Three Legged Cross is an extended village within

Verwood Verwood is a town and civil parish in eastern Dorset, England. The town lies north of Bournemouth and north east of Poole as the crow flies. The civil parish comprises the town of Verwood together with the extended village of Three Legged C ...

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 east

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 ...

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 to the south of the town of Verwood and to the north of

West Moors West Moors is a village in Dorset, England, on the northern fringe of the Poole-Bournemouth conurbation, just outside the larger settlements of Ferndown and Verwood. The parish of West Moors had an estimated population of 7,400 in 2004, increasi ...

. Its population in 2014 was estimated at 2,740.

Origins

Various explanations have been put forward for the etymology of 'Three Legged Cross', which is recorded as a toponym from the sixteenth century onwards. One theory is that a type of

gibbet A gibbet is any instrument of public execution (including guillotine, decapitation, executioner's block, Impalement, impalement stake, gallows, hanging gallows, or related Scaffold (execution site), scaffold). Gibbeting is the use of a gallows- ...

known as a 'three-legged mare' once stood here; another theory is that there may once have been a boundary stone in the area marking the convergence of three great estates: Lord Shaftesbury's to the west, Lord Normanton's to the north and east, and the nineteenth-century banking family, the Rolles-Fryer's, to the south. The simpler explanation is that the name signifies the zigzagging configuration of the B3072 through this district, whereby the road is effectively divided into three separate stretches, or 'legs'.A. J. McKinstry, 'Crosses Revisited - Part Two', in ''The Journal of the Christchurch Local History Society'' (February 2012), p. 7.

References

External links

Villages in Dorset Verwood {{Dorset-geo-stub