Ramsbury

Ramsbury is a village and civil parish in the English county of Wiltshire. The village is in the Kennet Valley near the Berkshire boundary. The nearest towns are Hungerford about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) east and Marlborough about 5.5 miles (8.9 km) west. The much larger town of Swindon is about 12 miles (19 km) to the north.

The civil parish includes the hamlet of Axford about 2.5 miles (4.0 km) west of Ramsbury, and three smaller hamlets: New Town, close to Ramsbury to the southeast, and Knighton and Whittonditch, both about 1 mile (1.6 km) to the east. The 2011 Census recorded a parish population of 1,989.

The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded a large settlement of 156 households at Ramesberie.

Littlecote Roman Villa is in the parish. The earliest written history of Ramsbury can be traced from the Saxon era when the bishopric of Ramsbury was created in 909 AD.

Between 1942 and 1946, during World War II, there was a Royal Air Force airfield known as RAF Ramsbury on a ridge of high ground to the south of the village.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Ramsbury traditionally held two annual fairs – a livestock fair in the spring, and a hiring fair or Mop fair at Michaelmas. Nearby Marlborough's tradition of holding one Mop each side of Michaelmas ("Little Mop" on the Saturday before and "Big Mop" on the Saturday after) was originally a means to accommodate the (then) more prestigious Ramsbury Mop. By the 19th century, both fairs had become cattle fairs. The spring cattle fair (traditionally held on 14 May) ceased in 1939. The Michaelmas fair slowly lost its original agricultural connections, becoming purely a funfair in 1946 before ceasing in the 1950s.

An annual carnival was instituted to replace the fairs and survived until the 1990s, but has in turn been replaced with a biennial street fair which sees the High Street closed from the Square to the Memorial Hall.

The Provident Union Investment Society was founded in Ramsbury in 1846, becoming the Ramsbury Building Society in 1928. It had its headquarters in the Square until 1982 and took as its logo the ancient wych-elm which grew immediately opposite. Subsequent mergers saw the building society subsumed into the Regency and West of England Building Society, then the Portman Building Society, and finally the Nationwide Building Society.