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Nuneham Courtenay is a village and civil parish about 5 mile (8 km) SSE of Oxford. It occupies several miles close to the east bank of the River Thames.

The parish is bounded to the west by the River Thames and on other sides by field boundaries. The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 200. The parish is on a light escarpment running north east to south west. Its highest point is a small knoll 100 metres above sea level, about 500 metres from the village (in Harcourt Arboretum, part of a larger woodland). Between these points is Windmill Hill where no evidence of a windmill survives. The minimum elevation is 52m to 53m along the Thames which follows the line of the central eminent land. Most of the Bluebell Wood nature reserve is on the eastern slopes, across Marsh Baldon's straight and touching boundary. The parish covers about 2 km north to the same south west of the point shown and just over 1% of South Oxfordshire's 67.85 km2. Its population was 0.15% of the district's total of 134,257. The privately owned, two storey Old Rectory was built in 1759 on the northern boundary, by the first Earl. It was a Grade II listed building in 1963 as part of the "Nuneham Courtney Park and Garden".

The new village comprised two identical rows of brick built semi detached cottages, each of a single main storey plus an attic floor with dormer windows. The two identical rows face each other across the main road from Oxford to Reading and Henley on Thames, which had been made a turnpike in 1736. (It has been classified the A4074 since the 20th century.) As the village population grew, additional cottages were added in similar styles early in the 19th century and again early in the 20th century. The old village had a village green. The new village has none, but was built to a spacious plan with gardens for every cottage and verges between them and the main road. In the 1760s the Irish writer, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of a medieval village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry. The Deserted Village gave the demolished medieval village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn" and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village on which he based it. He did, however, indicate it was about 50 mile (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay.

The 'new' Nuneham House was designed by the architect Stiff Leadbetter in 1756. The design was changed and enlarged twice during construction, so that the house when completed in 1764 was far from the compact Palladian villa designed eight years earlier. The Poet Laureate William Whitehead was a visitor, and it was he who coined the change of spelling from "Newenham" to "Nuneham" in 1764. The Archbishop of York commissioned the architect Robert Smirke to make unaesthetic but functional extensions to the house in the 1830s. Further alterations to the house were made in 1904.

The design of the original landscape garden park owed much to the poet and gardener the Rev. William Mason, who designed its formal flower garden in 1771. George Simon Harcourt, 2nd Earl Harcourt commissioned the renowned Lancelot "Capability" Brown to make alterations to the landscape garden park in 1779, and the house in 1781. The works were completed in the autumn of 1782, shortly before Brown's death. William Whitehead's poem The Late Improvements at Nuneham celebrated Brown's work. Brown had planned a Gothic Revival tower folly for a prominent site overlooking the Thames. In 1787, however, the University of Oxford dismantled Carfax Conduit, which had been built in 1617 in the centre of Oxford. The 2nd Earl re erected the Conduit building in his park instead of the proposed tower. In the 1830s Edward Venables Vernon Harcourt, Archbishop of York, destroyed William Mason's formal flower garden and most of the landscape park's sculptures. He bought and added adjacent land in Marsh Baldon parish to extend the park eastwards as far as the Oxford–Dorchester main road. On this new land he had the artist W. S. Gilpin design a Doric entrance lodge in the 1830s. The Archbishop had a pinetum botanical garden planted in 1835. In 1963 the arboretum became Harcourt Arboretum, part of the tree and plant collection of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. It includes of woodland and a wildflower meadow.

Abingdon Abbey may have had a Saxon parish church in Newenham. If so, it was destroyed in the Danish invasions of the 10th century. There was then a parish church of All Saints that served the village from the Middle Ages until the 1760s, but little information about it survives. It was demolished in 1764 to make way for Earl Harcourt's landscaping plan (see above). Remains of two windows of the old church and one of the tombs were moved to Baldon House at nearby Marsh Baldon, where the windows were used to create a folly. The Earl removed monuments from both the churchyard and the church, demolished the church building and sold its ring of five bells. The English Baroque style monument to Anthony Pollard (died 1577) and Philippa Pollard (died 1606) was salvaged from the medieval church, and is now displayed in an open fronted shelter outside the 'new' 1764 church, which is now a redundant church.

Earl Harcourt had the next All Saints parish church, the Old All Saints Church, built in 1764 about 20 feet (6 m) away from the medieval one's site. The Earl was an amateur architect and designed the church himself in the Neoclassical Greek Revival style, aided by the Neoclassicist James "Athenian" Stuart. It is a domed Palladian style temple. It is conventionally oriented, with its entrance on the west facade and altar in the east end, but also has a doorless Ionic portico on its north side overlooking the River Thames. The church is positioned on a slight rise on the river bluff to maximise its effect in the landscape park design. The removal of the village to a new site put the 1764 church almost 1 mile (2 km) away by winding, partly wooded footpaths. Its austere Neoclassical Palladian design also became unpopular during the 19th century Gothic Revival. A new church was completed in 1874, which left the 1764 church to become the Harcourt family chapel. In 1880 ornately carved Italian fittings were added to its austere interior. The Churches Conservation Trust now cares for the building.

In 1871 Edward Vernon Harcourt MP inherited Nuneham Courtenay. He had a new All Saints' Church built for the parish during 1872–74 that was closer to the relocated village. It was designed in the Early English Gothic Revival style by the architect C. C. Rolfe. All Saints' parish is now part of the Benefice of "Marsh Baldon St Peter and Toot Baldon St Lawrence with Nuneham Courtenay, The Baldons". In the 1970s the Old All Saints Church, Nuneham Courtenay, of classical design, was declared redundant.

There are sporadic records of one or more locks on the River Thames at Nuneham. One called "Bunselock" was referred to in 1279. In the 16th century the river seems to have had three locks at Nuneham. A map of 1707 shows a flash lock on the channel past a small island opposite the appropriately named Lock Wood. In 1716 it was repaired at the expense of the first Viscount. By 1707 Nuneham Courtenay had a ferry linking it with Lower Radley across the river. This continued to operate after the 1st Viscount removed Nuneham Courtenay village (see above).

In 1809 the Countess Harcourt opened a school for the village, run by a schoolmistress and supervised by the vicar. In 1835 a new school building was completed and in 1849 the National Society for Promoting Religious Education gave a grant to develop the building. At the end of the 19th century it was noted amongst village schools for the high quality of its education. In 1925 it was reorganised as a junior school; known to be open in 1957 it closed later that century. It fed into Dorchester's school.