The earliest record of the parish of Diptford does not mention the village by name: instead it is Bickham which appears in a Charter prepared by Aethelwulf, King of the West Saxons. The charter of AD 847 sets out an area of land on whose boundary lies the river crossing of "Beocca's cumb": by 962 AD it was known as "Beoccan bricge" in a charter of King Edgar.
Whilst Diptford today is just one of hundreds of small villages in the South Hams, it appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 in its own Hundred. The Domesday Book records Diptford village as a small settlement of about 13 households, but it gave its name to the much larger "Hundred of Diptford" which was an administrative area within the county of Devon that stretched from Stoke on Dartmoor to Soar on the south coast.
Diptford takes its name not from the Dipper bird that nests on the river and is often associated with the village, but from the 'deep ford' on the River Avon below the village at Diptford Manor (formerly Diptford Mill). This ancient crossing point, which also had a wooden 'clam' footbridge, was the subject of much disagreement with North Huish over who should pay for a proper bridge, but one was eventually built in the 20th Century.
A church was built in 1226, including main body of the present building and the window on the south side of the chancel. As the village grew, the church was expanded with side aisles in the 15th century.
As a farming community, Diptford grew slowly. The arrival of slate quarrying and limestone production in the 18th and 19th centuries brought many more people (and several pubs!) to the village. However, once the quarries were worked out, the quarrymen left for Delabole or the colonies, the pubs closed and Diptford shrank again.
Diptford’s first school was opened in the ‘Poor House’ in 1845 by the Rev. William Cooper-Johnson, who then commissioned a purpose-built school, complete with Headmaster’s house, in 1865. It was enlarged just 11 years later, and has continued to expand and improve over the last 157 years, as it has grown to teach 70 or so pupils aged 3 to 11. The school has seen a great deal of change over the years - modern lavatories in 1948, electricity in 1956, a telephone in 1967, a television in 1975 and computers in every classroom by 1990. The school became an academy in 2016.
The railway never quite arrived in Diptford, merely dipping into the south-western corner of the parish. When the Kingsbridge branch of the Great Western was built in the 1890s, Diptford and Avonwick were mostly owned by the estate based at Black Hall in the latter village: a station was sited between the two villages (complete with a footbridge across the river to a private carriage drive for the estate's owner), and named after the smaller village. The line closed in 1963.
By the 20th century, Diptford was still a small village of less than 50 houses within a parish of scattered hamlets. The village did have a full-time post office and its longest-lasting pub - the (Rising) Sun - as well as three shops and three dairy farms supplying the villagers. Significant expansion only happened again after the Second World War, beginning with eight council houses in the 1950s and then the building of Church Park Close.
Since the designation of the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (now the South Devon National Landscape) in 1960, opportunities for expansion have become more limited, but Diptford remains a busy and popular village.