Old photographs of the parish are on the Thorpe Mandeville Yesterday website

Images:  All images are subject to copyright Thorpe Mandeville Today 2012

Home Page Picture Puzzle answer:  Field gate at the foot of Bulls Lane.

Congratulations go to Amy Sadler for winning one of the Young Kennel Club classes at Crufts - for the third time in succession!  This year she won with a new dog; she showed her mother Emma’s young dog Rupert (pictured left) in the Dogstable class - combining agility and obedience.

A likely Bronze Age scraper has been found in Thorpe Mandeville. The scraper was found by Janet Clouston in her garden. The Portable Antiquities Scheme has identified it as a flint scraper from circa 2100BC to 800BC with minimal retouching around one edge. The Scheme also noted the remains of a fossilised creature imbedded on the dorsal surface (see photograph opposite) . This is probably a sea creature and is likely to be a sponge.

The indentation on the dorsal side (right) is a natural flaking of the flint - not a recession for a thumb.

Mag Durham has taken this splendid photograph of a sparrow hawk visiting her garden.

The sparrow hawk is a daily visitor, seeing if a meal awaits on the bird feeders...

The recently fallen beech tree on Thorpe’s northern boundary with Culworth. (Thorpe village can be seen in the top right.)

In 1943 a Wellington bomber from the RAF’s wartime Operational Training Unit at Chipping Warden clipped this tree on a night-time training flight.  It crashed into a field in Culworth parish with the loss of five lives.

Commemorative poppies have been placed on the tree in November for many years.

Click here for details of Chipping Warden and other local WW2 aerodromes.

Left: The tree in 2008.

Below: Poppy wreath on the tree in 2011.