Kentford Your village parish council

A history of Kentford

The village takes its name from the ford where the road crossed the River Kennett. People have lived here for a very long time.

  1. Before the village

    The ford and the old road

    Kentford sits where a road crossed the River Kennett on the chalk of west Suffolk. The crossroads a mile from the village lies on the Icknield Way, one of the oldest routes in England. A ford of this kind is normally far older than any settlement recorded around it, but what is actually buried in the parish is a question for the county archaeologists rather than for tradition.

    Source: not yet recorded.

  2. 1086

    Kennett is in the Domesday Book. Kentford is not.

    Kennett, across the river in Cambridgeshire, was surveyed in 1086 as Chenet: 24 households, ten ploughlands and a mill, which put it among the larger settlements recorded. No separate Domesday entry for Kentford has been found.

    The name existed. Place-name scholars record Cheneteforde in the 11th century, and it means exactly what it looks like: the ford over the Kennett. But a name is not a manor, and Kentford does not appear in the survey as a place in its own right.

    The reading that fits the evidence is that Kentford grew up at the crossing as an offshoot of Kennett, and in 1086 was still counted with it. That is a reading, not a record, and the Council would rather say so than claim a Domesday entry the village does not have.

    Source: Domesday Book, Kennett (Chenet), Staploe hundred, via Open Domesday. The 11th century form Cheneteforde is from A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place Names (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 193

  3. c. 1161

    The ford itself is recorded

    A ford across the Kennett is documented in about 1161, at the south east corner of Kennett parish. By the late 13th century the crossing there was known as Kentfayre. This is the first firm documentary sight of the thing the village is named after, and it comes three quarters of a century after Domesday.

    Source: Victoria County History of Cambridgeshire, vol. 10, parish of Kennett

  4. 14th century

    St Mary's Church

    The parish church is built of flint rubble with clunch and limestone dressings, and has a nave, chancel, west tower and south porch. Almost all of the medieval fabric is mid to late 14th century, though the chancel has an earlier core. The north and south walls carry large two-light traceried windows, and the east window has net tracery. It is listed Grade II*.

    Source: Historic England, Church of St Mary, Kentford, list entry 1037677, Grade II*, listed 7 May 1954

  5. 14th century

    The Three Living and the Three Dead

    Traces of a wall painting survive on the north wall of the nave. It shows a medieval morality subject: three living men meet three corpses, who tell them that as you are, so once were we. Ernest William Tristram made a full copy of the Kentford painting in 1926, and that copy is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which makes it one of the few things in the village recorded in a national collection.

    Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, E. W. Tristram copy of the Kentford nave painting, made 1926

  6. From the 1300s

    One lord, two villages

    From the middle of the 14th century to the middle of the 16th, the manor of Kennett was held jointly with the manor of Kentford. Whatever the two places were to each other in 1086, for two hundred years of the later Middle Ages they answered to the same lord.

    A bridge linking Kennett End and Kentford stood at the same corner of the parish from 1604 or earlier, and was being called the old bridge by 1797. The two villages sharing a village hall today is the latest turn of a very old arrangement.

    Source: Victoria County History of Cambridgeshire, vol. 10, parish of Kennett

  7. 1605

    The court comes to Newmarket Heath

    James I first stayed at Newmarket in 1605, drawn by open heath that suited hunting, coursing and racing horses. Royal patronage, above all under Charles II, turned the town into the centre of English racing. Kentford lies about four miles north east of it, and the training industry has shaped work, land use and traffic in the villages around ever since. It is also why a horse appears on the Kentford village sign.

    Source: Jockey Club Estates, history of Newmarket

  8. 1674

    Twelve houses

    The parish was recorded as having twelve houses in 1674. Kentford stayed at roughly that size for the next two hundred years, a farming settlement at a river crossing with a church and not much else.

    Source: Kentford Parish Council village history

  9. c. 1750

    The Boy's Grave

    The best known landmark in the district is not actually in the parish. The Boy's Grave stands at the crossroads on the Icknield Way about a mile from the village, and a small loop in the county boundary puts it inside Moulton, by a matter of inches.

