Landwade
Coordinates: 52°17′10″N 0°23′0″E / 52.28611°N 0.38333°E Landwade is a parish in west Suffolk, England, four miles north of Newmarket. One of the smallest parishes in the county, it is only 1 kilometre from north to south and at most 500m from east to west.
The village is crossed by New River (formerly known as Monk's Lode), a small river that flows through Wicken Fen and reaches the River Cam at Upware. The village's name probably derives in part from gewaed an Old English word meaning "ford".
The area around Landwade was occupied in Roman times, and a villa was situated just to the south of the modern parish.
Although it has existed since early medieval times, the parish of Landwade has always been comparatively small. By the late 13th century it consisted of around 300 acres of farmland and around 1400 acres of fen, but boundary changes between 1881 and 1954 reduced it to its present size of only 127 acres. The civil parish was amalgamated with Fordham, Cambridgeshire in 1954, though it is now part of the parish of Exning in Suffolk.
Parishes of its size were often absorbed in the Middle Ages, but Landwade survived thanks to the rebuilding of the church by Walter Cotton (d. after 1434), Lord of the manor, in the 15th century to serve as a burial place for his family. The Manor of Landwade had passed to Sir Thomas Cotton, Knt., of Cotton Hall, Cambs., by virtue of his marriage to Alice, daughter and heiress of John Hastings, Lord of the Manor of Landwade in the 14th century. Landwade Hall, a large house that was partially destroyed by bombs during the Second World War, was the ancestral home of the Cotton family until they moved to Madingley in the 18th century.
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