Little Rollright, Oxfordshire

Historical Description

Rollright, Little, a parish in Oxfordshire, adjacent to Warwickshire, 2½ miles NW of Chipping Norton station on the G.W.R. Post town and money order and telegraph office, Chipping Norton. Acreage, 627; population, 27. The manor belongs to the Bliss family. Part of a Druidical circle is here, originally comprising 60 stones, now comprising about 30, few of them rising more than 4 feet from the ground. A stone of singular shape, and about 8 feet high, is 252 feetN of the circle, bears the name of the King's Stone, and commands an extensive view. Five larger stones are about a quarter of a mile to the SE, and are supposed to have formed a kistvaen. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Oxford; net value, £110. The church is a small plain building of stone in the Perpendicular style, consisting £ chancel, nave, S porch, and an ivy-covered western tower. It has two canopied altar-tombs and an ancient font.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Church Records

Ancestry.co.uk, in association with Oxfordshire Family History Society and Oxfordshire History Centre, have images of the Parish Registers for Oxfordshire online.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Little Rollright from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Rollright, Little)

Land and Property

A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Oxfordshire is available online

Maps

Online maps of Little Rollright are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Oxfordshire newspapers online:

• Oxford Journal
• Banbury Advertiser
• Banbury Guardian
• Oxford University and City Herald
• Oxford Chronicle and Reading Gazette
• Faringdon Advertiser and Vale of the White Horse Gazette
• Oxford Times
• Banbury Beacon
• Ossett Observer

Visitations Heraldic

The Visitations of Oxfordshire, 1566, 1574 &1634 are available on the Heraldry page.