The Villages of Great and Little Ouseburn take their name from the river Ouse which starts as ouse Gill Beck in the garden of the old Great Ouseburn Workhouse.
The Workhouse stands on the old Roman Road of Deere Street and was built around 1830, it had jurisdiction over42 Townships under the Great Ouseburn Poor Law union Board of Guardians. It also served as meeting place for the Great Ouseburn Rural District Council and during the World War 2 was a prisoner of war camp for Italian & German POWs. The site is now used as a Seed Warehouse and house..

At the original source of the Ouse (the spring now emerges aprox 35metres away) stands a stone column bearing the inscription 'OUSE RIVER HEAD' 'OUSEGILL SPRING Ft. YORK 13miles BOROUGHBRIDGE 4miles' Ouse Gill Beck flows for 4 miles before joining the river Ure, a broad river of 60 miles length. Here the river Ouse usurps the power of the Ure and gives its name to the river which flows through York to the Humber estuary and into the North sea. Camden wrote "the little pretty rivulet which runs into the river at Ouseburn, giving the name to the Ouse and robbing the Eure of it" Here stands a neat little pillar, which marks the head of the River Ouse. This celebrated head, whose waters would scarcely wet your shoe-soles, is a burlesque upon two noble rivers, the Ure and the Swale, by depriving them of their names, and usurping a dignity in favour of a dirty puddle. --Hutton.

William de Stuteville, in about 1190, had a ditch dug to contain OuseGill beck, the marshy meadows at its side are now a Site of Interest to Nature Conservation (SINC) being too wet to have fallen under the plough.
Below Great Ouseburn the stream is fed by a perenial spring known as the Stock Well, this spring varies in neither temperature or volume throughout the year, and in severe frost steam rises from the spring.
The ditch was widened and banked to form a lake either side of where Little Ouseburn Bridge stands (the lake as now unfortunately silted up through neglect). Where the beck entered the lake is an island were in the late 1800's the writer Edmund Bogg saw a spreading Ash cut down containing 432 Rooks nests, he also states that the waters swarmed with pike and trout, the butter bump or bittern frequented the area and will-o-the wisps were seen almost nightly in the marsh meadows.