Letcombe Regis

Letcombe Regis today

Letcombe Regis is a compact village where Letcombe Brook, one of Oxfordshire’s few chalk streams, comes down from the Downs towards Wantage. The parish climbs south over the ridge and a little way down the far side, and takes in the Iron Age hillfort of Segsbury Camp. Letcombe Valley, a small Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust reserve along the brook, lies at the south end of the village. It was in Berkshire until 1974 and is now in Oxfordshire.

The village has St Andrew’s church, the Greyhound (an 18th-century pub with rooms), a village hall and a football club. There is no school now; the village school merged with Childrey’s in 1998 to form the Ridgeway Church of England Primary School in Childrey. Letcombe Regis is reached by lanes from Wantage and the B4507, and the Ridgeway is a steep walk or ride up from the south end of the village.

History

Segsbury and the Romans

Segsbury Camp, also called Letcombe Castle, is a roughly circular hillfort of about 10.7 hectares on the crest of the Downs, just north of the Ridgeway. Excavations by Oxford University in 1996 and 1997 found that it was used on and off between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC, perhaps as a shared meeting place for the farming communities around it rather than a permanent town. British and Roman coins have been found in the parish, and the county history of 1924 records the remains of a Roman villa.

The King’s Letcombe

The name comes from Old English and refers to the brook in its combe. ‘Regis’ (of the king) was added because the manor belonged to the Crown: Edward the Confessor held it, and in 1086 King William held it, with 51 households, five mills and a church belonging to the nuns of Amesbury. Letcombe Bassett, further up the valley, took its name from a later family of lords instead. In 1136 King Stephen gave the manor to the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, and it passed back and forth between Cluny and the Crown during the wars with France. Under Henry V’s will it went to Westminster Abbey in 1445, and the Dean and Chapter of Westminster kept it until 1869.

Church and houses

The two lower stages of St Andrew’s tower date from about 1195; most of the rest of the church is 15th-century, restored in 1863. Inside are a 12th-century font and fragments of 15th-century glass. In the churchyard stands a monument to George King Hipango, a young Māori chief who died here in 1871, aged nineteen, while staying at the vicarage. Antwicks Manor, once called the Moat House, was bought around 1900 by Richard ‘Boss’ Croker, the former Tammany Hall leader from New York, who filled in its moat and sold it in 1905.

Enclosure, racing and research

The open fields of Letcombe Regis and the Challows were enclosed under an Act of 1801, with the award made in 1804. In the early 20th century the village had four racing stables and grew watercress in the brook. From 1957 the Agricultural Research Council ran a laboratory at the Letcombe Manor estate, first studying radioactive fallout in food and later plant roots and soils; it closed in 1985, and Dow used the site for crop research for some years after that.

Things to see

• Segsbury Camp (Letcombe Castle), a scheduled Iron Age hillfort beside the Ridgeway.
• St Andrew’s church, with its late 12th-century tower base and 12th-century font.
• The Hipango monument in St Andrew’s churchyard.
• Letcombe Valley nature reserve along Letcombe Brook, entered from the top of South Street.
• The Greyhound and the listed cottages and farmhouses of the village street.