Yetminster Church - geograph.org.uk - 438264.jpg
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Yetminster is a village and civil parish in the
English county The counties of England are areas used for different purposes, which include administrative, geographical, cultural and political demarcation. The term "county" is defined in several ways and can apply to similar or the same areas used by each ...
of Dorset. It lies south-west of Sherborne. It is sited on the River Wriggle, a tributary of the River Yeo, and is built almost entirely of honey-coloured limestone, which gives the village an appearance reminiscent of
Cotswold The Cotswolds (, ) is a region in central-southwest England, along a range of rolling hills that rise from the meadows of the upper Thames to an escarpment above the Severn Valley and Evesham Vale. The area is defined by the bedrock of Juras ...
villages. In the 2011 census the civil parish had a population of 1,105.


History

In 1086 in the Domesday Book Yetminster was recorded as ''Etiminstre''; it had 76 households, 26 ploughlands, of meadow and 2 mills. It was in
Yetminster Hundred Yetminster Hundred was a hundred in the county of Dorset, England, containing the following parishes: * Batcombe *Clifton Maybank *Melbury Bubb *Melbury Osmond *Yetminster *(''Chetnole and Leigh were created from Yetminster in 1866'') See also ...
and the tenant-in-chief was the Bishop of Salisbury. The parish church of St Andrew has
Saxon The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic * * * * peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country (Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the Nor ...
origins, though only part of a 10th-century standing cross remains from that period; the current building dates mostly from the mid-15th century, though the chancel was built around 1300 and the whole church was
restored ''Restored'' is the fourth studio album by American contemporary Christian music musician Jeremy Camp. It was released on November 16, 2004 by BEC Recordings. Track listing Standard release Enhanced edition Deluxe gold edition Standard ...
in 1890 and several times subsequently. In 1300 the bishop of Salisbury founded a weekly market and three-day annual fair in the village. Records do not state whether the market thrived, but the fair continued until the 19th century. It was revived in the 20th century, and today takes place on the second Saturday in July. Robert Boyle, pioneer of modern chemistry who is best known for Boyle's Law, left an endowment for the provision of a school for poor boys in the district; the building was constructed in 1697 and functioned as a school between 1711 and 1945. Records from 1848 indicate Yetminster's degree of self-sufficiency as a community; nearly 20 trades and crafts were conducted in the village, including a glazier, a saddler, several shoe and boot makers, a tailor and a maltster. In 1857 the Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway between Weymouth and Westbury opened; it passed through Yetminster and a station was built for the village. Many of the buildings still standing in the village were built from the local limestone between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 18th centuries, resulting in an unusually unified architectural appearance. Writing in 1905 Sir Frederick Treves described the village as "probably the most consistent old-world village or townlet in the county", in 1965 Ralph Wightman stated that "Yetminster ..is the nearest Dorset equivalent to the stone building of the Cotswold country", and in 1980 Roland Gant wrote that "little has come since to spoil this largish village."


Governance

Yetminster is within an
electoral ward A ward is a local authority area, typically used for electoral purposes. In some countries, wards are usually named after neighbourhoods, thoroughfares, parishes, landmarks, geographical features and in some cases historical figures connected to t ...
that bears its name and includes
Chetnole Chetnole is a village and civil parish in the county of Dorset in southern England. It lies approximately south-southwest of Sherborne and southeast of Yeovil in Somerset. It is sited on Oxford clay by the small Wriggle River at the western end ...
and the surrounding area. The population of this ward in the 2011 census was 1,564. The ward is one of 32 that comprise the West Dorset parliamentary constituency, which is currently represented in the UK national parliament by the Conservative Chris Loder, who succeeded Oliver Letwin in 2019.


Geography

Measured directly, Yetminster village is about southwest of Sherborne, southeast of Yeovil, northeast of Bridport and north-northwest of Dorchester. The geology of the parish comprises a narrow central band of
Middle Jurassic The Middle Jurassic is the second epoch of the Jurassic Period. It lasted from about 174.1 to 163.5 million years ago. Fossils of land-dwelling animals, such as dinosaurs, from the Middle Jurassic are relatively rare, but geological formations co ...
cornbrash limestone and
Forest Marble The Forest Marble is a geological formation in England. Part of the Great Oolite Group, it dates to the late Bathonian stage of the Middle Jurassic.Weishampel, David B; et al. (2004). "Dinosaur distribution (Middle Jurassic, Europe)." In: Weisha ...
that crosses the parish from west to east, with
Upper Jurassic The Late Jurassic is the third epoch of the Jurassic Period, and it spans the geologic time from 163.5 ± 1.0 to 145.0 ± 0.8 million years ago (Ma), which is preserved in Upper Jurassic strata.Owen 1987. In European lithostratigraphy, the name ...
Oxford clay to the north and south. In the southeast and northeast the Oxford clay is overlain by
Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ...
undifferentiated head deposits. The village is sited on the cornbrash.


Demography

In the 2011 census Yetminster civil parish had 531 dwellings, 498 households and a population of 1,105. % of residents were age 65 or over, compared to % for England as a whole. The population of the parish in the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below:


Amenities

Yetminster does not lie on a main road and experiences mostly local traffic. It has its own railway station (on the Heart of Wessex Line), which is sited close to the village centre. St Andrews Church has a 300-year-old faceless clock which chimes the national anthem every three hours. As well as the expected local store and pub, Yetminster still possesses a variety of village amenities and services, including a GP surgery and health centre, and a sports/social club with playing grounds and tennis court.


Notable people

Yetminster was the birthplace of
Benjamin Jesty Benjamin Jesty (c. 1736 – 16 April 1816) was a farmer at Yetminster in Dorset, England, notable for his early experiment in artificial induction of immunity, inducing immunity against smallpox using cowpox. The notion that those people infect ...
(c.1736–1816), a farmer who lived in the village for much of his life, who is notable for his early experiment in inducing immunity against smallpox using deliberate inoculation with the less virulent cowpox. Unlike Edward Jenner, a medical doctor who is given broad credit for developing the smallpox vaccine in 1796, Jesty did not publicise his findings, even though they were made some twenty years earlier in 1774. Only two people pre-dated Jesty's work. There is a
blue plaque A blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving as a historical marker. The term i ...
commemorating Jesty's pioneering work at Upbury Farm, near to the church. English folk music group
The Yetties The Yetties (John "Bonny" Sartin, Pete Shutler, and Mac McCulloch) were an English folk music group, who took their name from the Dorset village of Yetminster, their childhood home. In 1975, they released an album entitled '' The Yetties of Yet ...
met in the Yetminster Scout Group in the mid 1950’s and took their name from the village.


References


Notes


General references

*


External links

{{authority control Villages in Dorset