Ruislip was first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, as “Rislepe”, probably deriving from the Old English for “leaping place (across the River Pinn) where rushes grow”.
The Manor at the northern end of the modern High Street was granted to the Benedictine Abbey of Le Bec Hellouin in the late eleventh century, and to St Nicholas’s College (now King’s College), Cambridge in the fifteenth.
Still to be seen in the grounds are the remains of a Motte and Bailey dating to the late eleventh century, …
… and, on the site of the Benedictine Prior’s House, the handsome timber-framed Manor Farm House, dating in part to the sixteenth.
Also in the grounds is the Great Barn, dating to the late thirteenth century, and the Little Barn, dating to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth, with a magnificent queen-post roof.
Opposite is the church of St Martin, dating for the most part to the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and containing surviving fragments of a Medieval wall painting depicting the “Seven Deadly Sins”; …
… ringing the churchyard, a row of cottages with jettied first floors, and a row of alms-houses, both dating to the sixteenth century