It is 16 miles (26 km) north of Hexham, and about the same west from Morpeth.

Sir John de Babington, Lord of Babington Parva (now Bavington), in the county of Northumberland was alive in 1178 and 1220 and the family remained there for at least five generations before migrating south to Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Nottingham, Cambridge and Devon.

[3] In 1794, the Northumberland mathematician and astronomer Henry Atkinson began running Bavington school when he was only thirteen.

According to John Stokoe in his "Songs and Ballads of Northern England" (1893), the song Bobby Shaftoe[4] is connected by tradition with one of the Shaftoes of Bavington, who ran away to sea to escape the attentions of a lady of beauty and fortune.

The poet Kathleen Raine spent her younger days living in the manse in Great Bavington.