Waterstock

Waterstock is a village and civil parish on the River Thame about 4.5mi west of the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire. The parish is bounded to the north and west by the river, to the south largely by the A418 main road, and to the east largely by the minor road between Tiddington and Ickford Bridge across the Thame. On the north side of the parish, the river forms the county boundary with Buckinghamshire as well as the parish boundary with Ickford and Worminghall.Waterstock village is on a minor road north of the A418 and is surrounded by open farming land. In the village are about 50 houses and a farm along one main street.HistoryWaterstock's toponym is derived from the Old English for "Waterplace".Waterstock Mill is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. It was most likely on the same site as the current mill, which is a 15th-century building on a small island in the River Thame. The mill a two-storey L-shaped building, with a timber frame filled in with brick nogging. It was rebuilt in the Elizabethan period. In 1957 it was converted and sold.Many of the parish's fields show ridge-and-furrow strip cultivation. In 1279 there were probably about 200 inhabitants, but after the Black Death the population decreased to 51 persons over the age of 14.