    The story told about it is that a boy, sometimes named as Joseph, hanged himself after losing sheep from his flock, and that as a suicide he could not be buried in consecrated ground and was buried at the crossroads instead. No name, date or burial record has ever been produced for him. The grave is still tended and flowers are still left there.

    The Council would rather record the tradition as a tradition, with its provenance, than repeat it as fact.

    Source: East Anglian Daily Times, Weird Suffolk: The Boy's Grave, Kentford. The fullest published account is a Country Standard report of 1949

  10. 1833

    A new tower for the church

    The three stage west tower was built in 1833, with a west doorway at ground level, triple lancet bell chamber openings, crenellated parapets and crocketed corner pinnacles. The 18th century box pews in the nave, among the best preserved in Suffolk, came through the Victorian alterations intact.

    Source: Historic England, Church of St Mary, Kentford, list entry 1037677

  11. 1848

    152 people and 798 acres

    Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England describes Kentford as a parish in the union of Mildenhall, partly in the hundred of Lackford but chiefly in that of Risbridge, four and a half miles north east of Newmarket. It had 152 inhabitants and just under 799 acres. The living was a rectory united to the vicarage of Gazeley, an arrangement that says a good deal about how small the parish was.

    Source: Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England (1848), via British History Online

  12. 1854

    The railway arrives

    Kennett station opened in 1854, when the line from Newmarket was extended to Bury St Edmunds. It stands between Kennett and Kentford and still serves both villages, which is the oldest example of the two places sharing something across the county boundary.

    Source: Wikipedia, Kennett railway station. Worth replacing with a railway history reference

  13. 1893

    Lillie Langtry at Regal Lodge

    The actress Lillie Langtry, a friend of the future Edward VII, bought Regal Lodge in 1893 and enlarged it. The house had been built as a farmhouse in 1863, and for a period afterwards it traded as the Langtry Hotel. It is the closest Kentford comes to the racing world it sits next to.

    Source: not yet recorded.

  14. 1894

    The Parish Council is created

    The Local Government Act 1894 created elected parish councils across England, taking civil responsibilities away from the parish vestry. Kentford Parish Council dates from this reform, as do most of its neighbours.

    Source: Local Government Act 1894 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 73)

  15. By the 1970s

    The packhorse bridge goes

    Kentford had a packhorse bridge over the Kennett, one of only two in Suffolk. The other, at Moulton, survives and is looked after. Kentford's had largely disappeared by the 1970s.

    Source: not yet recorded.

  16. 1994

    The A45 becomes the A14

    The trunk road between Cambridge and Felixstowe was renumbered from A45 to A14 in 1994, when the link road between the A1 and the M1 opened. The old route through the village is now the B1506, with the A14 running just to the north. Through traffic and traffic speed remain among the things residents raise with the Council most often.

    Source: Wikipedia, A14 road (England)

  17. 2019

    A new district council

    West Suffolk Council came into being on 1 April 2019, merging Forest Heath District Council and St Edmundsbury Borough Council. Kentford had been in Forest Heath. Three tiers now cover the village: the Parish Council, West Suffolk Council and Suffolk County Council, each responsible for different things.

    Source: West Suffolk Council, a single council for West Suffolk

  18. 2021

    The village more than doubles

    The census counted 408 people in Kentford in 2001 and 420 in 2011. By 2021 it was 1,125. New housing changed the size of the village more in one decade than in the three centuries between the twelve houses of 1674 and the end of the twentieth century, which is why so much of the Council's work now concerns roads, drainage and what the village hall has to cope with.

    Source: Office for National Statistics census figures for 2001, 2011 and 2021, collated at citypopulation.de

  19. Today

    A village on the county line

    Kentford sits in West Suffolk, immediately alongside Kennett in Cambridgeshire. The two villages share a village hall and much else besides, while answering to different county and district authorities.

Corrections and additions

Every entry above says where it comes from, and links to the source where there is one to link to. A few are still marked as not yet recorded. Village history repeated without a source tends to harden into fact, so if you can correct something here, or add a date, a photograph or a record office reference, please contact the Parish Clerk.