Offord Cluny

Offord Cluny is in Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as a historic county of England.

[2] The name 'Cluny' comes from Cluny Abbey in the Bourgogne region of France, which were granted a manor in Offord by Arnulf de Hesding some time before 1086.

[3] In 1085 William the Conqueror ordered that a survey should be carried out across his kingdom to discover who owned which parts and what it was worth.

[6] The Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place but it records that there were 29 households at Offord Cluny.

The Domesday Book uses a number of units of measure for areas of land that are now unfamiliar terms, such as hides and ploughlands.

In different parts of the country, these were terms for the area of land that a team of eight oxen could plough in a single season and are equivalent to 120 acres (49 hectares); this was the amount of land that was considered to be sufficient to support a single family.

[6] In addition to the arable land, there were 24 acres (10 hectares) of meadows and two water mills at Offord Cluny.

[6] The tax assessment in the Domesday Book was known as geld or danegeld and was a type of land-tax based on the hide or ploughland.

A parish council is responsible for providing and maintaining a variety of local services including allotments and a cemetery; grass cutting and tree planting within public open spaces such as a village green or playing fields.

For Offord Cluny the highest tier of local government is Cambridgeshire County Council which has administration buildings in Cambridge.

The village and historic civil parish of Offord Cluny lies on the eastern side of the Great Ouse river valley between 50 feet (15 m) and 150 feet (46 m) above ordnance datum; the parish covered an area of 1,046 acres (423 hectares) of land and 16 acres (6.5 hectares) of water.

It is 3 miles (4.8 km) from Offord Cluny to the railway station at Huntingdon, which is on the East Coast Main Line, where regular services run south to St Neots and London, and north to Peterborough.

Historical documents relating to Offord Cluny, including Church of England parish registers, maps and photographs, are held by Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office Huntingdon.