Engine Plantation

HER Number

15506

District

Newcastle

Site Name

Engine Plantation

Place

Throckley

Map Sheet

NZ16NE

Class

Agriculture and Subsistence

Site Type: Broad

Plantation

Site Type: Specific

Plantation

General Period

POST MEDIEVAL

Specific Period

Hanoverian 1714 to 1837

Form of Evidence

Documentary Evidence

Description

This plantation is shown on a plan of 1805. It is named Engine Plantation on the Ordnance Survey first edition map. Plantations were deliberately planted, usually with fast-growing species like larch and Norway spruce conifers. Conifers provided good shelter for the newly enclosed fields from the wind as they do not shed leaves. They also enlivened the landscape of hedged fields. Plantations are of geometric shape. The plantation may also have served as a fox cover, in which to rear and shelter game (pheasants, hares, partridges and rabbits) or where foxes could be encouraged to live and breed. Game-keeping, shooting and fox hunting were popular elite pastimes from the C18.

Easting

415320

Northing

565830

Grid Reference

NZ415320565830

Sources

Greenwich Hospital Estates, no date but probably 1805, Plan of Throckley manor in the county of Northumberland, NRO 691/1/19 (Woodhorn); Rackham, 1986, The history of the countryside - the classic history of Britain's landscape, flora and fauna, p 64, 98; T Williamson and L Bellamy, 1987, Property and Landscape - a social history of land ownership and the English countryside, pp 193, 196, 200-201; R. Newton, 1972, The Northumberland landscape, p 119; T. Wild, 2004, Village England - a social history of the countryside, p 33; JH Bettey, 1993, Know the landscape - estates and the English countryside, p 101; Jennifer Morrison, 2007, Newburn Manor - an analysis of a changing medieval, post-medieval and early modern landscape in Newcastle upon Tyne, unpublished MA thesis, University of Durham, pp 131-133