Approaching the bridge across the lake towards the main house in the Capability Brown landscaped grounds of Compton Verney in Warwickshire you pass a gently sloping open field. This is Old Town Meadow.
This is sometimes used for open air installations as part of Compton Verney’s contemporary remit as an art gallery. However, if you were to dig down beneath the meadow’s soil then below ground there would be fascinating traces of non-aristocratic lives.
As the name belies it is here that the village of Compton Murdak once stood. A settlement which predated the first stately home at Compton Verney – which was constructed in the 1440s – by hundreds of years. Indeed, prior to William I’s takeover of Britian the village had been known simply as Compton. The name Murdak comes from the lords of manor who took over in the 12th Century, just under 300 years before Compton Verney was first built.
Over time, whether due to shifting fortunes, the changing desires of the inhabitants, or a landlord’s desire to remove tenants from in front of their great house (or perhaps a bit of all three) Compton Murdak became no more.
By the 1760s when Capability Brown arrived to landscape the park Compton Murdark was no more. This left the area to be landscaped into fashionable parkland, the only above ground clue to its past remaining encoded in the field’s name.
In the 1960s the trees planted and the wildflower meadows allowed to bloom under Capability Brown’s instruction were ploughed up for farmland. Beginning in 2010 the trust that manages Compton Verney as an art gallery began work to restore the parkland to being a wildflower meadow studded with trees. A reversal of the historic trends which have seen all but fragments of the UK’s wildflower meadows lost over the last 90 years. Today Old Town Meadow and its surrounds provides a habitat for rare species of grass, flower and animals such as small mammals, barn owls and skylarks.
This decade interest and attention has turned back even further towards the lost village of Compton Murdak. Signs around the edge of the meadow now tell visitors what (little) is known about the village’s history.
Between spring 2022 and spring 2023 Old Town Meadow was home to “The Village” , an installation (depicted in the header for this article) by the artist Morag Myerscough. Designed in conjunction with local communities who advised on what they’d like to see in Old Town Meadow, the project put an array of town-like structures back into the field for the first time in centuries.
Throughout the summer of 2022 the installation provided a stage for performances and during the life of the structures provided a talking point for visitors to Compton Verney and a place for children to play.
A testimony to the memory of Compton Murdark centuries after it faded as a place of residence, a playful nod to Compton Verney’s famous folk art collection and a means of encouraging visitors to contemplate that people can co-exist beneficially alongside restored nature.