Stanton Harcourt
Stanton Harcourt is a village and civil parish in Oxfordshire about southeast of Witney and about west of Oxford. The parish includes the hamlet of Sutton, north of the village. The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 960. Archaeology Within the parish of Stanton Harcourt is a series of palaeochannel deposits buried beneath the second (Summertown-Radley) gravel terrace of the River Thames. The deposits have been attributed to Marine isotope stages and have been the subject of archaeological and palaeontological research. Evidence was found for the co-existence of species of elephant and mammoth during interglacial conditions, disproving the widely held view that mammoths were an exclusively cold-adapted species. Manor Stanton is derived from the Old English for "farmstead by the stones", probably after the prehistoric stone circle known as the Devil's Quoits, southwest of the village. The site is a scheduled monument. The Domesday Book of 1086 records that the manor was held by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. It became Stanton Harcourt after Robert de Harcourt of Bosworth, Leicestershire inherited lands of his father-in-law at Stanton in 1191. Harcourt House was built for the Harcourt family in the 15th and mid-16th centuries, and its gatehouse was added about 1540.