Ickwell Bury

Ickwell Bury was a country house in Ickwell, Bedfordshire, England. The house was demolished in 1975.^[1]

Ickwell Bury, at the heart of the former manor of Ickwell, first built by John Harvey in 1683 near the site of an older manor house. The Harvey family continued to own the house until 1925, although from 1900 it had housed Horton Preparatory School.^[2]

In 1898, Ickwell Bury was the property of John Edmund Audley Harvey DL JP and was described as "a mansion of red brick, in the Queen Anne style, standing in a park and woodlands of about five hundred acres, approached by an avenue of trees about a mile in length".^[3]

The school closed in 1937, and soon afterwards the empty house was destroyed in a fire. The property was then bought by Colonel George Hayward Wells, chairman of the brewery Charles Wells, who rebuilt the house on a smaller scale and on his death left it to the Bedford Charity to be used by Bedford School, his own old school. The school uses the grounds for field studies and as a conservation reserve, but it lets the buildings, which are too far from the main school to be useful to it.^[2]

The building was rented from the school by the Yoga for Health foundation for a number of years and was open all year round. It was especially busy during the Summer months where all the rooms were open and tents covered the grounds around the main house. Although the building has now been purchased from the school, the Yoga foundation removed and property development is now taking place. The Yoga for Health Foundation fought against the approval of planning permission, but were not successful.

In a wood between Ickwell Bury and Northill church is an ancient earthwork, with a high bank on the east side, enclosing long pools which are thought to have been fish ponds for the monks of a college at Northill or for the priory of Ickwell Bury.^[3]

References

Coordinates: 52°05′45″N 0°19′43″W / 52.0959°N 0.3285°W / 52.0959; -0.3285