The Community of Ion in General

Little Ion Farm February 2016

Landscape

Ion stands on a soil known as head - a mixture of sand, gravel, silt and clay laid down on glacial slopes during the last two million years. Beneath this is a solid geology of Gault Formation - a mudstone deposited in the warm, shallow seas of the Cretaceous Period between 99 and 112 million years ago. The hamlet stands around 165 feet above sea-level.

Name

The Place Names of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire by A Mawer and Frank M Stenton was published in 1926 but is still the most scholarly study of the county’s place names and their origins. Ion means “at the island or islands”. The name has had a number of different forms over the years:

• Eie: 1202-1413;
• Eye: 1202-1413;
• Eyeyn: 1260;
• Eyen: 1270-1428;
• Eyon: 1492-1637;
• Yon: 1504;
• Yen: 1549.
• Yne: 1704

Administrative History

Ion was a hamlet, divided between the ancient parish of Lower Gravenhurst and a detached part of Upper Gravenhurst which included Ion Farm. In 1888 the civil parishes of Lower Gravenhurst and Upper Gravenhurst were combined to create Gravenhurst. The ecclesiastical parish of Lower Gravenhurst was abolished in 1972 to create the new ecclesiastical parish of Upper with Lower Gravenhurst.