Winterborne St Martin, commonly known as Martinstown, is a
village
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...
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 southwest
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 , ...
,
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 ...
, situated southwest of
Dorchester, beside
Maiden Castle. In 2013 the estimated population of the civil parish was 780.
[
In the centre of the village is the parish church of St Martin, which dates from the 12th century and has a Norman font. Other amenities in the village include a public house and village hall. Bronze Age barrows including Clandon Barrow surround the village, and Maiden Castle ]hillfort
A hillfort is a type of earthwork used as a fortified refuge or defended settlement, located to exploit a rise in elevation for defensive advantage. They are typically European and of the Bronze Age or Iron Age. Some were used in the post-Roma ...
is nearby. The stream running through the village is a winterbourne though rarely dries out in the summer now.
Winterborne St Martin is in the UK Weather Records
The United Kingdom weather records show the most extreme weather ever recorded in the United Kingdom, such as temperature, wind speed, and rainfall records. Reliable temperature records for the whole of the United Kingdom go back to about 1880. ...
for the ''Highest 24-hour total'' rainfall
Rain is water droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then fall under gravity. Rain is a major component of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on the Earth. It provides water f ...
, which was recorded in the village on 18 July 1955
Events January
* January 3 – José Ramón Guizado becomes president of Panama.
* January 17 – , the first nuclear-powered submarine, puts to sea for the first time, from Groton, Connecticut.
* January 18– 20 – Battle of Yijiangs ...
. The total recorded was 279 mm (11 inches) in a 15-hour period. However this record was surpassed by Seathwaite in Cumbria in 2009.
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 ...
Winterborne St Martin was recorded as ''Wintreburne''; it had 22 households, 6 ploughlands, of meadow and one mill. 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 Dorchester and the lord and 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 Hawise, wife of Hugh son of Grip.
In 1268 Henry II granted a charter to Winterborne St Martin, which allowed the village to hold an annual fair within five days of St. Martin's Day. The fair, which in times past was a leading horse market and amusement fair, had been revived, but the old-time custom of roasting a ram was replaced once during an event in the 1960s with a 'badger roast'. The 80 lb badger was caught in a snare, and many villagers thought they were eating goose.
After a hundred years silence, bells in the church rang out in 1947. Five new bells were hung as a village memorial to those who died in the war. An earlier peal had been sold to defray debts.
In 2007 and 2014 Martinstown won the Best Kept Village in Dorset Award, in the Large Village Category.
The Catholic martyr John Adams
John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Befor ...
was born in Winterborne St Martin in about 1543. The politician Sir Francis Ashley
Sir Francis Ashley (24 November 1569 – 1635) was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1614 and 1625.
Ashley was born at Damerham, the son of Sir Anthony Ashley of Damerham in Wiltshire and ...
was the main landowner here in the early seventeenth century.
Governance
Winterborne St Martin 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 ...
that bears its name and extends from Winterbourne Abbas
Winterborne Abbas is a village and civil parish in south west Dorset, England, situated in a valley on the A35 road west of Dorchester. In the 2011 census the parish had a population of 355.
The village
Winterbourne Abbas is a pleasant r ...
in a roughly south-easterly direction to the edge of Upwey. The total population of this ward was 2,095 in the 2011 census.Conservative
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...
Chris Loder
Christopher Lionel John Loder (born 5 September 1981) is a British Conservative Party politician who has been the MP for West Dorset since the 2019 general election. He succeeded Sir Oliver Letwin, who was elected as a Conservative but sat as ...
.
See also
* List of hundreds in Dorset
References
Notes
External links
Aerial map
Villages in Dorset
{{Dorset-geo-stub