It is bounded by the River Itchen to the east, Fosse Way to the northwest, a minor road to the south and field boundaries on its other sides.

A middle Bronze Age burial (carbon dated 1530-1320 BCE) has been found near a Neolithic pit to the north-west of the village.

[2] Bronze Age pits and hearths, carbon dated to c. 1000 BCE, were found in 1972 near Sharmer Farm in the north of the parish.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records the manor as Edburberie where it is listed amongst lands granted to Henry de Ferrers[4] by William the Conqueror.

[6] The earliest known record of a post office in the village is from September 1847, when a type of postmark called an undated circle was issued.

In 1873 the church was restored and the south aisle widened and new Gothic Revival windows inserted in the east and north walls of the chancel.

Southam Road and Harbury railway station opened that year, at Deppers Hill about 1 mile (1.6 km) east of the village.

In 1884 the Great Western Railway widened the cutting to make its slopes shallower in the hope of preventing further slips.

[19] All train services were suspended for several days while Network Rail worked to clear the damaged section of the slope and try to stabilise it.

Network Rail was still working on the cutting by 31 January 2015 when part of it subsided again, and again the line had to be closed to all train services.

[21] On 3 February Network Rail chairman Mark Carne described the landslip as "a massive incident" and said the line may be closed for "several weeks".

[24] As well as linking Birmingham and Oxford, the new railway provided a connection for the Greaves Works in Bishop's Itchington that since 1820 had been quarrying Blue Lias and turning it into cement.

Associated Portland Cement, now Blue Circle Industries, bought ACM's assets in 1932 and continued production.

[25] The deep quarries on the Harbury side of the parish boundary have since been converted into Bishops Bowl Lakes, which is a coarse fishing facility.

[26] During a heat wave in the summer of 2018 a 17-year-old boy from Daventry drowned after getting into difficulty in the lake,[27] this prompted the tightening of security at the site.

Harbury lies on the Blue Lias, a Lower Jurassic marine sediment that also forms the unstable sea cliffs at Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.

It covers 6.7 hectares and the clay spoilbanks host species-rich grassland with flowering plants including cowslip, early forget-me-not, hairy violet and orchids such as Twayblade and Common Spotted-Orchid.

[32] A pre-school provides sessional early years education for children aged 2 yrs 9 months to school entry.