Cholsey

History

A Bronze Age site has been found beside the River Thames at Whitecross Farm in the northeast of the parish. A pre-Roman road, the Icknield Way, crosses the River Thames at Cholsey.

The village itself was founded on an island (Ceol's Isle) in marshy ground close to the Thames. There is evidence that the House of Wessex Royal family owned land in Cholsey in the 6th and 7th centuries. At this time the town was home to a Saint Wilgyth who was venerated locally in the Middle Ages.

A royal nunnery, Cholsey Abbey, was founded in the village in 986 by Queen Dowager Ælfthryth on land given by her son, King Ethelred the Unready. The nunnery is thought to have been destroyed by invading Danes in 1006 when they camped in Cholsey after setting nearby Wallingford ablaze. However, Saxon masonry still survives in the Church of England parish church of St Mary. Most of this flint and stone church was built in the 12th century.

In the 13th-century a tithe barn was built in the village. It was, at the time, the largest aisled building in the world, being 51 feet (16 m) high, 54 feet (16 m) wide and over 300 feet (91 m) long. It was demolished in 1815.

Fair Mile Hospital, a former lunatic asylum, originally opened near Cholsey in 1870 and closed in 2003. Its Victorian buildings were converted to housing between 2011 and 2014, whilst portions of the site were given over to newly built accommodation.

Notable residents

Writer and poet John Masefield lived in the parish, for several years during World War I, as tenant of Lollingdon Farm, at the foot of the Berkshire Downs. He was Poet Laureate from 1936 to his death in 1967 and is most famous for a series of poems and sonnets entitled Lollingdon Downs and his poem Sea-Fever, which is most often heard set to music by John Ireland.

The grave of novelist Dame Agatha Christie is in the churchyard of St Mary's. She lived with her second husband, archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, at Winterbrook House, in the north of the parish, from about 1934 and died there in 1976. She and her husband Sir Max had chosen a burial plot in the mid 1960s just under the perimeter wall of the churchyard. About 20 journalists and TV reporters attended her funeral service, some having travelled from as far away as South America. Thirty wreaths adorned her grave including one from the cast of her long-running play The Mousetrap, and another sent 'on behalf of the multitude of grateful readers' from the Ulverscroft Large Print Book Publishers

Transport

Cholsey is served by Cholsey railway station, a calling point for First Great Western stopping services on the Great Western Main Line between Reading and Didcot.

The station was also the junction for a branch line or bunk line to Wallingford, which the heritage Cholsey and Wallingford Railway now operates on Bank Holidays and some weekends.

In addition, Cholsey is also served by a bus service operated by Thames Travel.