33-713: Pendon Museum , located in Long Wittenham near Didcot , Oxfordshire , England , is a museum that displays scale models , in particular a large scene representing parts of the Vale of White Horse in the 1920s and 1930s. The scene, under construction since the 1950s and with parts dating back earlier, was inspired by detailed research into the architecture and landscape of the vale, with some models of cottages taking hundreds of hours to complete. The late Roye England , an anglophile Australian who lived in England, founded it, and run jointly by
66-562: A high status Saxon enclosure, and the variety and number of objects found in Saxon burial sites around the village would appear to support this. These large, Saxon burial sites also indicate a sizeable population that lasted for many years. Historians now recognise that the general area of southern Oxfordshire was the heartland of the Gewisse . The nearness to the Iron Age hillfort of Wittenham Clumps and
99-546: A large proportion of the farmland, which had been sold the year before, was donated to the Northmoor Trust (now Earth Trust ) to establish a new research woodland called Paradise Wood , created and managed by Gabriel Hemery . In 2013, 20 hectares (12 acres) of the remainder of the farmland, including the redundant buildings, was gifted to another charity the Sylva Foundation . In 2016 the charity moved its main office to
132-466: A pub), which is closer to Clifton Hampden but is on the Wittenham side of the parish boundary. The Machine Man was disfranchised in 2003. The Sylva Wood Centre provides a hub for small businesses and craftspeople who design, innovate or make in wood, including incubation facilities for new businesses linked with City of Oxford College . The village has a sports club: Long Wittenham Athletics Club, which
165-471: A sequence of trains, showing what one could have seen passing by on a summer day and night, in the mid-1920s. This sequence is based on timetables of the period. They are all modelled in 4 mm to 1 foot scale (1:76), and run on track of 18mm gauge, a combination known as EM gauge . Long Wittenham Long Wittenham is a village and small civil parish about 3 miles (5 km) north of Didcot , and 3.5 miles (5.6 km) southeast of Abingdon . It
198-579: Is a model railway interactive museum set up by Roye England. Its site was The Three Poplars public house . Declining trade forced its sale in 1954 and for a time it traded as a Youth Hostel , being close to the North Wessex Downs and the Thames Path . Other pubs include The Plough, and The Vine (now The Vine and Spice Indian restaurant). North of the village is the Barley Mow Inn (nowadays just
231-456: Is a few hundred yards from the confluence of the River Thames and River Thame . A common practice of the scholars at Oxford was to refer to the river Thames by two separate names, with Dorchester on Thames the point of change. Downstream of the village, the river continued to be named The Thames , while upstream it was named The Isis . Ordnance Survey maps continued the practice by labelling
264-642: Is a scale representation of the Vale of White Horse as it was in the inter-war period. The scene is centred on the 'typical' village of Pendon Parva, which is served by a railway station on the main London to Bristol GWR main line that runs through the Vale, and another on the M&;SWJR that became one of the constituent companies of the GWR in 1923. The topography and the village layout is fictional, but every building and significant feature
297-558: Is an exact model of a real building from the Vale of White Horse. Some locos on the layout: On the ground floor of the museum, a model representing a Great Western Railway branch line on Dartmoor , originally built in 1955 to showcase the trains being built for the Vale scene, is operated for visitors. The main focus of the Dartmoor scene is a model of Brunel 's timber viaduct at Walkham in Devon built by R. Guy Williams , who also built many of
330-482: Is based at Bodkins Field. This and other flat fields around the village have often been used as impromptu landing sites by hot-air balloonists. Beyond the eastern edge of the village is Neptune Wood, planted in 2005 as one of 33 British Trafalgar Wood commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar . The Wittenhams Community Orchard and Future Forest were created by the Sylva Foundation in 2017 on land to
363-488: Is both the village's Church of England parish church and its main tourist attraction. The Abbey has a museum. Of the ten original coaching inns, two remain: The George and The White Hart. The George has a galleried yard dating back to 1495 and it used to serve coaches on the Gloucester-Oxford-London route. The George was used as a filming location for ITV 's Agatha Christie's Poirot in the episode Taken at
