[2] It lies about a mile and a half (2.4 km) north of Wallingford at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, where a chalk stream, Ewelme Brook, joins the River Thames next to Benson Lock.

The fertile land surrounding Benson meant that farming was the main source of employment until the 20th century.

[citation needed] The brook through the village is home to trout and to the invasive American signal crayfish.

[citation needed] The village lies in a well-known frost-pocket, sometimes recording the lowest night-time temperatures in the UK.

Instances where the name is mentioned include the Battle of Bedcanford, which supposedly took place in 571 and led to Britons ceding Benson to someone called Cuthwulf, but the historicity of this event is uncertain.

[citation needed] The 1866 Working Agreement made by the Great Western Railway for its Wallingford–Watlington line used the older form.

The village occupies the site of an ancient British town known also to have been occupied in the Roman period, although Benson's written history dates back only to 571 CE[7] Recent excavation for a housing site at the junction of St Helen's Avenue and Church Road revealed evidence of early Neolithic (3500 BCE) and later Bronze Age or early Iron Age (11th – 8th centuries BCE) pits and post holes, with a possible later Bronze Age roundhouse and three early or mid-Saxon (5th – 6th centuries CE) sunken-floored buildings.

[11] The manor boundaries ran from the borders of Stadhampton in the north to include Henley in the south-east[12] and were probably set long before the Conquest.

The road between Henley-on-Thames and Dorchester on Thames became a turnpike in 1736[20] and in the 18th and early 19th centuries Benson was an important staging post for coaches between London and Oxford via Henley.

[23] Failure to extend the Cholsey and Wallingford Railway to Watlington, via a station at Benson on an embankment north of Littleworth Road and close to the junction with Oxford Road, left the village increasingly isolated, as passenger transport between London and Oxford largely followed a railway line that ran nowhere near the once-prominent coaching stop.

[27] The village play area reopened in 2021, dedicated to a local teenager, Faye Elizabeth Grundy.

[28] Aircraft noise in the area can be marked, which lowers property values compared with many surrounding villages.

[29] In 1993 the River Thames at Benson was one of the primary filming locations for Episode 7 of Series 3 of the BBC sitcom Keeping up Appearances.