On 28 March 2008, members of the Project Team visited a number of churches in western Northamptonshire, searching for evidence of eighteenth-century improvements carried out at around the time the parishes were enclosed. The team started the day in Wicken in the extreme south of the county. Here the lord of the manor, Thomas Prowse, enclosed the open fields in 1757 without need for an Act of Parliament. The following year, Prowse began work on the parish church, which he had already partly demolished after it was declared unsafe in 1753. Prowse was an amateur architect who drew the designs for the new church, as well as for his house in the park. Many of the 18th-century windows were replaced in the later 19th century, but most of the masonry as well as Prowse's exuberant fan vault in the chancel survive.

Next the team headed to Cosgrove, where the Rev. Pulter Forrester remodeled the church and rebuilt the rectory in the years following the 1767 enclosure act. According to the VCH, Forrester replastered the ceiling, reglazed the windows and installed a new font, pulpit, desk and pews. Yet almost nothing of Forrester’s work remains. The late 18^th-century architecture and fittings have been almost completely swept away by the Victorian restorations of the 1860s and 1880s. From Cosgrove the team drove north, stopping at Greens Norton to see the 1807 spire, which was rebuilt in the years after enclosure in 1799 and again in 1957. As at Cosgrove, there was little other sign of 18^th-century work: a theme which became all too clear during the course of the day!

The final visits of the day were to Great Brington and Whilton, neighbouring parishes lying just east of the modern A5. The two parishes were enclosed by parliamentary acts in 1743 and 1777, respectively, and Whilton church was restored just as the new hedges and fences were being laid out across the open fields. The incumbent Rev. William Lucas Rose rebuilt the upper parts of the west tower, porch, north and south walls of the aisles, and part of the chancel, as well as giving a set of plate and new bells to the church. He is commemorated with a marble wall tablet, but much of his building work has been obscured by later restoration and rebuilding projects. Much the same may be true at nearby Great Brington, where Rose was also the incumbent. Here the tombs and memorials in the early 16th-century Spencer chapel carefully document the lives and works of the lords of Althorp, but there is little to suggest whether Rev. Rose lavished the same attention on Great Brington church as he did Whilton.