Ingleby Barwick

Ingleby Barwick is a town and civil parish in the Borough of Stockton-on-Tees, North Yorkshire, England. It is south of the River Tees and north-east of the River Leven.

Large scale development of the town started in the late 1970s on farm land south-west of Thornaby, the first development being officially opened on 30 July 1981 by the mayor of Stockton-on-Tees. The parish gained town status in 2007.

In 2011, the population of the civil parish of Ingleby Barwick was 20,378, its two electoral wards (which also include the settlements of Hilton, Maltby, High Leven and Low Leven) had a population of 21,045.

Ingleby Barwick was originally two settlements under a single joint parish, it is common to shorten the name to Ingleby in speech unless disambiguation is needed. Ingleby is derived from Old Norse Englar+by, a group of Angles' place. Barwick is of Anglo-Saxon in origin, Bere is Old English for barley and Wick means farm.

A '-by' suffix is a homophone to the word 'bee' and such place with the suffix are common locally: Maltby, Thornaby and Coulby Newham. The by-laws are remnant of by's use as a word for a place type, the word itself has come to be pronounced in this case as a homophone to 'bye'. Ingleby is a common name around Yorkshire. Ingleby Arncliffe and Ingleby Greenhow are notably within a ten-mile distance from the town and in the same county, North Yorkshire.

This name is pronounced two ways. One way Barwick is pronounced is Bar-ick, this loss is traditional and also seen with Berwick-upon-Tweed. The second way of pronouncing is closer to how the individual words evolved in English and how the name is spelt, Bar-wick. This reflects the name's origin as two separate words. Both ways are common in Ingleby Barwick itself.

The settlement of Ingleby Barwick has been occupied for thousands of years. There are traces of human occupation from as far back as the Stone Age. Work at a former farm discovered prolific multi period flintwork and Iron Age field patterns in the town.

A salvage excavation was carried out on the former Windmills Fields of the town, at the end of 1996. Five individual burials were found along with a wooden cist, these finds were accompanied by objects containing stone, jet and copper alloy of high status. This site was considered of European significance as it threw new light on the settlement of the area in the Bronze Age and highlighted a change in tradition of burial traditions and trade networks at this time.