Recusants, the Old Manor, and the seventeenth century

Through the Reformation and after, several Farnham families held to the old Catholic faith — quietly, at considerable risk, in a county where recusancy ran deeper than most. The most prominent surviving building of this period is the Old Manor House, raised in 1667 with its dated lintel still legible. With Farnham Hall, Branton Court, and Heron Court, it forms the core of a small but distinguished group of seventeenth-century houses.

Limestone, copper, and the gravel pits

For two centuries the village's quiet economy was supplemented by extractive industry. Limestone was quarried from the ridge for building stone and lime-burning. A short-lived copper mine opened on Folly Hill — its name now the only easily-read trace on the landscape. From 1941 to 1985, the Farnham Gravel Pits worked the floodplain south-west of the village; the exhausted workings filled with water and became, in time, the 200-acre lakes that now lie along the village's south-western edge.

Conservation, the Millennium, and today

In 1993 Farnham was formally designated a Conservation Area, in recognition of the near-intact historic core; the boundary was refined in 2011 following a detailed character appraisal. To mark the Millennium, in 2000–01, the community undertook a major restoration of St Oswald's, securing its future for another generation. The village today is just over two hundred souls, governed by a Parish Meeting — direct democracy, where every elector has a voice in the room.