Five years ago Oxfordshire celebrated its 1,000th birthday, but I remember thinking at the time —and I hate to carp — that surely counties, like languages, came into existence gradually, rather than with a single event.

The very word county, after all, is derived from the Norman French title of Count, rather than the English equivalent (Earl) — and, of course, the Norman Conquest did not occur until 1066.

The thinking behind the notion that Oxfordshire was born in 1007 was based on research at Oxford University that had unearthed evidence that in that year a place similar to what was to become known as Oxfordshire was divided up into 24 hundreds for administrative purposes — and therefore must have existed as a whole. But who cares? Any excuse for a party. Fun events included one that involved beaming the message ‘Celebrating A Thousand Years of Oxfordshire’ on to one of the mighty cooling towers of Didcot Power Station.

This was in spite of the fact that Didcot had only been a part of Oxfordshire for 33 years, ie since the boundary changes of 1974.

Until then Didcot, together with the whole Vale of White Horse district of Oxfordshire, had been part of poor old Berkshire; which suffered the indignity of losing much of its territory to Oxfordshire, including its former county town of Abingdon.

Since then the Vale has sat rather uneasily within the new Oxfordshire, since it is situated to the south of the River Thames which, for 80 miles and (possibly) 1,000 years, had formed the frontier.

So uneasily, indeed, that many writers and historians, including the producers of the revised Pevsner Guide to Berkshire, in The Buildings of England series (published by Yale in 2010), and An Historical Atlas of Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire Record Society, also 2010), have blithely continued to define their respective counties in the pre-1974 way.

In truth, whatever date you set for its birth, the area that was in due course to become Oxfordshire was already defined as the point at which the territories of three major British tribes converged (the Cantuvellauni; the Dobunni; and the Atrebates), when the Romans arrived in AD43.

The Romans, of course, built roads, notably Akeman Street, and settlements grew up along them; such as Alchester (two miles south of modern-day Bicester), and Dorchester-on-Thames, which in time became one of England’s earliest centres of Christianity under the missionary St Birinus who, in the seventh century became the first Bishop of Dorchester. The bishopric was transferred to Lincoln shortly after the Norman Conquest.

By the 11th century, Oxfordshire began to feature as a resort of kings. Canute, monarch of both Denmark and England, was crowned in Oxford in 1018 together with Queen Emma, the widow of the Saxon King Ethelred.

And in 1109 Henry I decided to build a wall around his hunting lodge at Woodstock — an estate that was to remain in royal possession until given to the Duke of Marlborough after the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.

Some of the first skirmishes of the 17th-century English Civil War took place in Oxfordshire. Banbury became a byword for Puritanism, while Oxford became King Charles’s capital of England. By and large peace and prosperity ruled in the 18th century, sadly giving way to strife and poverty in the 19th. As elsewhere, men returning from the First World War found it hard to regain the jobs on the land they had left. But at least in Oxfordshire many were able to find work at the new Cowley car works of William Morris, later Viscount Nuffield.

I know of one former blacksmith, back from the war, who took to bicycling from Burford in order to work there; the irony was that it took him a decade or more to save up enough money to buy a car for himself.

They say that Oxfordshire was spared bombing in the Second World War because Hitler had in mind making Oxford his capital. Be that as it may, its lovely countryside and hauntingly pretty villages are the result of the vicissitudes of its history — whenever it was officially born.