England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Nettlebed St Bartholomew

The Parish

The parish of Nettlebed lies in southeastern Oxfordshire not too far from its border with neighbouring Buckinghamshire and also close to Berkshire. Nettlebed is located about 5 miles northwest of Henley on Thames and sits on the A4130 road which connects Henley with Wallingford. Nettlebed in a small and compact crossroads village set in the southern fringes of the Chiltern Hills. The local economy of farming, a mixed regime in place, was augmented by exploitation of the local clay, which caps the underlying chalk, for brick-making and kilns for firing the same existed from the 15th century onwards. As Nettlebed sits on porous chalk there is little surface drainage, what there is heads eastwards to join the nearby Thames and thence through the capital to the North Sea Nettlebed is sited at 180 metres above the sea and sits on the ridge-line of the southern Chiltern Hills, a picturesque area of chalky valleys pocked with beech-woods and popular with hikers. Local heights rise gently northwestwards to reach just over 210 metres at nearby Nuffield before plunging to the Thames valley which forms an extensive loop around this tract of downland. Nettlebed parish was fairly small by the standards of the Chilterns range, it covered just short of 1,200 acres but with the employment in the brick-making business supported a population of close to 700 parishioners. Nettlebed is not specifically mentioned in Domesday Book.

The Church

St Bartholomew's church sits at the extreme western end of the village on the southern side of the A4130, here named High Street. Sadly St Bartholomew is not some mediaeval masterpiece but a Victorian rebuild constructed in the 1840s in the local grey brick. Pevsner's account of the church is terse, just 4 lines of descriptive text but scathingly describing the church as "prosaic". Clearly Pevsner was unimpressed with the work. A low waist high wall separates the churchyard from the pavement alongside High Street, a nice lychgate at the eastern end of the site granting access to a churchyard which is relatively free of photographic obstacles.