The Making Of Tysoe project is an ambitious community project of interest to anyone wanting to understand more about the history and evolution of the Parish of Tysoe. The project looks at the people who lived here in prehistoric, Roman, medieval and later times.
Key themes are the early settlement patterns, the evolution of the three hamlets, the role of the church, ownership and patronage throughout the centuries, and the ways in which society integrated with its surrounding landscape and resources.
This is a community project carried out by local volunteers (The Tysoe Heritage Research Group – THRG) who are interested in Tysoe’s past and is open to anyone curious about the area’s history from prehistoric times through to the present day.
The past comes to us in many forms – documents, archaeological remains, fieldwork, photographs and oral history. The aims of the project are to draw together all these different strands so that we can not only understand more about the evolution of Tysoe, but also make sure that all this evidence is secure for the future and can be easily accessed by anyone interested.
This area of the Parish Council website is one of the ways the information is being disseminated.
The topics show just how varied these evidence sources can be. At one extreme is the presence of settlers from prehistoric, Iron Age, Roman and Medieval times evidenced from geophysical surveys, field walking and landscape study, and at the other extreme is life in twentieth century Tysoe recorded through oral histories.
THRG has mapped ridge and furrow earthworks, recorded over 500 field names, catalogued and photographed listed buildings, digitised documents and created YouTube records of earlier interviews.
It has produced guides on the various geologies of the graveyard memorials, on the different lichens to be found there, and on the unique set of carved stones inside the church.
The church itself has featured highly in THRG’s activities. The Group has painstakingly mapped and recorded around 750 memorials, all indexed and described in a way intended to satisfy the needs of genealogists, family historians and future sociologists.
The renovation of the tower allowed the Group the unique opportunity to study the stonework and carvings in detail from the scaffolding.
All their findings are detailed here together with a growing collection of scanned early photographs of the village.
There is, of course, a wider picture to create from drawing all these strands together, namely a study of the evolution of the parish through time, the nature of the communities that made it their home, the relationship between the church and the settlements, land ownership, patronage and the way in which people integrated with their surrounding landscape and resources