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#1732858419952396-502: Is surrounded on three sides by water (and may have been founded at the point where the river became navigable), it is likely the name is linked to the Celtic word for water " dwfr " (or " dŵr " as in modern Modern Welsh ), giving a meaning of " Fort on the Water " or " Water-town ". This etymology was known as early as 1545 when it was used by John Leland in his epic poem Cygnea Cantio ("Song of
429-509: The Feet of fines for example). By the Tudor era , parish records show it had a population of around 200, with arable crops: wheat, oats, barley and rye being farmed. For a time the village was called Earl's Wittenham, after its feudal overlord Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester . In 1534 Sir Thomas White bought the manor and gave it to his foundation, St John's College, Oxford . Until recently,
462-454: The Norman building; the aisles and tower are later additions. The font is a rare Norman lead one; it was later encased in wood, and this preserved it from iconoclastic Parliamentarian soldiers in the 17th century. The church has the smallest monument in England a small stone effigy of Gilbert de Clare. The first female Scottish electrical engineer Evelyn Roxburgh is buried in the graveyard at
495-505: The de facto capital of Wessex, which was later to become the dominant kingdom in England. Eventually Winchester displaced it, with the bishopric being transferred there in 660. Briefly in the late 670s Dorchester was once more a bishop's seat under Mercian control. Dorchester again became the seat of a bishop in around 875, when the Mercian Bishop of Leicester transferred his seat there. The diocese merged with that of Lindsey in 971;
528-512: The 1960s, and early Bronze Age items, such as an axe and spearhead, have been found in the Thames. Later settlement evidence is more extensive: Iron Age and Roman presence is indicated by trackways, various buildings (enclosures, farms and villas), burials (cremation and inhumation), and pottery and coins. There is also evidence of a possible Frankish settlement: a 5th-century grave that contained high-status Frankish objects. This early habitation
561-601: The President and scholars of St. John's owned most of the houses in the village and much of the land. Until the inclosure acts there were just two large, open fields , which the college leased in strips to the various villagers. In 1857, using a special government grant for agricultural communities, the village school was built. Local legend claims that Oliver Cromwell addressed the villagers on his way to his niece's wedding, in neighbouring Little Wittenham. The author and wood engraver Robert Gibbings lived at Footbridge Cottage at
594-466: The Roman (and post-Roman) town of Dorchester show that the localised area was of great importance for many centuries, although the notion that Witta (and/or his family) were related to the later Royal House of Wessex , is unproven. The Domesday Book of 1086 records the village in one of two entries for Wittenham identifiable as this part of the modern village by government-registered manorial descent (such as
627-559: The Sinodun Hills on the opposite side of the Thames, a ramparted settlement was inhabited during the Bronze Age and Iron Age . Two of the Sinodun Hills bear distinctive landmarks of mature trees called Wittenham Clumps . Adjacent to the village is Dyke Hills which is the remains of an Iron Age hill fort . The Romans built a vicus here, with a road linking the settlement to a military camp at Alchester , 16 miles (25 km) to
660-514: The Swan"). In the poem Leland refers to the town with a Greek translation, Hydropolis ( "Water-city"). There is no surviving record of the settlement's Latin name, and Bede 's reference to the town as " Dorcic " is otherwise unsupported. The area has been inhabited since at least the Neolithic . In the north of the parish there was a Neolithic sacred site, now largely destroyed by gravel pits. On one of
693-498: The bishop's seat was moved to Lincoln in 1085. In the 12th century the church, then Dorchester Abbey , was enlarged to serve a community of Augustinian canons . King Henry VIII dissolved the Abbey in 1536, leaving the small village with a huge parish church. Since 1939 the title of Bishop of Dorchester was revived as a Suffragan Bishop in the Diocese of Oxford . Dorchester Abbey
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#1732858419952726-445: The church. A Methodist chapel was built in 1820, and later converted into a butcher's, a general store, and a Post Office . It was disfranchised in 2006 and is now a private house. The base of the village preaching cross dates from the 7th century. Saint Birinus preached here when he brought Christianity to the area. Cruck Cottage can be architecturally dated to being around 800 years old. The building housing Pendon Museum
