Bedwell Hey Ely Cambs- How to find a Lost Village (original) (raw)

During Sutton's recent Jubilee Feast Week events, local historian Mike Petty gave a talk in the hall of the primary school on our local history and, in passing, mentioned a lost settlement under a part of Ely.

After the talk, I bought a couple of reprints of 17th century maps from him and I happened to notice there were two sizeable village settlements that are marked by pictograms to be to the south west of Ely but neither of them appear on modern road maps. The villages are labelled Bedwell Hey (or Bedelhey, or Bedelhuy, and there are probably other variations on that spelling) and Brame. Spelling used to be a case of "spell it how it sounds" and local accents of the person speaking and the person writing it down could lead to some interesting variety, so "Braham" for "Brame" was near enough for me for the second lost village!

Now, I've an enquiring mind, I'm quite nosey you might say, so I thought I'd try to see whether traces of either of the two lost villages still exist.