It is amazing what you learn when you start rummaging around in the local archive office. Reading through the enclosure award for Kimberworth of 1800, I found details of just how well Earl Fitzwilliam had done out of the process. When it came to fencing the outer limits of the earl's new estates, the local residents found themselves financing his lordship's needs. They gave some of their land to the earl in lieu of tithes foregone. They would have little choice, as land allotted under the enclosure award would probably be the only capital asset they had and the only way to buy out their future obligations.

Having given up some of their future livelihood, the villagers then found an extra hurdle. The commissioners decreed that they, not the earl, should plant the hawthorn hedge and protective fence to mark off the earl's land, around the outer perimeter. It was at no small cost, either. The award specifies "good and substantial oak posts and double rails with such ditches on each side thereof as the said commissioners should direct and appoint and also with good and substantial gates to be made where necessary in the said fences..."

This particular parcel of enclosed land, the subject of my research, lies between the village of Thorpe Hesley and the tiny settlement of Scholes, a ribbon of houses and farms along a twisting, winding road which snakes its way towards the earl's then home at Wentworth.

In four weeks' time, the present villagers are off to a public inquiry which will decide whether a housing development of 1,200 homes should meld the two villages together. They will be using skylarks, partridges, brown hares, newts and orchids as their arguments. The developer will fund its costs through the profits it makes here or elsewhere. The local council will pay its costs via the taxes that villagers pay to it. Local residents will pay their modest bills for the inquiry via collections and donations. Although the landscape has changed significantly in the last 200 years, some things have hardly changed at all.