Welcome to the Great Ouseburn Parish Website

We hope that visitors to this site will find it both useful and enjoyable. The purpose of the site is to provide an insight into the village and the activities which go on in and around the parish. Further links and information will be added as time goes by and all suggestions to improve the site are most welcome.

To access the information you wish to read, click on the relevant link in the left margin, you will then be taken to the page you require.

The Villages of Great and Little Ouseburn take their name from the river Ouse which starts as Ouse Gill Beck in the garden of the old Great Ouseburn Workhouse. At the original source of the Ouse (the spring now emerges aprox 35 metres away) stands a stone column bearing the inscription 'OUSE RIVER HEAD' 'OUSEGILL SPRING Ft. YORK 13miles BOROUGHBRIDGE 4miles'. -Ouse Gill Beck flows for 4 miles before joining the river Ure (a broad river of 60 miles length). Here, the tiny Ouse Gill Beck usurps the power of the Ure and gives its name to the river which flows through York to the Humber estuary and into the North sea.

The marshy meadows along side Ouse Gill Beck are now a Site of Interest to Nature Conservation (SINC)
Below Great Ouseburn the stream is fed by a perenial spring known as the Stock Well, this spring varies in neither temperature or volume throughout the year, and in severe frost steam rises from the spring. The ditch was widened and banked to form a lake either side of where Little Ouseburn Bridge stands (the lake as now unfortunately silted up through neglect). Where the beck entered the lake is an island were in the late 1800's the writer Edmund Bogg saw a spreading Ash cut down containing 432 Rooks nests, he also states that the waters swarmed with pike and trout, the butter bump or bittern frequented the area and Will o' the Wisps were seen almost nightly in the marsh meadows.---------------------------------------------------------------