Sydling St Nicholas
| Sydling St Nicholas | |
| Dorset | |
|---|---|
 High Street, Sydling St Nicholas | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | SY632995 |
| Location: | 50°47’35"N, 2°31’26"W |
| Data | |
| Population: | 414 |
| Post town: | Dorchester |
| Postcode: | DT2 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Dorset |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
West Dorset |
| Website: | Sydling St Nicholas Village |
Sydling St Nicholas is a village in Dorset. The parish is five to nine miles north-west of the county town, Dorchester and covers most of the valley of the small Sydling Water in the chalk hills of the Dorset Downs. The parish includes the hamlet of Up Sydling in the north.
Sydling St Nicholas village is recorded in the 11th-century Domesday Book, though evidence of much earlier human occupation has been found in the surrounding area. Over the last thousand years the village has been owned by Milton Abbey, Sir Francis Walsingham and Winchester College.
The whole of Sydling St Nicholas parish lies within the 'Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty'. In addition, parts of the parish lie within the Hog Cliff National Nature Reserve and the Cerne and Sydling Downs Special Area of Conservation.
In the 2011 census the parish had a population of 414.
Contents
Name
'Sydling' derives from the Old English sid and hlinc, which mean 'broad ridge'[1] and refer to the hills around the village.[2] In the 10th century the village was recorded as Sidelyng and in the Domesday Book of 1086 it was Sidelince. The second part of the name comes from the dedication of the parish church.[1]
History
Early artefacts found in the vicinity include Neolithic hand-axes and Bronze and Iron Age pottery. Evidence of an early village settlement exists at Shearplace Hill, about three-quarters of a mile to the south-east of the current village. Remains of Celtic field systems have been found in the north and west of the parish.[3] Evidence of early Saxon settlers is seen in the remains of strip lynchets visible on the surrounding hillsides.[4]
In 933 AD land was given to the monks at Milton Abbey, who provided the village with a priest.[5] The abbey was the lord of the village at the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, which recorded 54 households with a value to the abbey of £25.[6] In subsequent centuries the village has been owned by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth,[7] and by Winchester College.[8]
Sydling St Nicholas once constituted a liberty, containing only the parish itself.
Geography
Sydling St Nicholas is sited in the valley of Sydling Water, a tributary of the River Frome. The valley is one of several roughly parallel valleys which cut into the dip slope of the Dorset Downs, a line of chalk hills that span the centre of the county. The village lies at an altitude of 361 feet and the surrounding chalk hills rise to 869 feet at Gore Hill to the north. The hills and all of the civil parish lie within the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. In the south of the parish and within the Cerne and Sydling Downs Special Area of Conservation are two parts of the three-part Hog Cliff National Nature Reserve (the third part lies within the neighbouring parish of Maiden Newton).[9]
Measured directly, Sydling St Nicholas village is six and half miles north-west of Dorchester, eleven miles east of Bridport and eleven miles south of Yeovil. The A37 Dorchester-Yeovil main road runs along the top of the hills about a mile to the west of the village.
Sydling Water
Sydling Water is a chalk stream that rises just to the north of Sydling St Nicholas in the hamlet of Up Sydling. The stream divides upon entering the village, and many cottages are reached across small bridges.[5] The stream used to flow along the High Street in an open course, resulting in occasional floods; after a thunderstorm in June 1889 one local man, Tom Churchill, drowned after having been swept away, and his body was found about a mile downstream.[10] Today Sydling Water is known for its watercress farms.
