Daresbury is a village, civil parish and ward in the unitary authority of Halton and part of the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England. It is covered by the Weaver Vale constituency. At the 2001 Census, the population of the parish was 216,with a total ward population of 3,906. Controversy arose in the late 1990s when Diamond, a new synchrotron light source planned to be built at the Laboratory, went instead to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot in Oxfordshire.