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Long Wittenham is a village and small civil parish about north of Didcot, and southeast of Abingdon. It was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it from Berkshire to Oxfordshire, and from the former Wallingford Rural District to the new district of South Oxfordshire.
The core of the village emerges from the Saxon era. 6th century cropmarks outline a large group of buildings, which indicate, if not a royal palace, then certainly a high status Saxon enclosure, and the variety and number of objects found in Saxon burial sites around the village would appear to support this. These large, Saxon burial sites also indicate a sizeable population that lasted for many years. Historians now recognise that the general area of southern Oxfordshire was the heartland of the Gewisse. The nearness to the Iron Age hillfort of Wittenham Clumps and the Roman (and post-Roman) town of Dorchester show that the localised area was of great importance for many centuries, although the notion that Witta (and/or his family) were related to the later Royal House of Wessex, is unproven.
The Domesday Book of 1086 records the village in one of two entries for Wittenham identifiable as this part of the modern village by government-registered manorial descent (such as the Feet of fines for example). Entries for Wittenham in the Domesday Book opendomesday.org Retrieved 2016-04-27 By the Tudor period, parish records show it had a population of around 200, with arable crops: wheat, oats, barley and rye being farmed. For a time the village was called Earl's Wittenham, after its feudal overlord Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Gloucester.
In 1534 Sir Thomas White bought the manor and gave it to his foundation, St John's College, Oxford. Until recently, the President and scholars of St. John's owned most of the houses in the village and much of the land. Until the there were just two large, open fields, which the college leased in strips to the various villagers. In 1857, using a special government grant for agricultural communities, the village school was built. Local legend claims that Oliver Cromwell addressed the villagers on his way to his niece's wedding, in neighbouring Little Wittenham. The author and wood engraver Robert Gibbings lived at Footbridge Cottage at the end of his life (1955-8), and is buried in the churchyard. His last book, Till I end my Song (1957), is based on his life in the village.
In the late 1930s (exact date unknown) the University of Oxford based its Institute for Research in Agricultural Engineering at College Farm (owned by St John's College, Oxford), which moved to York in 1942. The property was subsequently managed as a commercial farm although some buildings gradually fell into dereliction. In 1992 a large proportion of the farmland, which had been sold the year before, was donated to the Northmoor Trust (now Earth Trust) to establish a new research woodland called Paradise Wood, created and managed by Gabriel Hemery. In 2013, 20 hectares (12 acres) of the remainder of the farmland, including the redundant buildings, was gifted to another charity the Sylva Foundation. In 2016 the charity moved its main office to the site and established the Sylva Wood Centre, which provides a hub for small businesses and craftspeople who design, innovate or make in wood. In 2017 the Sylva Foundation created the Wittenhams Community Orchard and Future Forest on surrounding land.
Cruck Cottage can be architecturally dated to being around 800 years old. The building housing Pendon Museum is a model railway interactive museum set up by Roye England. Its site was The Three Poplars public house.
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