Edge Hill, Warwickshire
village in Warwickshire, United Kingdom

Edge Hill is an escarpment and Edgehill is a hamlet in the civil parish of Ratley and Upton, Stratford-on-Avon District, southern Warwickshire, England. At Ratley, the escarpment rises to 219 m (719 ft) above sea level and 112 m (367 ft) above nearby Radway, within 300 metres of the Warwickshire border with Oxfordshire.
Edge Hill gave its name to the first battle of the English Civil War, in which it was a prominent feature.
The hamlet has a public house, an eccentric building of local Hornton Stone called the Castle Inn that was built in the 1740s to the designs of Sanderson Miller (1716–80). It is controlled by the Hook Norton Brewery.
Battle
The narrow wood on the scarp of Edge Hill, in the south-east overlooks the lower slope and the plain on which the battle was fought.
The battle of Edge Hill was fought on Sunday 23 October 1642 and was the first major battle in the English Civil War between the Royalist forces of King Charles I and the Parliamentarian army commanded by the Earl of Essex.
The King's army started the day on the plateau above the scarp and Parliament's front line was about 2,200 yards (2,000 m) away. From Edge Hill, the ground drops steeply, levels out, then rises to Battleton Holt and a little beyond it are the Oaks and Graveground Copice. It was across the latter two that Parliament's army was drawn up (grid reference SP346485 to SP367498).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Edge Hill, Warwickshire” is village in Warwickshire, United Kingdom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Edge, Hill and Warwickshire, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “village in Warwickshire, United Kingdom” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5337661. VIAF identifies the subject as 315147349. The Library of Congress control number is sh95009902. Authority coordinates are 52.123, -1.456. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1716 and 1642.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edge Hill, Warwickshire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.