Maids Moreton

Maids Moreton is a village and civil parish in north-west Buckinghamshire, England, around 1 mi north of Buckingham. The village sits on top of a plateau overlooking Buckingham and is less than 1km away from the Foxcote Reservoir SSSI.

Description and history
The parish of Maids Moreton covers about 1365 acre of which 376 acre are arable, 786 acre permanent grass and 26 acre woods and plantations. The soil is mostly clay and gravel and the subsoil gravel.

The village lies along the Buckingham to Towcester road (A413). It contains many 17th-century houses and cottages with timber frames with brick or plaster filling and thatched roofs.

The 15th-century parish church of Saint Edmund is said to have been built by two maiden ladies of the Pever family hence the name "Maids' Moreton". The Maids' memorials are a wall painting over the north door and brasses on a slab just within the doorway.

The old post office, situated at the junction of Main Street with the A413, closed in the mid-1990s and is now a private house. The chapel (on the A413) was demolished in the early 1980s and the allotments next to the chapel were all used for new housing.

The village of Maids Moreton is currently fighting two greenfield planning applications to build 163 and 15 houses increasing the village size by 50%. David Wilson Homes a subsidiary of Barrett Developments are looking to build 163 houses in planning application 16/00151/AOP which was challenged at Judicial Review in 2022. Buckinghamshire Council successfully defended that legal challenge. The planning application is notable for having seven different sets of Biodiversity Net Gain figures. The village produced two documentary films covering the history of the fight which are viewable at maidsmoretonmatters.org

In October 2019, Ben Field was jailed for the murder of Maids Moreton resident Peter Farquhar in 2015. Field was also accused of attempted murder of another Maids Moreton resident, Ann Moore-Martin, but was found not guilty. The case was the centre of the 2023 BBC drama The Sixth Commandment.

School
Maids Moreton Church of England School is a mixed Church of England voluntary controlled primary school in Maids Moreton. The school takes children between the ages of four and seven and has about 50 pupils.