Braishfield is a village and

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 ...

north of Romsey in

Hampshire Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire ...

, England. The name is thought to be derived from the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

''bræsc'' + ''feld'', meaning 'open land with small branches or brushwood'. The hamlet of Pucknall lies due east of the village.

Geology

The parish lies on the northern edge of the

Hampshire Basin The Hampshire Basin is a geological basin of Palaeogene age in southern England, underlying parts of Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Dorset, and Sussex. Like the London Basin to the northeast, it is filled with sands and clays of Paleocene and y ...

, with

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Ch ...

in the north. To the south and east of the village this is overlain by Palaeocene sands and clays of the

Lambeth Group The Lambeth Group is a stratigraphic group, a set of geological rock strata in the London and Hampshire Basins of southern England. It comprises a complex of vertically and laterally varying gravels, sands, silts and clays deposited between 56-55 ...

. At the southern edge the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens are on younger deposits of

Eocene The Eocene ( ) Epoch is a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name ''Eocene'' comes from the Ancient Greek (''ēṓs'', " ...

age, sloping from a ridge of the Nursling sands into a valley of

London Clay The London Clay Formation is a marine geological formation of Ypresian (early Eocene Epoch, c. 56–49 million years ago) age which crops out in the southeast of England. The London Clay is well known for its fossil content. The fossils from t ...

History

Archaeological discoveries in Braishfield include the remains of some of the oldest dwellings to be found in Great Britain and the first

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several p ...

dwelling site of any kind to be discovered in Hampshire. Higgins James Bown of Laurel Cottage, was the village wheelwright, carpenter, chairmaker and undertaker. H.J. Bown died in July 1954 aged 88 years. His woodworking tools were donated to the

Museum of English Rural Life The Museum of English Rural Life, also known as The MERL, is a museum, library and archive dedicated to recording the changing face of farming and the countryside in England. The museum is run by the University of Reading, and is situated in Red ...

Places of interest

The Church of England parish church of All Saints was built in 1855 to a design by

William Butterfield William Butterfield (7 September 1814 – 23 February 1900) was a Gothic Revival architect and associated with the Oxford Movement (or Tractarian Movement). He is noted for his use of polychromy. Biography William Butterfield was born in Lon ...

Transport

The Village has neither main roads nor railways, but is crossed by the

Monarch's Way The Monarch's Way is a long-distance footpath in England that approximates the escape route taken by King Charles II in 1651 after being defeated in the Battle of Worcester. It runs from Worcester via Bristol and Yeovil to Shoreham, West Su ...

long-distance footpath.

Sport

Braishfield has a long running football club, who play their home games at the Recreation Ground. Founded in 1907, Braishfield football club run two adult sides in the Southampton League, a 1st team and a reserve team. They also have six boys teams at various age groups in the Test Way Youth League known as the Braishfield bees. There is also a village cricket club.

Local folklore and legend

Braishfield is reputedly haunted by the ghost of a miserly Edwardian lady, who has been seen searching the village for the fortune she buried shortly before her death.

Media appearances

Much of the 1979-1981 television series ''

Worzel Gummidge Worzel Gummidge is a scarecrow in British children's fiction, who originally appeared in a series of books by the English novelist Barbara Euphan Todd.

'' was filmed in and around Braishfield.

Twin towns

Braishfield is twinned with: * Crouay, France

References

{{authority control Villages in Hampshire Test Valley Reportedly haunted locations in South East England