Notable buildings
Within the parish are more than fifty listed structures. In 1905 Sir Frederick Treves described the village as "the most charming in the district".[7]
The 15th-century parish church of St Nicholas, which is built on slightly higher ground than most of the houses in the village, replaces at least two other buildings previously built on the site.[4] It possesses a Norman font and a fine tower. The tower clock has no face and dates from 1593, making it one of the oldest in Britain.[11][12] The south aisle has settled since construction, so the south wall is buttressed and has only a small door.[10] In 1905 Treves described the church as being "quite famous for its numerous and amazing gargoyles",[7] although seventy-five years later Dorset-based writer Roland Gant noted it instead for being "Light, open, airy, free of restorers' excesses", and for possessing a "noble wagon-roof" in the nave.[10]
Next to the church are Court House and Court Farm. Court House is the village manor house and was the venue for meetings of the local Court leet. Court Farm has a large Elizabethan tithe barn which overlooks the churchyard; it was built in 1590 and constructed from flint, with stone buttresses and oak roof beams.[11] In his 18th-century History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, John Hutchins stated that one of the beams in the barn was inscribed with 'L.V.W. 1590', the initials being those of Lady Ursula Walsingham,[3] though searches by subsequent writers have failed to find them, and the beam may have been removed when the roof thatch was removed in the 20th century.[11]
The Old Vicarage is based on an early Tudor building which was expanded and altered in 1640. Adjoining it is the mullioned old bakery, dating from 1733 upon a 17th-century core.[5][13]
In literature and film
Thomas Hardy fictionalised the village as 'Sidlinch' or 'Broad Sidlinch' in his story 'The Grave by the Handpost' (1897)[2] published in The Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). These names are reminiscent of previous forms of the village's name, such as 'Broadsidlynch' in 1333 and 'Brodesedelyng', in a legal record, in Latin, dated 1440.[14]
The parish church was used as a location in the 1967 film adaptation of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, in a scene that involved water pouring from one of the church's gargoyles onto the grave of Fanny Robin.[15]
The Sydling valley is used as a location within Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel |Rogue Male.[16]
Outside links
 |
("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Sydling St Nicholas) |
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mills, Anthony David: 'A Dictionary of British Place-Names' (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-852758-9
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ken Ayres (January 2005). "Sydling St Nicholas". Dorset Life. http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2005/01/sydling-st-nicholas/. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Sydling St. Nicholas: An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Dorset, Volume 1, pages 230–236
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Joanne Paul (15 April 2003). "The Genuine Article – Sydling St. Nicholas, England". bootsnall.com. http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/03-04/the-genuine-article-sydling-st-nicholas-england.html. Retrieved 11 March 2013.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Roland Gant (1980). Dorset Villages (1 ed.). Robert Hale Ltd. p. 97. ISBN 0 7091 8135 3.
- ↑ "Place: Sydling [St Nicholas and [Up] Sydling"]. Open Domesday. domesdaymap.co.uk. http://domesdaymap.co.uk/place/XX0000/sydling-st-nicholas-and-up-sydling/. Retrieved 1 May 2014.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Treves, Sir F., Highways and Byways in Dorset, Macmillan, 1905, p340
- ↑ Ralph Wightman (1983). Portrait of Dorset (4 ed.). Robert Hale Ltd. p. 97. ISBN 0 7090 0844 9.
- ↑ "Hog Cliff NNR". Natural England. http://www.naturalengland.org.uk/ourwork/conservation/designations/nnr/1006077.aspx. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Roland Gant (1980). Dorset Villages (1 ed.). Robert Hale Ltd. p. 98. ISBN 0 7091 8135 3.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Roland Gant (1980). Dorset Villages (1 ed.). Robert Hale Ltd. p. 99. ISBN 0 7091 8135 3.
- ↑ "Sydling St. Nicholas". The Dorset Page. 2000. http://www.thedorsetpage.com/locations/place/S410.htm. Retrieved 11 March 2013.
- ↑ National Heritage List 1302832: 3, High Street, Sydling St Nicholas
- ↑ "Plea Rolls of the Court of Common Pleas; National Archives; CP 40 / 717; last entry, second line". Anglo-American Legal Tradition. Documents from Mediæval and Early Modern England from the National Archives in London digitised and displayed through The O'Quinn Law Library of the University of Houston Law Center by licence of the National Archives, sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center and by the University of Houston Department of History. http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT1/H6/CP40no717/bCP40no717dorses/IMG_1722.htm. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
- ↑ "Far From The Madding Crowd MGM/EMI 1967 Directed by John Schlesinger, script by Frederic Raphael from the Thomas Hardy novel". South Central MediaScene. http://www.south-central-media.co.uk/ffmc_feature.htm. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
- ↑ "Jimmy Crabb and Albie Lovell; the buses of Sydling St Nicholas". countrybus.co.uk. http://www.countrybus.co.uk/sydling.htm. Retrieved 11 March 2013.
