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General
Northill has all the traditional village ingredients of a pond, public house and parish church. Nearby stands The Grange and the former Rectory. In the 2001 Census the parish population was 2,288. The derivation of the name is not quite what you would expect as it is thought to derive from the Old English north plus a tribal name to give 'the north Gifla's'. The name appears as Nortigble, Nortgiuele and Nortgiue in the Domesday Book.
The church, dedicated to St Mary, was built in the fourteenth century and contains some fine mediæval stalls and exceptional seventeenth century stained glass windows. The church also contains a one-handed clock built by Thomas Tompion, the father of English clock makers who was born in nearby Ickwell.
Northill
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The Crown
Several customers in the pub have seen the figure of a monk appear on the Green beside the pond. The spectral figure has then drifted across the pub car park before disappearing into the woods. When Tony Dawson was the landlord at the Crown one of his sons had a ghostly visitor. “Some years ago (around 1994) my sons encountered a figure in black coming towards them in the upstairs corridor one night. They both rushed back to their bedrooms to arms themselves with snooker cues but when they came out the figure had gone.” The successor to Tony Dawson, Ian Taylor, says that certain areas of the pub have ‘a presence' about them. “There is an area behind the bar that if you stand on it with bare feet, is always warm as though someone else had just been standing there when there has been no one else about. The strange thing is there is absolutely no reason for that spot to be hot because it is not near any pipes, boilers or central heating.”
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Northill, The Crown
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