In Nostalgia on January 18, reader Barrie David explained how the area we now know as Sands came into existence and grew into a village.

Barrie now shares with is some of his early memories of growing up in the village.

He writes: As boys, we used to play on the old rusty machinery and the rails tracks which were abandoned after the sand pits closed.

We would slide down the banks of sandy soil sitting on a piece of metal or wooden plank, until the site was later cleared, bringing these pleasures to an end!

In the early 1940s, the war years, the Sands Women’s Institute used to organise blackberry picking parties which would last for most of the day. Picture a gathering of between 20 and 30 women along with their children, dressed in old clothes, with their sandwiches and walking sticks with curved handles, which were used to pull down the branches of hard-to-reach berries!

The women would meet at the old War Memorial Hall and then walk along Lane End Road to what is now Warwick Farm. They would then take the footpath to Newmer Common, which in those days was just a small hamlet with a few houses and a green pond.

These houses were pulled down in the 1960s and replaced with new houses, now known as Spring Coppice. From here, the ladies would spread out into the old sand pits and Whittington Park to fill their baskets with berries.

In those days there was very little traffic on the roads and unlike today it was perfectly safe to pick the blackberries form the roadside hedgerows!

When the days picking was finished, the ladies would catch a bus back into Sands. In those days catching a bus in the country lanes was just a matter of holding out your arm and the bus driver would stop the bus to pick you up.

Imagine the scene, 20 to 30 ladies, willow baskets full to the brim with blackberries, fingers black from picking, children with black hands and faces from eating their fill, their legs scratched and sore from prickly bushes and stinging nettles, turned green from having ‘dock’ leaves rubbed on them.

There were no long trousers for young boys at that time!

There always seemed to be a surplus of apples in Sands in those days. The farm which is now “Barn Court” used to be called “Bottom Farm” and had a large orchard which was facing Lane End Road, opposite from where the new Village Hall now stands.

The farmer used to leave surplus apples in large boxes out on the pavement for people to take. Several other houses in Sands used to do the same, so there was always plenty of blackberry and apple jam to go around!

Our own Nature Reserve Up until the 1950s, the land between Pinewood Road and Hellbottom Wood was an open space to the public, accessed from Pinewood Road. Access was subsequently blocked by housing developments.

Up until this time Sands School frequently had nature walks as part of their curriculum as the area was well known for butterflies, wild flowers and dog roses.

In 1941 I was a pupil at Sands School and we were asked to pick rose hips to make rose hip syrup as part of the war effort. I filled a basket and was told off for not ‘topping and tailing’ the rose hips. I then found out that the Women’s Voluntary Service, who had an office by the Parish Church in High Wycombe, were offering three pence per pound for rose hips. I headed out into the fields again and picked 10 pounds, topped and tailed them and received half a crown for my trouble. I was only seven years old!

In the 1960’s further housing development including Combe Rise was started, including the creation of Sands Industrial Estate. This took away large parts of the remaining fields, leaving land to the west which is now known as Sands Bank.

Sands Nature Reserve was setup in the early 1990’s when Wycombe District Council leased the fields and woodlands north of Adams park football ground to West Wycombe estate and set the land aside as a nature reserve.