Water Stratford

The earliest remains in Water Stratford parish consist of a Neolithic stone axe, found by chance, and a ring-ditch and several possible enclosures seen on aerial photographs. These may be late prehistoric. Roman roads are known to pass through this parish and have been recorded in field survey. A possible Roman burial was found in a gravel pit and possible Roman buildings were found in a cutting for a road under a railway bridge in the nineteenth century.

Medieval pottery was found by metal-detectorists and earthworks seen on aerial photographs suggest that Water Stratford village was larger in the medieval period. There are also historical records of a medieval watermill that appears to have been destroyed in the fourteenth century. Later on a manor house and garden was built in 1598, possibly replacing an older one. The rectory is probably seventeenth century, though there is some debate as to whether it is actually modern.

There seems to have been a spate of rebuilding in the nineteenth century, as most of the listed buildings are either late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Also, the church was rebuilt in 1828, though it reused some of the medieval doorways and kept the fourteenth century tower. One of the nineteenth century lodges of Stowe landscape gardens is also in Water Stratford parish. The Victorian transportation revolution brought at least three railway bridges to this parish. These are not, unlike in many other parishes in the county, the latest features of note in this record. The site of a World War II camp is now a kennels, though it is thought some of the original buildings survive and some practice trenches were seen on aerial photographs.