Melcombe Horsey is a

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority ...

in the

county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesChambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the unitary authority areas of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole and Dorset (unitary authority), Dors ...

South West England South West England, or the South West of England, is one of nine official regions of England. It consists of the counties of Bristol, Cornwall (including the Isles of Scilly), Dorset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire. Cities and ...

. It contains the small settlements of Melcombe Bingham, Bingham's Melcombe and Higher Melcombe, the last being the site of the

deserted village An abandoned village is a village that has, for some reason, been deserted. In many countries, and throughout history, thousands of villages have been deserted for a variety of causes. Abandonment of villages is often related to epidemic, f ...

of Melcombe Horsey. In the 2011 census the parish had a population of 141. Bingham's Melcombe is a medieval house. It takes its name from Robert Bingham who acquired the property through marriage in the 13th century. It remained in the Bingham family until 1895. The house is believed to date from the early 16th century. It was substantially restored and remodelled in 1893-4 by Evelyn Hellicar (1862-1929)

Melcombe Bingham

Melcombe Bingham is a village in central

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

, situated approximately northeast of Dorchester, southeast of Sherborne and west-southwest of

Blandford Forum Blandford Forum ( ), commonly Blandford, is a market town in Dorset, England, sited by the River Stour, Dorset, River Stour about northwest of Poole. It was the administrative headquarters of North Dorset District until April 2019, when this ...

.Bartholomew 1:100,000 National Map Series, sheet 4 (Dorset), published 1980, It is surrounded by

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Chalk ...

hills of the

Dorset Downs The Dorset Downs are an area of chalk downland in the centre of the county Dorset in south west England. The downs are the most western part of a larger chalk formation which also includes (from west to east) Cranborne Chase, Salisbury Plain, Ham ...

, though the village itself is sited in a basin of greensand and

gault The Gault Formation is a geological formation of stiff blue clay deposited in a calm, fairly deep-water marine environment during the Lower Cretaceous Period (Upper and Middle Albian). It is well exposed in the coastal cliffs at Copt Point in Fol ...

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Landranger 1:50,000 map series. The names of places in this area are frequently muddled, with published sources providing different information. Melcombe Bingham is the name of the current village, though in the fields near the church there is an abandoned

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...

village called Bingham's Melcombe, and this latter name is sometimes used to describe the church and its adjacent manor. Writing in 1980, writer Roland Gant stated "whichever form I use, I always find that the person to whom I am speaking uses the other". Either way, the name of both the

civil Civil may refer to: *Civic virtue, or civility *Civil action, or lawsuit * Civil affairs *Civil and political rights *Civil disobedience *Civil engineering *Civil (journalism), a platform for independent journalism *Civilian, someone not a membe ...

and ecclesiastical parishes is Melcombe Horsey. There are two manor houses within the parish: the one by the church—owned for six hundred years (until the late 19th century) by the Bingham family—and another a couple of miles to the west in a coombe at Higher Melcombe (which is also called Melcombe Horsey by some sources). Between the two manors is another settlement, situated along the road running north into the neighbouring parish of

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. This settlement is called either Hartfoot Lane or Ansty (including Lower Ansty, Ansty Cross, Higher Ansty, and Little Ansty), and, according to the

, at its southern end it merges into part of Melcombe Bingham. Melcombe Horsey parish has an area of 2,151 acres. Its

population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...

in 1871 was 190 and in 1911 only 151. The parish church, St. Andrew's, is located at the southeastern edge of the parish and its records date to 1690.

References

{{Authority control Villages in Dorset

Melcombe Bingham

See also

References