Almost all villages and hamlets have a source of running water in the form of a river, stream or brook. Indeed, the very positioning of the habitation in the first place was often dictated by the need for flowing water, for cattle or irrigation, or to drive machinery or as part of an industrial process.
Badsey and Aldington are no exception to this and the water was and still is used for a variety of land based purposes. Sadly, water mills that were located in both villages are no longer in existence or working.
The only problem with flowing water is that the population has to cross it, preferably without getting wet, necessitating the construction of bridges.
Badsey and Aldington have several natural watercourses all flowing into the river Avon upstream of Evesham. The Badsey Brook is the largest, flowing south to north through both parishes and then becoming the Broadway Brook before Offenham. Bully Brook enters the Badsey parish from the Willersey direction and joins the Badsey Brook just upstream of the Badsey mill site. Another brook flows from the Littletons to join the Broadway Brook south of Blackminster.
The two villages have a collection of foot and road bridges, all over the streams, constructed mostly of brick, blue lias and Cotswold stone. Some foot bridges are of simple wood forms.
However, the northwest of Aldington parish has seen considerable development, first with the construction of the Oxford/Worcester railway and recently the building of the A46 Evesham bypass. This has necessitated the building of a number of extra bridges to carry the railway over the brook and the by-pass over and under local roads.
A pictorial record of these bridges has been made, although many of them are in rural positions, very inaccessible and very overgrown.
In the words of Badsey born and bred Mike Hewlett, "The Market gardeners used to keep the brooks and ditches clean. It's amazing when you think of the amount of work it must have taken to bring this land into cultivation, but it's now all going back to nature."
Mike Lovatt
September 2006
