Hammoon 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 authorit ...

in the English county of

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. Covering an area of , ...

, sited on a river terrace of alluvial silt by the River Stour, about east of the small town of Sturminster Newton. Its name is derived from the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

''ham'', meaning dwelling, and the surname of the Norman

lord of the manor Lord of the Manor is a title that, in Anglo-Saxon England, referred to the landholder of a rural estate. The lord enjoyed manorial rights (the rights to establish and occupy a residence, known as the manor house and demesne) as well as seig ...

('de Moion' or 'Mohun'). In 2001 the parish had 19 households and a population of 49. In 2013 the estimated population of the parish was 40.

History

In 1086 in the

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manusc ...

Hammoon was recorded as ''Hame''; it had 15 households, 4 ploughlands and of meadow. It was in the

hundred 100 or one hundred (Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101. In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to des ...

of Newton and the

tenant-in-chief In medieval and early modern Europe, the term ''tenant-in-chief'' (or ''vassal-in-chief'') denoted a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opp ...

was William of Mohun. The

Church of England parish church A parish church in the Church of England is the church which acts as the religious centre for the people within each Church of England parish (the smallest and most basic Church of England administrative unit; since the 19th century sometimes ca ...

of St Paul dates probably from the late 12th or early 13th century, though only the north wall of the

nave The nave () is the central part of a church, stretching from the (normally western) main entrance or rear wall, to the transepts, or in a church without transepts, to the chancel. When a church contains side aisles, as in a basilica-typ ...

is original. The first building was likely only about wide, and in the mid 13th century the

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may terminate in an apse. ...

and south wall of the nave were rebuilt to a slightly larger floorplan; the nave's north wall should also have been rebuilt at this time, but the work was not completed. New windows were installed in the north wall in the 15th century. The nave's west wall was rebuilt in 1885, extending the building westwards. The parish was the first incumbency of the academic and clergyman

Humphrey Gower Humphrey Gower (1638–1711) was an English clergyman and academic, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and then St. John's College, Cambridge, and Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity. Life He was the son of Stanley Gower, successively rector ...

(1638–1711), who later went on to become Master of

Jesus College, Cambridge Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's full name is The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge. Its common name comes ...

and then St. John's College, Cambridge. The Manor House - Hammoon - geograph

Near St. Paul's is the

thatched Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, water reed, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), rushes, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away from the inner roof. Since the bulk of ...

and

mullion A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window or screen, or is used decoratively. It is also often used as a division between double doors. When dividing adjacent window units its primary purpose is a rigid sup ...

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals ...

, which dates from the 16th century and which Sir Frederick Treves described in 1906 as "the most picturesque of its kind". It has an L-shaped plan and has had several changes since first construction, including the addition of a classical porch around 1600. According to Pevsner the building overall has "an air ..of simple innocence under its thatched roof". It is

listed Listed may refer to: * Listed, Bornholm, a fishing village on the Danish island of Bornholm * Listed (MMM program), a television show on MuchMoreMusic * Endangered species in biology * Listed building, in architecture, designation of a historicall ...

English Heritage English Heritage (officially the English Heritage Trust) is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses. The charity states that i ...

as Grade II*. The old open fields of the parish were enclosed before 1771. Hammoon House was built in the 1890s for use as a hunting lodge by the 2nd Viscount Portman of nearby

Bryanston Bryanston is a village and civil parish in north Dorset, England, situated on the River Stour west of Blandford Forum. In the 2011 census the parish had a population of 925. The village is adjacent to the grounds of Bryanston School, an ind ...

. It is an early example of the use of shuttered

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wid ...

as a building material, though the exterior was finished to give an appearance of stone. It is now a private residence.

Geography

Hammoon parish covers an area of at an elevation of about . The highest land is on

Kimmeridge clay The Kimmeridge Clay is a sedimentary deposit of fossiliferous marine clay which is of Late Jurassic to lowermost Cretaceous age and occurs in southern and eastern England and in the North Sea. This rock formation is the major source rock for Nor ...

in the south. Beside the Stour at Hammoon Bridge is an

ox-bow lake An oxbow lake is a U-shaped lake or pool that forms when a wide meander of a river is cut off, creating a free-standing body of water. In South Texas, oxbows left by the Rio Grande are called '' resacas''. In Australia, oxbow lakes are call ...

; it is upstream of the bridge, on the south side of the river. Next to the bridge there is also a

gauging station A stream gauge, streamgage or stream gauging station is a location used by hydrologists or environmental scientists to monitor and test terrestrial bodies of water. Hydrometric measurements of water level surface elevation (" stage") and/or vol ...

that measures the river flow. It opened in 1968 and is operated by the

Environment Agency The Environment Agency (EA) is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and en ...

. The river level typically varies between . The highest recorded level is , which occurred on 24 December 2013.

References

External links

{{authority control Villages in Dorset