Pitstone Area Guide
Just a few minutes’ drive from Tring station and with beautiful countryside on the doorstep, Pitstone offers a rural life with great connections to the surrounding towns and villages. Adjacent to historic Ivinghoe, with which it shares a school and football club, Pitstone has increased in size over the past 20 years with the Castlemead development bringing lots of new housing.
About Pitstone
As near to Tring station as Tring station is to Tring, this Buckinghamshire village is close to the borders of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and located on the edge of the Chiltern Hills.Pitstone has a general store, village hall, church, recreation ground and well-regarded Indian restaurant.
Delightful Pitstone Green Museum chronicles the local agricultural history and is open to the public just nine or ten days each year.
Walking around Pitstone it is impossible to miss that you are in the middle of the countryside with large fields and paddocks beside the roads and some 5,000 acres of National Trust land close by, where Pitstone Windmill and Ivinghoe Beacon can be found.
Despite this rural setting, road and rail connections are excellent. The A41 at Tring that has a dual carriageway direct to the M25 (J20), while Tring mainline station is only five minutes’ drive from the centre of the village and has regular, direct trains taking around forty minutes to reach London Euston. The train line and roads also make light work of getting around, with the lovely boutiques and coffee shops of Berkhamsted and Tring complemented by the larger towns of Hemel Hempstead and Aylesbury with their shopping centres, department stores, cinemas and leisure facilities.
Excellent schooling includes Brookmead, the local primary school, located on the Pitstone/Ivinghoe border and catering for children aged 4 to 11. The village falls within the Grammar Schools catchment area in Aylesbury.
History
Pitstone's name is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means ‘Picel’s thorn tree’ - so Pit’s Tone, not Pit Stone. In 1290 King Edward I spent a five week long Christmas in the village, during which time he held parliament in nearby Ashridge and caused substantial inconvenience to the local villagers who, back then, had a legal obligation to keep the king and his court.In Victorian times, the civil parish of Pitstone (when the village was basically just the stretch of houses along Marsworth Road), was noted for its elongated nature by John Marius Wilson and described in a gazetteer as "7 miles in length and 1 in breadth".
There were two separate but substantial stages of new housing development that significantly increased the local population: one in the 1960s and another in the early 21st century.
A beautiful and unmissable local landmark is Pitstone Windmill. Dating back at least 1627 - the date is carved in the paintwork and is the oldest date inscribed on any windmill in Britain - the mill ground flour for hundreds of years that was grown in the neighbouring villages. Damaged by a huge gale in 1902, the mill was donated to the National Trust in 1937. Only in 1963 did restoration works begin, by a group of local volunteers and at their own expense. Today the mill is open to the public on Sundays during the summer.
We Recommend
- Capture a photo of the sunset at Pitstone Windmill
- Explore Pitstone Green Museum, and learn how farmers worked the land in days gone by
- Visit Tring Museum and find out how one man built a world-leading private collection
- Take a stroll around College Lake, a thriving nature reserve that boasts more than 1,000 different wildlife species