Our Parish

The Parish of Olveston forms part of the ‘Severnside’ electoral ward, South Gloucestershire District Council.

The Parish lies within South Gloucestershire, just north of Bristol and is part of either the BS32 or BS35 postcode areas.

Predominantly rural, the Parish includes the villages of Olveston and Tockington, and the hamlets of Old Down, Awkly, Ingst, and Lower Hazel, plus land adjacent to Woodhouse Down.

The district has been inhabited since the Stone Age, and the salt marshes that made up almost half of the parish were progressively drained in Roman and Saxon times. A sea wall was constructed at the same time to prevent flooding from the nearby estuary of the River Severn. Given its rural setting and the fertile land of the Severn flood plain, many years of agriculture and its allied trades were the primary occupations.

The Parish has a number of historic sites and buildings, many of which are of special architectural or historic interest. Probably the most notable of which is Olveston Court, a 15th-century fortified manor house which is a Grade II ‘listed’ building.  

The boundaries of the parish have contracted over time, but the population has risen from 230 in the 18^th Century to a civil parish population at the 2011 census of 2,033.