Drayton Beauchamp (pronounced 'Beecham') is a village and civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district in Buckinghamshire, England. It is in the east of the county bordering Hertfordshire, about six miles from Aylesbury and two miles from Tring.
History
The village toponym is derived from the Old English for "farm where sledges are used". It is a common place name in England, and refers to places that were perched on the hillside, thus requiring the use of a sledge rather than a cart to pull heavy loads. The suffix 'Beauchamp' refers to the ancient manorial family of the parish. The village is intersected by the Icknield Way a prehistoric, long-distance trackway of significant importance in providing a trading route between East Anglia and the Thames Valley certainly during the Iron Age and maybe earlier. In more recent times it has been bisected by the Roman Road, Akeman Street now the A41 and by both the Aylesbury Arm and Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal. when the rector was the parson-naturalist, Henry Harpur Crewe.
In 1934 Drayton Beauchamp ceded a small parcel of land, adjacent to the previously detached parish of Cholesbury to the new parish of Cholesbury-cum-St Leonards.
References
Further reading
- Ross, Margaret (2011) "Drayton Beauchamp: The Village That Time Passed By". England:Peebles Press.
- Romantic fiction - nothing to do with Drayton Beauchamp
External links
- St Mary the Virgin
- British History Online – Victoria County History of Buckinghamshire: Volume 3 – Drayton Beauchamp