Chettle is a small village and

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 ...

in southern

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 ...

. It lies northeast 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 ...

. It is sited at the head of a gently sloping valley on the dip slope of the

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 ...

formation called

Cranborne Chase Cranborne Chase () is an area of central southern England, straddling the counties Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. It is part of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The area is dominated by, ...

. The A354 trunk road crosses the valley about 1 km to the south. In 2013 the estimated population of the civil parish was 90. A 2008 report indicated that the entire village was owned by the Bourke family and operated in the mode of "benevolent feudalism". A news item from 2015 confirmed the ownership and provided the following update about the community:

The tiny hamlet, with its hotel, manor house, 40 cottages, farms and lumber yard has belonged to the Bourke family for more than 400 years, in a benign throwback to feudal times.

Chettle House, the village

manor Manor may refer to: Land ownership *Manorialism or "manor system", the method of land ownership (or "tenure") in parts of medieval Europe, notably England *Lord of the manor, the owner of an agreed area of land (or "manor") under manorialism *Man ...

, is a red brick

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

mansion designed by

Thomas Archer Thomas Archer (1668–1743) was an English Baroque architect, whose work is somewhat overshadowed by that of his contemporaries Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. His buildings are important as the only ones by an English Baroque architec ...

, a pupil of Vanbrugh, and built by the

Bastard brothers John (ca 1688–1770) and William Bastard (ca 1689–1766) were British surveyor-architects, and civic dignitaries of the town of Blandford Forum in Dorset. John and William generally worked together and are known as the "Bastard brothers". Th ...

of Blandford Forum during the reign of Queen Anne.Gant, R., ''Dorset Villages'', Hale, 1980, p40 Pevsner called it "the plum among Dorset houses of the early 18th century, and even nationally outstanding as a specimen of English Baroque". Two rounded ends were added to the house in 1912. Chettle House (2) - geograph

From the 1950s to 2015 the house was a series of flats. After 2015, extensive renovations were completed by new owners; the house and gardens were closed to the public. A book about Chettle, "Enduring Village", was published in August, 2008.

Notes

External links

Villages in Dorset {{Dorset-geo-stub