Marcham

Marcham is a village and civil parish about 2 miles (3 km) west of Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

The A415 links Abingdon and A34 Marcham interchange to the east with Kingston Bagpuize on the A420 road to the west.

In Trendles Field behind the former Noah's Ark Inn, in the extreme south-west of the parish, the remains of an Iron Age and Roman village have been excavated.

[3] Evidence has been found of round huts and grain storage pits, to which a celtic religious shrine was later added.

[citation needed] The toponym "Marcham" is derived from the Old English Merceham, in which ham is a homestead and merece is a place where wild celery grows.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records that the abbey still held Marcham after the Norman Conquest of England.

[12] Marcham has long had a watermill on the Ock, about 3⁄4 mile (1.2 km) south of the village.

[13] An open field system of farming continued in the parish until 1836, when the inclosure award for Marcham was made.

[2] The road east–west through Gozzard's Ford used to be a turnpike linking Abingdon in the east to Fyfield in the west.

It was later disturnpiked, and in the 20th century the part between Gozzard's Ford and Shippon was closed and dismantled to make way for one of the runways at RAF Abingdon.

A minute later it crashed in Upwood Park in the north of Marcham parish and burst into flames.

The survivor, Sgt DE Hughes, was hospitalised in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and survived the rest of the War.

The Black Horse at Gozzard's Ford
An Armstrong Whitworth Whitley V aircraft, similar to N1439 which crashed at Upwood Park