Wrest Park

Silsoe is a village and civil parish in Bedfordshire, England. The village used to be on the main A6 road but a bypass around the village was opened in 1981 at a cost of £1.6m.

Cainhoe Castle was an 11th-century Norman castle, located near the village of Clophill, in the county of Bedfordshire, England. Cainhoe Castle was a motte and triple bailey castle, built by Nigel d'Aubigny, a Norman Knight, sometime after the Norman Invasion (1066). It was not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086; "Cainou: Nigel d'Aubigny; Thurstan from Avelina, Ralph Tailbois' wife. Mill." The d'Aubigny family, known for being deeply involved in the crusades, used the castle as the seat of the Barony of Cainhoe. The castle was to stay in the d'Aubigny family until the death of Simon d'Aubigny, who died without a male heir, in 1272. It then passed to the de Lacys and the Nortons, and then on to the Greys, Earls of Kent. The castle was occupied until the time of the Black Death (1348), when all the inhabitants died of the disease. The castle, and the small village that had built up around it, were discovered abandoned sometime later. By 1374 the castle was in ruins. The site was excavated in 1973, 1985 and 1986. Only earthworks remain. The site is a Scheduled Monument.

Clophill is a village and civil parish clustered on the north bank of the River Flit, Bedfordshire, England. It is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Clopelle. "Clop" likely means 'tree-stump' in Old English. However, it also has cognate terms for clay, with which the soil of mid Bedfordshire is rich.

St Mary's Church is a redundant Anglican church in the village of Lower Gravenhurst, Bedfordshire, England. It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building, and is under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Lower Gravenhurst is some 10 miles (16 km) southeast of Bedford, to the east of the A6 road. The church is surrounded by fields and stands on a small hill and open daily.

The present St Mary's Church is located in the centre of the small village of Clophill, between Bedford and Luton in the South Midlands of England. The new church, built in 1848, replaced the old church by order of the Church Commissioners in 1850. The old church building, formally The Church of St Mary The Virgin (shortened to The Church of St Mary) and known colloquially as Old St Mary's or The Old Parish Church, is at the edge of the village, and is estimated to be around 650 years old. It sits at the crest of the Greensand Ridge, offering views over the surrounding countryside. Its graveyard is a haven for wild flowers and wildlife. After the church moved to the village centre, incorporating various items from the old church building, the old building was converted for use as a mortuary chapel, but in the 1950s it fell into ruin. The Church of England no longer has responsibility for the Old Parish Church, nor is it deemed to be consecrated; legally it is the responsibility of Central Bedfordshire Council. It acquired first local, then more widespread, notoriety in the 1960s, as a result of the desecration of a number of the church's graves, with the attendant sensationalist suspicions of Satanism and black masses. In 2010 Central Bedfordshire Council, prompted by local activists concerned with the condition of the church, announced it would attempt to restore the Old Church and adopt it for use as a bothy on a regional walking trail. Those plans proved too expensive for the council; instead, in 2012 a new project was announced, which included stabilising the existing ruin and providing a viewing platform on the top of the tower, besides building a heritage centre next to the church.

Higham Gobion Castle was once believed to be an 11th-century castle located in the village of Higham Gobion. Now it is part of the civil parish of Shillington, in the English county of Bedfordshire. It has since been determined that the site was in fact a fishery with a breeding island that was mistaken for a defendable moated building of some sort. The "castle" was located 3 miles from Pirton Castle, and 14 miles south of Bedford Castle. Only earthworks remain at the site. Roman Antiquities, such as coins, millstone and cinerary urns have been discovered near the site.

Higham Gobion is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Shillington, in the Central Bedfordshire district, in the ceremonial county of Bedfordshire, England. It is located between the villages of Shillington and Barton-le-Clay. In 1961 the parish had a population of 28. On 1 April 1984 the parish was abolished and merged with Shillington. It was in the hundred of Flitt. This hilltop village, which consists of a church, farm and small industrial unit and one or two houses, gets the second part of its name from the Gobion family, who resided in this area after the Norman invasion of 1066. In the fields a mile north-east of the church are triangular earthworks and medieval fishponds, all that remain today of a substantial deserted medieval village. Roman pottery has also been found in the field east of the former Rectory. The Anglican church, dedicated to St. Margaret, dates from c.1300, but was much restored during the Victorian period. It contains a monument to Dr. Edmund Castell, who died in 1674 and was a Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. He was a rector at Higham during the last years of his life and lived in the adjoining (and much restored), former rectory. The church is part of the Diocese of St Albans.

Beadlow Priory was a monastic foundation established between 1140 and 1146 by Robert D'Albini for a community of Benedictine monks.

Upper Gravenhurst is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Gravenhurst, in the Central Bedfordshire district of the ceremonial county of Bedfordshire, England. In 1881 the parish had a population of 354. On 24 March 1888 the parish was abolished and merged with Lower Gravenhurst to form "Gravenhurst".The Church of St Giles has been established in the village since the 12th Century. The first school in the village was built in 1870, today known as Gravenhurst Academy.

Mid Bedfordshire is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament by Alistair Strathern of the Labour Party since a 2023 by-election.

The Woburn Sands Formation is a geological formation in England. Part of the Lower Greensand Group, it is the only unit of the group where it occurs, and thus is sometimes simply referred to as the 'Lower Greensand' in these areas. It was deposited during the late Aptian to early Albian stages of the Early Cretaceous. The lithology consists of sandstone or loose sand with rare wisps or thin seams of clay. The formation was extensively exploited in the 19th century for the "coprolite industry", with coprolite being a local term referring to phosphate nodules of varying origins (often the internal moulds of shells), named due to their resemblance to real coprolites. The formation contains reworked fossils of late Tithonian-Berriasian age from deposits that are no longer found locally, equivalent in age to the Sandringham Sand Formation in Norfolk and the Spilsby Sandstone of Lincolnshire, these include Dicranodonta and the ammonite Subcraspedites. Reworked dinosaur material is known from the Potton locality within the formation.

Beadlow is a hamlet in the Central Bedfordshire district of Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census the population of the hamlet was included in the civil parish of Campton and Chicksands. It is located around a mile and a half east of Clophill, of whose civil parish it forms a part, and around two and a half miles west of Shefford, in whose post town it lies. The River Flit flows through the hamlet.