The village

Tasburgh is referred to in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Taseburc or Tasburch, and there have been a number of suggestions as to the origin of the name. Clearly "burgh", being the Anglo Saxon word for a fortified settlement, refers to the hill fort enclosure in the centre of the village but the origin or meaning of Tas is not so certain. The obvious link is to the name of the river which forms the north western boundary of the parish, but some have put forward a theory that there was a local leader by the name of Taese whose fortified settlement it was. Current thinking however seems to favour a derivation from the Old English word "tease" meaning convenient, advantageous or pleasant, but we shall never know for sure.
For centuries the village was a largely self-supporting rural community, and a comparison with the Tithe Apportionment Map of 1840 would show that a hundred and twenty years later little had changed in terms of its buildings, apart from some pre and post WW2 council houses, but by 1960 much had in fact changed. Over the previous century the population had declined by a quarter to just 343 people including children, most of the shops, pubs and trades had closed and there were so few children that the village school was facing closure; in a word the village was dying. 

However, after several attempts, planning permission was finally granted in 1961 for 56 new houses to be built to the south of Church Road, and further building, almost all in the upper part of the village, continued for the next fifty years. As a result the population has tripled and the village is again a thriving, though very different, community with a new school and numerous activities 

However, if you were to take away all the buildings in the village, the three remaining key physical features on the parish boundary map would be the river Tas and its valley, the Hill Fort enclosure and the roads.  Each of these has had an influence on the development of the village and will now be examined in more detail.