Lackford

Coordinates: 52°18′04″N 0°37′34″E / 52.301°N 0.626°E / 52.301; 0.626

Lackford is a village and civil parish in the St Edmundsbury district of Suffolk in eastern England. Located around four miles north-west of Bury St Edmunds on the A1101, in 2005 it had a population of 270. The name is believed to be derived from the place where wild leeks where found rather than a ford over the river Lark in whose valley in lies.

The parish contains the Lackford Lakes nature reserve and SSSI, created from reclaimed gravel pits. The Black Ditches run to the west of the parish and mark the parish boundary with Cavenham in places. These are believed to be the most easterly of a series of early Anglo-Saxon defensive earthworks built across the Icknield Way.

Lackford Hall is believed to have been built around 1570 by the fourth son of the squire of West Stow Hall. The hall is a three chimeyed timber-framed, Medieval hall house containing church and abbey stone reclaimed following the dissolution of the Roman Catholic Church by Henry VIII. The Hall is believed by local historians to have been a hunting and fishing lodge. Lackford Lakes Barns are an adjacent quadrangle of barns built from local timber and flint around 1839, based upon engravings in the windows.

Lackford Hundred

Lackford was a hundred of Suffolk, consisting of 83,712 acres (338.77 km²).

The hundred fills the north western corner of Suffolk and is triangular in shape, extending about fifteen miles (24 km) in length on each side. It is bounded on the north by Norfolk, on the west by Cambridgeshire, and on the south east by Blackbourn, Thingoe and Risbridge Hundreds. It is in the Franchise or Liberty of St Edmund, in the Diocese of Ely, the Archdeaconry of Sudbury and the Deanery of Fordham.

The main towns are Newmarket (detached from the rest of the hundred), Brandon and Mildenhall as well as a part of Thetford.

It is watered by the rivers Lark and Little Ouse, the latter of which separates it from Norfolk and the former after crossing it near Icklingham and Mildenhall flows northward and forms its western boundary with Cambridgeshire. The area to the north west of Mildenhall consists of low fen and part of the Bedford Level who drained the fens in the 17th century.

The name Lackford derives from the parish of the same name, Lackford just north-west of Bury St Edmunds, even though that village is actually in Thingoe Hundred. The village's name means "ford over the River Lark", referring to the ford on the village's border with Icklingham.