MAFF Conservation Walk - Permissive Access under MAFF licence GD 272361 September 1979 - September 2009. Telephone 0171 238 6907 for details.
The Walk starts from several points in the village - for the easiest access, travel from the New Inn down past the pond. The walk starts from a stile after the last house on St Peters Close. It runs across the fields at the back of St Peters church, and then passes through earthwork remains of buildings from the medieval period. Streets from the medieval period are also visible as hollows that run through the fields.
Detail from the notice board at the start of the walk:
The scheduled monument includes the remains of a medieval manor believed to have served as a camera of the Knights Hospillars from the 14th to the 16th Centuries (a camera was a subsidiary farm of a preceptory - a medieval monastery of the military orders). In the last 12th century the Knights Templar held the second largest manor in Great Limber, which they let to secular tenants. When the order was dissolved in the 14th century, the estate passed to the Hospitallers. Thereafter it developed as a camera dependent on the preceptory at Willoughton, from which it was administered as an agricultural estate under the management of a steward. In 1338 there was a large house, dovecote and garden on the site. After the dissolution of the preceptory in 1540 the house was rebuilt and let to a variety of tenants until its abandonment in the 17th Century. The medieval remains in the east part of the site are partly overlain by the remains of gardens and the farm buildings of Limber House, built before 1812 and destroyed in the mid 20th Century. To the west are the earthwork remains marking the eastern extent of the village of Great Limber in the medieval period.