Today myself and my usual expedition buddy went to map the path from Dry Drayton to Lolworth and the path from Lolworth to Childerley. In the process, we discovered that Childerley is not a real village despite being mentioned on multiple footpath and byway signs in the area. It doesn't exist...

Now, there's Childerley Gate near the A428, which does indeed exist. But the Childerley pointed to by the footpath / byway signs does not exist. Interesting. There's a huge farm there and plenty of public footpaths passing through. There is also a small collection of houses around a central street that look suspiciously like a village but apparently aren't. There's no right of way to Childerley Gate from here but a farmer kindly gave us permission to use their private access road to the south (presumably this used to be a public road to the village), which we used to bail out of the area and back onto normal roads.

NPE Map has a fix on where Childerley "should" be ( http://www.npemap.org.uk/tiles/map.html#535,261,1 ). The legend "CHILDERLEY" presumably marks the old Parish of Childerley. Childerley Hall seems to have turned into the modern farm, although it's possible the original building lurks in somewhere. The farm's private access road appears to be the original public road into the village / settlement. The was even the little row of houses next to it, adjacent to the farm, presumably the original residences.

A little Googling found some records about Childerley, which seems to have existed until some time in the 20th Century: (http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/CAM/Childerley/, http://www.cambridgeshirehistory.com/cambridgeshire/TownsandVillages/Childerley/index.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childerley). At some time since then, the village seems to have ceased to exist as a settlement and has become part of a large private estate - albeit with many public rights of way running through it.

I must say, a village / settlement being bought and "deleted" as an entity is not something I've encountered before - certainly not locally. It's interesting to note that the local right-of-way signs all refer to Childerley - presumably the records of rights-of-way were not updated to reflect that the place no longer exists and can't sensibly be referred to. There's even a risk of confusing people who expect to be able to reach Childerley Gate but can't legally get there. Any suggestions as to how to highlight this usefully on the map would be welcome :-)

It's been fascinating to find out such an unexpected piece of local history, as well as locating some more paths to survey and map in future. Always more paths to map...