Acrefield might be thought to be made up of acre - either "an area of an acre", or perhaps "cultivated land" plus field. There was a 14th century name Ackers in West Derby which Eilert Ekwall in Place-names of Lancashire derived in just this way. But in Woolton this was not so. Over 200 deeds from c.1200 to 1500 of land in Much & Little Woolton are among the Norris Deeds and from them we can see the name in early forms: 1300 Akeloufeld, 1350 Aclowefeld, making it quite clear that in our case the name was made up Ac - lowe - feld, with Ac being Old English "oak"; lowe (as in Brownlow Hill) being "hill"; and feld being "field". So we have a name meaning the "field of the hill of oaks" which, when we think of the lie of the land, does not strain the imagination at all.

With this meaning, and some 20 deeds describing strips and parcels of land lying in the Aclowefeld and "Acrefield" being still the name of one strip (the southern side of the site of the Hollies) in 1840, we are going to venture a little further. In the 14th century we would expect to find big open arable fields worked in "strips", and in Much Woolton, this was one of them. We can identify the direction in which the "strips" ran - parallel with Out Lane, like the boundaries of the Hollies and the next field to the north, and see also the arrows
< - - - > drawn on the map between trees plotted in 1891, growing in "furrows" and all running roughly parallel. That would have been the direction of the ploughing so that the "furrows" would have run-off excess rain. The average length of a "strip" here was 330 yards. The field seems to have extended about 2½ inches beyond the right hand edge of our map to a boundary line from Out Lane Cottages (lower entrance of Out Lane School) to Sandfield Road. (Between that line and Halewood Road, we suspect, lay the Aclowefeld brandurth, an expansion cleared by burning before 1317.)

In the other direction whether the whole distance from Out Lane to Gateacre Brow was all the Aclowefeld we are not sure, but probably it was once. If we have sketched the boundaries of the Aclowefeld right, the area was something like 45 statute acres; in 1840 25 acres of it was still mapped as one big field.

Above the line of Acrefield Road the "strip" just north of Acrefield Cottage - now Glenacres site - was Acrefield Butts in 1840; a clue to development up the hill ? This suggests that the area between Acrefield Road and the line A - B was used as "butts", short "strips", just over 100 yards long, in a similar ploughing regime. All that is a clue to the position in which Acrefield lane developed.

continued . . .