I REPLY to your reporter Tom Jennings’s article (Oxford Mail, August 10), headed ‘Parish fighting to preserve identity’ which related to Kidlington Parish Council’s junior neighbouring parish of Gosford and Water Eaton trying to stave off a merger with Kidlington.

In 1870-72 John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Gosford as a hamlet in Kidlington parish adjacent to the River Cherwell and Oxford Canal.

In an up-to-date context, Gosford consists of approximately nine roads – only the east side of Oxford Road, and only the south side of the Bicester Road with less than 1/10th of the population of the remainder of Kidlington village.

This small enclave of Gosford, where a road’s width separates the boundaries between them and the village of Kidlington is long overdue an overhaul.

It is ironic that both the chairman and council member pictured within the article don’t even live in the parish of Gosford, but in Kidlington.

Regardless of their dated, historical argument regarding what happened in the English Civil War in 1644, at Gosford Bridge, this doesn’t wash in our modern society when there is a need to streamline councils, do away with having extra councillors and another parish clerk for such a small amount of residents in Gosford.

Maybe it’s also time for Gosford Hill School to be also thinking of becoming the Kidlington Academy, as even they supply education to a heavy majority of pupils who are resident in Kidlington.

The time for a merger is now.

MICHAEL RHYMES Warborough Court Mill End Kidlington