Astwood is a

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

in the unitary authority area of the

City of Milton Keynes The City of Milton Keynes is a unitary authority area with both borough and city status, in Buckinghamshire. It is the northernmost district of the South East England Region. The borough abuts Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the remainder ...

, Buckinghamshire, England. It is located on the border with

Bedfordshire Bedfordshire (; abbreviated Beds) is a ceremonial county in the East of England. The county has been administered by three unitary authorities, Borough of Bedford, Central Bedfordshire and Borough of Luton, since Bedfordshire County Council ...

, approximately east of Newport Pagnell and west of

Bedford Bedford is a market town in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census, the population of the Bedford built-up area (including Biddenham and Kempston) was 106,940, making it the second-largest settlement in Bedfordshire, behind Luton, whilst ...

. The village name is Anglo-Saxon in origin and means "valley of the dammed". The churchyard of the parish church of St Peter is considered by some as being one of the prettiest dogging sites in the county. Most of the older buildings in the village have

thatched Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), rushes, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. Since the bulk of ...

roofs making for a quaint rural setting.

Astwood and Hardmead civil parish

Together with the neighbouring village of Hardmead, it forms the

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authorit ...

of Astwood and Hardmead.Parishes in Milton Keynes
- Milton Keynes Council.

References

External links

* * Villages in Buckinghamshire Areas of Milton Keynes Civil parishes in Buckinghamshire {{Buckinghamshire-geo-stub