Place:Ecchinswell, Hampshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Ecchinswell is a village in the modern civil parish of Ecchinswell, Sydmonton and Bishops Green in the English county of Hampshire.

Watership Down, location of the novel of the same name by Richard Adams, is just south of Ecchinswell.

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Ecchinswell from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"ITCHINGSWELL, or ECCHINSWELL, a village and a parish in Kingsclere [registration] district, Hants. The village stands 2 miles WNW of Kingsclere, and 5 SE of Newbury [railway] station; and has a post office under Newbury. The parish comprises 2,319 acres. Real property: £2,494. Population: 452. Houses: 95. The manor belongs to the Earl of Carnarvon. The living is a vicarage, united with the vicarage of Sydmonton, in the diocese of Winchester. Value: £100. Patron: the Vicar of Kingsclere. The church is ancient. There is an Independent chapel."

Ecchinswell was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Kingsclere, but was made an ecclesiastical parish "early". (Source: A Vision of Britain through Time) In 1932 it merged with the parish of Sydmonton to become the civil parish of Ecchinswell and Sydmondton. The parish is now in the non-metropolitan Basingstoke and Deane District and includes Bishops Green which was a hamlet before World War II, but expanded as a residential area for American troops at the nearly Greenham Common airbase.

Research Tips

• GENUKI has a list of archive holders in Hampshire including the Hampshire Record Office, various museums in Portsmouth and Southhampton, the Isle of Wight Record Office and Archives.
• The Hampshire Online Parish Clerk project has a large collection of transcriptions from Parish Registers across Hampshire.
• A listing of all the Registration Districts in England and Wales since their introduction in 1837 together with tables listing the parishes that were part of each district and the time period covered, along with detailed notes on changes of parish name, mergers, etc. Do respect the copyright on this material.
• The three-storey City Museum in Winchester covers the Iron Age and Roman periods, the Middle Ages, and the Victorian period.
• Volumes in The Victoria County History Series are available for Hampshire through British History Online. There are three volumes and the county is covered by parishes within the old divisions of "hundreds".

A collection of maps on the A Vision of Britain through Time website illustrating the English county of Hampshire over the period 1832-1932 (the last two are expandible):

• The Hundreds of Hampshire, a map from HMSO Boundary Commissioners, dated 1832
• Hampshire showing parishes in their Rural Districts as of 1900, a map from the Ordnance Survey
• Hampshire showing parishes in their Rural Districts after the alterations of 1932, a map from the Ordnance Survey

• A group of maps of the post-1974 municipal districts or boroughs of Hampshire on Wikipedia Commons