Descriptive Gazetteer Entry for HINKSEY (NORTH), or Ferry-Hinksey

HINKSEY (NORTH), or Ferry-Hinksey, a village and a parish in Abingdon district, Berks. The village stands on the river Isis, at the boundary with Oxfordshire, ½ a mile SW of Oxford r. station; is reached, from Oxford, by a ferry; and was anciently called Hengestesigge. A visitor to it says, respecting it, but might have said more suitably respecting South Hinksey:- "Down the woodlands on the left yon descend into old, old, dry walled, tottering, time worn Hinksey. This most Arcadian village, as secluded as a wood pigeon's nest, as tranquil as the grotto of Silence, the home of none but simplest peasantry, is scarce the flit of a butterfly from Oxford, that great laboratory of mind:- ' Not a bow shot from the college, Half the globe from sense and knowledge, ' Happy Hinksey !-the tree of knowledge is still fatal; and whoever tastes of its fruit his state of paradisiacal simplicity expires. Once more then happy Hinksey ! Up and down its stony lanes, and by its limpid, lightfooted stream, the only babbler to be heard in the place, along its grey, mossy bearded, mouldering walls, I wander for hours through a solitude as deep as that of a savannah., , -The parish contains also the hamlet of Botley. Post town, Oxford. Acres, 900. Real property, £2, 520. Pop., 438. Houses, 92. The property is much subdivided. The manor was given, in 955, to Abingdon abbey; and belongs now to the Earl of Abingdin. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford. Value, £97. Patron, alternately the Earl of Abingdon and the Rev. W. G. V. Harcourt. The church has a fine Norman doorway, and a good font of the decorated period; was reported, in 1859, as not good, but has since been repaired with red and black tiles, and with oaken substantial seats; and contains the tomb of Thomas Willis, who fell in the siege of Oxford in 1643, and a monument to W. Finmore, Fellow of St. John's in 1646. The churchyard has remains of a decorated cross with fluted shaft. There is a national school.


(John Marius Wilson, Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870-72))

Linked entities:
Feature Description: "a village and a parish"   (ADL Feature Type: "populated places")
Administrative units: North Hinksey CP/Ch       Abingdon RegD/PLU       Berkshire AncC
Place names: FERRY HINKSEY     |     HENGESTESIGGE     |     HINKSEY     |     HINKSEY NORTH     |     HINKSEY NORTH OR FERRY HINKSEY     |     NORTH HINKSEY
Place: North Hinksey

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