It’s always a thrill to have such a nice pair of tits so close to your face.
Was the 1800 house built inside the one that was torn down in 1920, or did they have a time machine? 
My grandfather’s house we all thought was about 500 years old. When he died, an architectural historian helped restore it and found that it had started life as a 13th century barn - and that one of the rafters was a piece of 1,000-year-old Scandinavian pine. In other words, dug up out of a Viking longship burial.
I wondered that, but I think Tris is referring to two different houses in two distinct places - one that used to be the oldest, but is now gone, and one that is now the oldest, but was built later than the former ‘oldest house in town’.
Oh. This could be a bit of an anticlimax…
I just forked out £3.50 for the document set from the National Archive - it contains colour photographs of the relevant pages, plus translations of the text…
… which say nothing about a pond!
Listed under the lands of Ralph de Mortimer:
However, it may be that I’m looking in the wrong place - there might be more detail elsewhere in the book.
Who told you it was there? Maybe they know where the listing can be found.
It’s mentioned on the Manor Farm website. I might have to pop into the museum part and see if they’ve got the relevant extract of the Domesday book (i.e. a different page to mine). Some of it might be confounded by place names having changed a bit over the years.
Was the pond a millpond?
That’s possible - there is a stream nearby (although I don’t think it flows through the pond any more - and the pond itself is not where you would expect it to occur naturally - at the bottom of the hill - it’s a little way up the hill…
Maybe it’s the mill pond. Or maybe it belonged to the church and is listed separately from Ralph’s properties.
I used to be based just down the road from there, at HMS Collingwood, did a lot of cycling in that area too.
Plenty of medieval villages had fishponds, watering ponds for livestock and duckponds, which were a source of fowl for food, as were pigeon cotes.
Its entirely possible that this was originally part of the village, and given the investment in labour to construct and maintain it, this little pond could be the key to the history of the village.
Villages around this time consisted mostly of, well for want of a better term, mud huts, if you look up Wharram Percy village in Yorkshire you will get an idea of what I mean.
These villages were not really permanent affairs, the houses would be built, they would last a few generations, and often the whole thing would be replaced by another new village built close by.
The result was that in many cases, villages would move around a central area.
Villages that had specific reasons for their location would generally end up being made of more durable material, but for plain old agricultural habitations this was not the case.
Having this village pond survive for so long could well mean that over the thousand years, the village itself did not follow the norms of other agri-villages, and that whole site could be very old.
If this pond is fed from a spring - which is quite common in this area at the lower reaches of the chalk hills which stretch right along the ridgeway, then this pond and the settlement could be significantly older than you think, as settlements tend to be gathered around sources of clean water - such a site would have been at a premium and in continuous usage from, well who knows, certainly worth investigating.
The suggestion of getting Time Team involved isn’t a bad one at all. If you want to know more though, you might try Southampton University they do have a reasonably well known archaeology faculty, I would expect they have done some sort of work, even if its just evaluations and not full investigation.
So, do you refer to it now as “Ye Olde Duckke Pondde”?
Hope it’s OK to resurrect this thread… I have a couple of new bits for it…
I finally got around to putting an extract of The Domesday Book on my site, so you can all take a look…
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/st/content/botley_domesday
Also, I received a lovely email from ‘Mrs Earwicker’ at the farm (I think this is the name of a period character who greets and guides visitors to the historic attractions) - my web page had come to her attention - most of what she said was reiteration of the potted history on their site, but she did confirm that the wild birds are fed several times daily, which explains my odd animal experience when I visited early in the morning to take photos.
Apparently, some of the birds will eat from your hand.