When the boundary of Sutton Coldfield was surveyed by the Enclosure Commissioner in 1824, he found that it passed from “the centre of the door of the Cock public house occupied by John Sandon and thence through the kitchen and house in an oblique direction.” Now the Cock Inn is entirely in Wishaw parish, and the Sutton boundary now follows the line of the lane leading from the Cock to Curdworth; in 1824, when the old method of open field agriculture was still practised in Wigginshill and Curdworth, the boundary followed the division between two ancient fields, Wigginshill Field in Sutton and Henne or Church Field in Curdworth.
These ancient fields were composed of ridges made by the medieval method of ploughing, the ridges being gently curved, and so the boundary also showed this aratral curve even after crossing the canal. The Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, opened in 1789, was a busy artery for goods traffic in 1824, and Mr. Harris the commissioner would have crossed it by the nearby Broad Bulk bridge to continue his perambulation, following a ditch to “the road leading from Minworth Greaves to Curdworth”. This is Kingsbury Road (A4097) - other main roads mentioned in the document are described as turnpike roads, but Kingsbury Road did not come under a Turnpike Trust until 1827, when the Act of Parliament described it as “a road of great utility but narrow and incommodious”. It was along this road that people would travel from Birmingham to the hundred court at Hemlingford near Kingsbury before the Norman Conquest, and that Mrs Silvester, writing in 1968, recalled following funeral processions from Minworth to Curdworth Church in her childhood.
The landmarks used to define the old boundary are all lost today beneath cornfields, except for the weir on the canal which allows excess water to overflow into the old boundary ditch, now culverted. Beyond Kingsbury Road lie the vast filter beds of the sewage works, but in 1824 a twisting line of hedges and ditches could be followed separating Sandyfoot Meadow in Sutton from the Curdworth meadows, as far as the River Tame.
