The Shoe is a

hamlet ''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts ...

in the parish of

North Wraxall North Wraxall is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. The village is about west of Chippenham, just north of the A420 road between Chippenham and Bristol. The parish includes the village of Ford and the hamlets of Upper Wraxall, ...

, in the north-west of

Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...

in England. It lies at the junction of the Fosse Way (the old Roman road from Exeter to Lincoln) and the A420 (running from Bristol to Oxford). The settlement is named after the former inn called The Horse-shoe and is about west of Chippenham and the same distance north east of Bath.

Facilities

There is a natural spring, which could suggest a historical settlement of some sort. The Shoe Inn, marked on the 1:25,000

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

map, has now become a private house, although a board for public notices and a post box are still outside; there was a public telephone box but this has now been relocated to the grounds of the Community Hall. There is a garage, a row of cottages ("Fosse Cottages") and a few larger houses. Just off the Fosse Way, about 400 yards north of the A420 junction, lies the North Wraxall

Village Hall A village hall is a public building in a village used for various things such as: United Kingdom In the United Kingdom, a village hall is usually a building which contains at least one large room (plus kitchen and toilets), is owned by a local ...

, called the Community Hall, offering a playgroup and other amenities.

References

{{reflist * G. M. Boumphrey, (1935) ''Along the Roman Roads''. London: Allen & Unwin Hamlets in Wiltshire