Blaxton

Blaxton is a village in the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster (part of South Yorkshire, England), on the border with Lincolnshire. It lies to the north of Finningley, on the A614 road, and is located at approximately 53° 29' 30" North, 0° 59' West, at an elevation of around 5 metres above sea level. It has a population of 1,179, reducing slightly to 1,162 at the 2011 Census.

Blaxton is a civil parish situated, since April 1974, in the county of South Yorkshire and in the Doncaster Metropolitan District. Before that date, it was situated in the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of the three divisions of the county of York. It lay on the southern border of the county and the name of the community derives from the name 'Blackstone'. Blaxton does not appear in the Domesday Book of 1087 and the earliest written reference dates from 1213, when it is named as 'Blacston' in the records of the central government. This spelling, or something similar, was customary for centuries. On the map in Edward Miller's History of Doncaster, published in 1805, it appears as Blakestone. The name is likely to refer to the location of a stone that traditionally marked a boundary. The boundary that it would most recently mark would be the county boundary of Yorkshire. However, the boundary it originally marked may be even more ancient, perhaps that of the southern boundary of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, the kingdom `North of the Humber'. The name of the village probably received its current spelling, as with many other places, from the surveyors of the Ordnance Survey, who first put Blaxton on their first map of Yorkshire, on a scale of one inch to one mile, published on 1 February 1841. This map, incidentally, shows the boundary stone to the south-east of the village cross roads.