Eynsham is a large village between Witney and Oxford on the banks of the River Thames in West Oxfordshire. It grew up around the important ford at Swinford, which is now the site of the Swinford Toll Bridge, a notorious traffic bottleneck! It was a coaching stop on the London to Fishguard (a port for Ireland) trunk road, and is now just off the A40, which is an important road linking Oxford to Cheltenham and Wales. There was a large abbey in the village from 1005 AD, dissolved in 1538.
The population of Eynsham was 2,177 in 1871, dropping in 1901 to 1,757. By 1971 it had more than doubled in size at 4,428 people.
A map of the parish of Eysham's historical boundaries
A map of the village centre
The centre of Eynsham today is a very attractive mix of stone houses, with a lovely social atmosphere. It has a population of just under 5,000 people. It has a morris team, which is shown on some of the photographs of this webpage.
My thanks to Suzy Prior for allowing me to use her photographs of Eynsham on this page.
Further reading
http://www.eynsham.org/eynhistgen.html (which includes its own further reading list of books)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eynsham
http://www.wospweb.com/site/Eynsham-Online/
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=10525&strquery=eynsham
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=9660&st=eynsham
http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/LeadDomainList.do?a=3&c=eynsham&d=14&i=1001x1002&m=0&r=1&s=1210583567984&enc=1&areaId=551674&OAAreaId=481639