Place:Warnham, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Warnham is a village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. The centre of the village is 2 miles (3.2 km) north-northwest of Horsham, 31 miles (50 km) from central London, and to the west of the A24 major road. Other named settlements within the parish include the hamlets of Goosegreen, Kingsfold and Winterfold as well as parts of Strood Green and Rowhook. The hamlets have all been redirected here to the parish of Warnham. Descriptions of three are found below.

The area is in the northwest of the Weald, a gently sloped remnant forest in southeast England which, due to erosion, is now largely a plain.

The parish has a land area of 1,980 hectares (4,892 acres or 7.64 sq mi). In the 2001 UK census 1958 people lived in 784 households; at the 2011 UK census the population was 2,068.

Warnham railway station lies nearly a mile away from the village, on the Sutton & Mole Valley Lines. There is an hourly service to London Victoria with connections to London Waterloo.

The Anglican parish church, dedicated to St. Margaret was built in the 14th century, but contains substantial later additions. There are monuments belonging to at least three influential families, the Durfords, the Lucases (builders of the Royal Albert Hall in London} and the Shelleys (the family of the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley).

There are two manors of interest in the parish. Warnham Court (formerly Hollands Manor) is set in Warnham Park immediately southeast of the village and has noteable park grounds. Field Place was the estate of the Shelley family. The early 19th-century poet and Romanticist Percy Bysshe Shelley was born there in 1792.

Kingsfold

Kingsfold is the northern settlement of the parish, situated on the A24 and Marches Road 2.8 miles (4.5 km) north of Horsham. The village lies close to the County Surrey border just south of the site of the medieval Shiremark Mill (also known as Capel Mill or Kingsfold Mill), a listed smock mill burnt down in 1972. The mill is actually 20 metres north of the county border in Capel.

Goosegreen

Goosegreen consists of a small group of farms and cottages between Warnham and Broadbridge Heath (a suburb of Horsham) and includes four Grade II listed buildings. Goose Green is another hamlet in Thakeham parish to the southwest.

Rowhook

Rowhook is a hamlet on the Broadbridge Heath to Ewhurst, Surrey road 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Horsham. Rowhook lies on a junction of two Roman roads, one being Stane Street (Chichester), the other an unnamed road which runs to the top of "Hurtwood" on the Greensand Ridge in Ewhurst.

Rowhook is divided by the parish boundaries of Warnham, Slinfold and Rudgwick, but the majority of the hamlet, particularly Rowhook Manor, a Grade II listed building of early medieval origin, is in Warnham civil parish.

Stroud Green and Winterfold are not described in Wikipedia.

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI on Warnham
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1, Bramber Rape: Southern Part, the first of a number of chapters on Warnham
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Bramber Rape and on that for Horsham Rural District.