Wytham

Wytham
All Saints' parish church
Wytham  Wytham shown within Oxfordshire
Population	131 (2001 census)[1]
OS grid reference	SP4708
Civil parish	Wytham
District	Vale of White Horse
Shire county	Oxfordshire
Region	South East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	Oxford
Postcode district	OX2
Dialling code	01865
Police	Thames Valley
Fire	Oxfordshire
Ambulance	South Central
EU Parliament	South East England
UK Parliament	Oxford West and Abingdon
Website	Wytham Village
List of places UK England Oxfordshire

Coordinates: 51°46′41″N 1°18′47″W / 51.778°N 1.313°W

Wytham /ˈwaɪtəm/ is a village and civil parish on Seacourt Stream, a branch of the River Thames, about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Oxford. It is just west of the Western By-Pass Road, part of the Oxford Ring Road (A34).

Wytham was the northernmost part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it to Oxfordshire. The toponym is first recorded as Wihtham around AD 957, and comes from the Old English for a homestead or village in a river-bend.^[2]

The manor of Wytham along with Wytham Abbey (not a religious foundation but the manor house) and much of the village was formerly owned by the Earls of Abingdon. The Church of England parish church of All Saints is a medieval building extensively rebuilt between 1811^[3] and 1812^[4] by Montagu Bertie, 5th Earl of Abingdon.

During WW2, in about 1941, the owners of Wytham Abbey agreed to take in half a dozen East End children, as part of the evacuee programme. This was in preference to a number of Canadian Infantry, whom they were asked to accommodate also. As the war progressed they got the Canadian Infantry anyway. The evacuees were educated by a governess, and returned to the East End with impeccable accents. Outings were in a big car to the local chip shop. When the Infantry arrived, the young soldiers took the evacuees on their tanks as they trained in the woods, crashing into trees. The owners of the Abbey were Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyons (cousin of the Queen Mother) and her husband, a diamond millionaire. When he died suddenly the evacuees were moved to less comfortable accommodation. The Infantry went off to war. A photo of the evacuees standing on the grand staircase of the Abbey, below a bronze statue of a horse, appeared in a national newspaper - The News Chronicle. The Abbey was sold by Oxford University in 1992 and is now in private hands. The secret room in which the diamond millionaire was said to keep his diamonds is still there, but no diamonds.

Wytham Woods is an area of long-established mixed woodland noted for their high population of badgers and long-term monitoring of great tits. The woods are a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The University of Oxford owns the woods and uses them for research in zoology and climate change. The University also has a field station north of the village.

Wytham village and Wytham Woods have frequently featured in the "Inspector Morse" detective novels by Colin Dexter.

Gallery

• 

  The centre of Wytham, with the village shop on the left and the White Hart pub on the right

• 

  Keepers Cottage, Wytham Woods, a gift to the University of Oxford in 1943

References

1. "Area selected: Vale of White Horse (Non-Metropolitan District)". Neighbourhood Statistics: Full Dataset View. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 30 March 2010.
2. Mills & Room, 2003, page not cited
3. Page & Ditchfield, 1924, pages 427-430
4. Pevsner, 1966, page 314

Sources

• Mills, A.D.; Room, A. (2003). A Dictionary of British Place-Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. not cited. ISBN 0-19-852758-6.
• Page, W.H.; Ditchfield, P.H., eds. (1924). A History of the County of Berkshire, Volume 4. Victoria County History. pp. 427–430.
• Pevsner, Nikolaus (1966). Berkshire. The Buildings of England. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. p. 314.

External links

• Wytham Village Hall
• All Saints Church, Wytham
• Nature Conservation in Wytham Woods
• Wytham Woods SSSI citation