Within the village itself is the medieval Church of St Michael, a seventeenth-century manor house, and what claims to be the oldest Rectory in England.

An area outside the fort, east of the entrance, has produced much greater quantities of pottery dating to the earliest period of the Iron Age, with many fragments of various jars and bowls.

[4] The Charter in this case dates to 709 AD, when Coenred of Mercia gave the land to St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester.

The abbey had been founded 30 years before,[5] and in 709 Coenred made this gift to the Church, gave up being King of the Mercians and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he died.

However the lease was relinquished to Henry VIII's commissioners, following the dissolution of Gloucester Abbey, and in 1546 the manor of Buckland was granted to Sir Richard Gresham in exchange for his lands in Yorkshire.

[14] Three years after being granted the manor of Buckland, one of his many properties, he died, and the estates passed to his son Sir Thomas Gresham.

[9] Thomas was even better than his father at accumulating wealth and land, serving as a financier and royal agent in turn to Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

John Thynne was steward to the Duke of Somerset, and even before this advantageous marriage was gaining preferments and amassing a considerable fortune.

[4] He died unmarried, aged 66, in 1709,[18] and a memorial in St Michael's Church records how he left his 'large personal estate to pious uses', and his lands to his nephew, Thomas Thynne.

[19] In 1715 Bernard Granville, a maternal cousin of the Thynne family and father of Mary Delany retired to the manor from London and is buried in a grade 2 listed tomb in the churchyard.

She had eloped to marry James Orchard Halliwell, a Shakespeare scholar who met her whilst studying her father's manuscripts.

[39] For many years the village church, St Michael's, housed a sixteenth-century copy of The Acts and Monuments (popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs).