Barkham is a village and civil parish in the borough of Wokingham in Berkshire, England, located around southwest of the town of Wokingham. Geography The old part of Barkham is the small settlement by the parish church and is close to Barkham Street. However most of the population lives in the north-east of the parish, around the post office, or in the Arborfield Garrison, which is largely in Barkham. It is a rural parish, mostly consisting of dairy farmland and woods, despite being surrounded by the town of Wokingham and the large villages of Winnersh, Arborfield Cross and Finchampstead. Manor The toponym "Barkham" is derived from the Old English bercheham meaning "birch home" referring to the birch trees on the edge of Windsor Great Park. The name evolved via forms including Berkham''' in the 14th century and Barcombe in the 18th century. In King Edward III's reign the income from Barkham Manor helped to pay for the rebuilding of Windsor Castle and, not long afterwards, timber from Barkham was sent to make the roof of Westminster Abbey. For many centuries the manor house was a secondary home of the Bullock family. The Bull Inn public house in Barkham is named in reference to their surname. The Bullocks had inherited the manor from the family of William Neville, a 13th-century valet to Saint Thomas Cantilupe, the Bishop of Hereford and Chancellor of England, from whom the manor was originally bought. The manor passed by marriage and inheritance through the Standen, Waterman, Kingsmill and Pitt families. In about 1783, the manor was purchased by the Dowager Countess Gower, the third wife of John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower, and became the property of the Leveson-Gower family. The present manor house is a late 18th-century Georgian building of two wings of differing dates. Barkham had two moated farm-houses. One of these survives, having been divided into two cottages. Parish church The earliest known record of the Church of England parish church of Saint James dates from 1220. However, the present church building was built in 1860–61 or 1862. It was designed in a 13th-century Gothic Revival style by the architects J.B. Clacy and Son of Reading. The chancel and transepts were added or rebuilt in 1887. The building retains two features from the earlier church: a late 13th-century wooden memorial effigy of a woman, and the late 18th-century baptismal font. The bell-tower has a