Beating of the Parish Bounds Walk in Denham

Date/Time
Date(s) - Sunday 25 May 2025
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Denham Parish Council invites you to join them in this ancient tradition, of walking the boundaries of Denham Parish. This walk will be led by Paul Graham and will be an excellent chance to explore a less walked route.

from New Denham Community Centre car park UB9 4DW
(Opposite Knighton Way Lane. What3Words – bravo.movie.define)

Welcome to the 2025 walk. The practice of walking the perimeter of a parish stems from at least medieval times and was intended to reinforce the boundaries to successive generations in days before maps. We will stop at convenient points and offer younger residents
the chance to be reinforced! Today’s walk is 2¼ miles and should take about 1½ hours. The main feature is the southern eastern
boundary with Uxbridge and Iver, along the banks of the River Colne and briefly the Alder Bourne. Thanks are due to Summerleaze Ltd, the minerals extracting company, who have recently restored the land.
The walk will finish at around 4pm at the New Denham Community Centre and refreshments will be available.

Please note: the walk may be unsuitable for pushchairs.

Families, children & dogs welcome.

The Beating the Bounds ceremony had an important practical purpose. Checking the boundaries was a way of preventing encroachment by neighbours; sometimes boundary markers would be moved or lines obscured, and a folk memory of the true extent of the parish was necessary to maintain integrity of borders by embedding knowledge in oral traditions.