Footbridge over the River Divelish - geograph

Fifehead Neville is a 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 authority ...

in the county of Dorset in southern England, situated in the

Blackmore Vale The Blackmore Vale (; less commonly spelt ''Blackmoor'') is a vale, or wide valley, in north Dorset, and to a lesser extent south Somerset and southwest Wiltshire in southern England. Geography The vale is part of the Stour valley, part of t ...

about southwest of the town of Sturminster Newton. In the 2011 census the population of the parish was 147.

Toponymy

The first part of the name Fifehead Neville derives 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 settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

''fīf'' and ''hīd'', meaning '(estate of) five hides of land'. It was recorded as ''Fifhide'' 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 ...

of 1086. The second part derives from the de Neville family who were here in the 13th century; in 1287 the name ''Fyfhud Neuyle'' was recorded. This differentiated this Fifehead from other Dorset manorial holdings called Fifehead (Fifehead St Quintin and Fifehead St Magdalen).

History

In a field bordering the River Divelish the remains of two wings of a Roman villa were found in 1880 and 1903. Floor mosaics and part of a

hypocaust A hypocaust ( la, hypocaustum) is a system of central heating in a building that produces and circulates hot air below the floor of a room, and may also warm the walls with a series of pipes through which the hot air passes. This air can warm th ...

system were uncovered. The archaeological findings are on view in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. The Domesday Book records that in 1086 the estate of Fifehead Neville had eight households and was part of Pimperne Hundred. 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 op ...

of the estate was

Waleran the Hunter Waleran the Hunter (floruit 1086) (Latin: ''Waleran Venator'') was an Anglo-Norman magnate who held 51 manors as recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, including Whaddon in Wiltshire and several in Hampshire, including West Dean, within the New F ...

whose tenant was Ingelrann.Victoria County History, A History of the County of Wiltshire, volumes 4, 11, 12, 15, A History of the County of Dorset, volume 3 The overlordship descended to Walter Walerand (d. 1200–1) and to his daughter and co-heiress Isabel de Waleran who married William de Nevill. The overlordship was inherited by Isabel de Nevill's daughter Joan de Nevill (d. 1263), wife of Jordan de St. Martin. Crossing the Divelish is an old

packhorse bridge A packhorse bridge is a bridge intended to carry packhorses (horses loaded with sidebags or panniers) across a river or stream. Typically a packhorse bridge consists of one or more narrow (one horse wide) masonry arches, and has low Parapet#Bridge ...

that has two pointed arches and is probably

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...

. Before 1920 the parish was in two parts, each with its own settlement—Fifehead Neville in the north and Lower Fifehead or Fifehead St Quentin in the south. It is probable each settlement had previously had its own

open field system The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acre ...

. Fifehead St Quentin (or Fifehead St Quintin) was previously a detached part of

Belchalwell Belchalwell is a small village in the civil parish of Okeford Fitzpaine in the Blackmore Vale, North Dorset, England. It lies south of Sturminster Newton and northwest of Blandford Forum. Belchalwell Street is sited on Upper Greensand, with ...

, a former parish that is now part of the parish of

Okeford Fitzpaine Okeford Fitzpaine is a village and civil parish in the English county of Dorset, situated in the Blackmore Vale south of the town of Sturminster Newton. It is sited on a thin strip of greensand under the scarp face of the Dorset Downs. In ...

Geography

Fifehead Neville parish is in the North Dorset administrative district in the Blackmore Vale, sited next to the River Divelish which drains land north of the

Dorset Downs The Dorset Downs are an area of chalk downland in the centre of the county Dorset in south west England. The downs are the most western part of a larger chalk formation which also includes (from west to east) Cranborne Chase, Salisbury Plain, Ham ...

around Bulbarrow Hill. The parish, which covers at an elevation of , is also drained by a small tributary of the River Lydden in the west. The underlying geology is mostly

Corallian Limestone The Corallian Group or Corallian Limestone is a geologic group in England. It is predominantly a coralliferous sedimentary rock, laid down in the Oxfordian stage of the Jurassic. It is a hard variety of "coral rag". Building stones from this geol ...

, with a small amount of

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 North ...

in the east and some

Oxford clay The Oxford Clay (or Oxford Clay Formation) is a Jurassic marine sedimentary rock formation underlying much of southeast England, from as far west as Dorset Dorset ( ; archaically: Dorsetshire , ) is a county in South West England on the ...

at Deadmoor Common in the west. Measured directly, Fifehead Neville village is about SW of Sturminster Newton, NNW of

Blandford Forum Blandford Forum ( ), commonly Blandford, is a market town in Dorset, England, sited by the River Stour, Dorset, River Stour about northwest of Poole. It was the administrative headquarters of North Dorset District until April 2019, when this ...

and NNE of the county town, Dorchester.

Demography

In the 2011 census Fifehead Neville civil parish had 61 dwellings, 56 households and a population of 147. The population of the parish in the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below: In 2013 the estimated population of the parish was 180.

References

External links

{{Authority control Villages in Dorset