Marshwood Vale
| Marshwood Vale | |
| Dorset | |
|---|---|
 Marshwood Vale viewed from Coney's Castle | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SY410980 |
| Location: | 50°46’44"N, 2°49’50"W |
| Data | |
| Post town: | Bridport |
| Postcode: | DT6 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Dorset |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
West Dorset |
The Marshwood Vale, or the Vale of Marshwood is a low-lying, bowl-shaped valley of lower lias clay, in the western tip of Dorset. It extends between the towns of Bridport and Lyme Regis (with the A35 trunk road along its southern bounds), and to the south of the two highest hills in Dorset, Lewesdon Hill (915 feet) and Pilsdon Pen (909 feet). The vale is drained by the River Char, which flows south-west to its mouth on the English Channel coast at Charmouth. All of the vale lies within the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Landscape
The landscape of the vale is agricultural and consists of narrow lanes winding between farms that lie amongst small fields, old hedgerows, copses and ancient semi-natural woods.[1] The vale is almost wholly surrounded by hills, including Lewesdon Hill (915 feet), Dorset's county top, Pilsdon Pen (909 feet), Dorset's second highest point and site of an Iron Age hill fort, Lambert's Castle Hill (846 feet) giving fine views across the vale,[2] and Hardown Hill (679 feet). The vale has escaped wholesale ploughing and large-scale agricultural intensification, leading to a landscape that still contains a wealth of wildlife.[1]
History
Farming existed in the vale at least as early as the Iron Age, with early farmers keeping livestock such as sheep and cattle and also cultivating crops such as barley and peas.[3] Later in the Middle Ages these agricultural activities expanded and forest clearance increased; several of the farms in the vale have names ending in '-hay', which means 'enclosure', and these have their origins in the forest clearances from this time, as does the vale's irregular pattern of many small fields.[4]
In the 13th century, Marshwood Castle was built on a site now occupied by Lodgehouse Farm. It was a motte and bailey construction, of which only earthworks remain today.[5]
Due to the poorly-draining nature of its clay soil, until modern times the vale maintained a reputation for being difficult to traverse in wet weather. In 1906 Sir Frederick Treves called it "marshy and full of trees" and quoted the Dorset historian John Hutchins (1698 - 1773) who said it "was hardly passable by travellers but in dry summers",[6] whilst in 1965 the Dorset-born agriculturalist and broadcaster Ralph Wightman remembered that in his boyhood in the early twentieth century "after months of hopeless winter rain .... little farms across the fields were cut off in desperate poverty and loneliness".[7] Mains water and electricity did not reach the vale until the second half of the 20th century, and ploughing with horses was still common in the 1960s.[5]
Villages
Today a number of small villages and hamlets (Fishpond Bottom, Marshwood, Birdsmoorgate, Bettiscombe, Pilsdon, Bowood, Broadoak, Ryall and Whitchurch Canonicorum) surround the vale, sited mostly on the hills and higher ground which virtually encircle it. The impervious clay soil of the floor of the vale has historically provided less amenable sites for building, and only supports a few scattered farms.
The village of Whitchurch Canonicorum is the largest settlement connected to the vale, and is notable for its church, St Candida and Holy Cross, which has the rare distinction (shared with few other churches) of possessing the bodily remains of the saint to which it is dedicated (St Wite or St Wita, in this case).[8] In the days before the Reformation, pilgrims to this shrine stopped to refresh themselves at the thirteenth-century inn which still stands a couple of miles to the north in the centre of the vale, and folklore recounts that this is why thereafter the inn became known as the "Shave Cross Inn", after the shaved heads of its pious guests.[9]
The village which shares its name with the vale, Marshwood, stands on the line of hills to the north, and from the churchyard the whole vale can be viewed to the south, with the coastal hills and the English Channel beyond.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Wildlife leaflet, Wessex Ridgeway". Dorset County Council. http://www.dorsetforyou.com/media.jsp?mediaid=137244&filetype=pdf. Retrieved 10 July 2012.
- ↑ Lamberts Castle, Dorset: Walk of the week at www.telegraph.co.uk. Accessed on 22 March 2013.
- ↑ "Marshwood Vale". Dorset County Council. http://www.dorsetforyou.com/392432. Retrieved July 10, 2012.
- ↑ J. H. Bettey (1974). Dorset. City and County Histories. David & Charles. p. 42. ISBN 0 7153 6371 9.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Marshwood". Dorset Life Magazine. September 2010. http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2010/09/marshwood/. Retrieved 8 February 2014.
- ↑ Sir Frederick Treves (1906). Highways and Byways in Dorset. Macmillan and Co. Ltd. p. 278. https://archive.org/details/cu31924028032351.
- ↑ Ralph Wightman (1983). Portrait of Dorset (4 ed.). Robert Hale Ltd. p. 159. ISBN 0 7090 0844 9.
- ↑ Roland Gant (1980). Dorset Villages. Robert Hale Ltd. p. 119. ISBN 0 7091 8135 3.
- ↑ Maureen Hymas (1981). Dorset Folklore. Books Of Wessex Ltd. pp. 15–16. ISBN 0 90157550 X.