759-486: The east, across the river, is the Roman town of Dorcic – now Dorchester-on-Thames . To the south-east are neighbouring Little Wittenham which has a much smaller population but a much larger area and within this parish is Wittenham Clumps , also called the Sinodun Hills. The village is supposedly named after a Saxon chieftain, named Witta, but there is evidence of an earlier settlement. Bronze Age double-ditch enclosures and middle Bronze Age pottery were identified in
792-600: The end of his life (1955-8), and is buried in the churchyard. His last book, Till I end my Song (1957), is based on his life in the village. In the late 1930s (exact date unknown) the University of Oxford based its Institute for Research in Agricultural Engineering at College Farm (owned by St John's College, Oxford ), which moved to York in 1942. The property was subsequently managed as a commercial farm although some buildings gradually fell into dereliction. In 1992
825-423: The late English Model Maker, Guy Williams, who made fifty-seven of the museum's ninety locomotives. They can be seen working together in the 1958 British Pathé short, 'Hair Thatching'. A group of volunteers runs the museum and it is open to the public most weekends and holidays, except during the winter. and Wednesdays during school holidays. The museum was founded by the artist and craftsman Roye England , who
858-432: The model locomotives at the museum. Locos on the layout include: The museum includes displays of individual models, modelling methods and railway artefacts. It also displays Madder Valley , a pioneering model railway built by John Ahern . The model trains are hand built, to represent individual locomotives , carriages , and wagons as exactly possible, based on surviving records and photographs. Operation consists of
891-503: The north. In 634 Pope Honorius I sent a bishop called Birinus to convert the Saxons of the Thames Valley to Christianity . King Cynegils of Wessex gave Dorchester to Birinus as the seat of a new Diocese of Dorchester under a Bishop of Dorchester; the diocese was extremely large, and covered most of Wessex and Mercia . The settled nature of the bishopric made Dorchester in a sense
924-462: The river as "River Thames or Isis" above Dorchester, however, this distinction is rarely made outside the city of Oxford. The town shares its name with Dorchester in Dorset , but there has been no proven link between the two names. The name is likely a combination of a Celtic or Pre-Celtic element "-Dor" with the common suffixation "Chester" ( Old English : "A Roman town or Fort"). As Dorchester on Thames
957-602: The site and established the Sylva Wood Centre, which provides a hub for small businesses and craftspeople who design, innovate or make in wood. In 2017 the Sylva Foundation created the Wittenhams Community Orchard and Future Forest on surrounding land. The Church of England parish church of Saint Mary , begun around 1120, is on the site of a previous Saxon church. The chancel arch survives from
990-510: The south of the village, providing public access via a network of permitted paths. Long Wittenham is twinned with the village of Thaon in Normandy , France. Dorchester-on-Thames Dorchester on Thames (or Dorchester-on-Thames ) is a village and civil parish in Oxfordshire , about 3 miles (5 km) northwest of Wallingford and 8 miles (13 km) southeast of Oxford . The town
1023-455: Was first revealed in the 1890s, in the first ever use of cropmarks to discern archaeological remains. In 2016, on land owned by the Sylva Foundation , an Anglo-Saxon building was excavated by Oxford University School of Archaeology. The core of the village emerges from the Saxon era . 6th century cropmarks outline a large group of buildings, which indicate, if not a royal palace, then certainly
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1056-527: Was interested in model railways . He observed the destruction and modification of many historic buildings in the area and began to make model representations of them. Both the main Vale scene and others display working scale model railway scale models of typical scenes on the Great Western Railway (GWR) of the 1920s. The trains are also representative in detail of those travelling that line in those years. The main display and ongoing project at Pendon
1089-413: Was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it from Berkshire to Oxfordshire , and from the former Wallingford Rural District to the new district of South Oxfordshire . The village is on the outside of a meander in the River Thames , on slightly higher ground than the flood plain around it. The river navigation follows Clifton cut, not the meander. About 1 mile (1.6 km) to
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