Wessex Chronicle (Blog)

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Wessex Attractions: Watersmeet House

Watersmeet in Devon has been settled since the Iron Age. Situated at the meeting point of the East Lyn River and Hoar Oak Water, it provides a popular spot for fishing, canoeing and wildlife spotting. Watersmeet House, built in 1832, was originally a hunting and fishing lodge. and has served cream teas since late Victorian times.

The house is surrounded by a 2000 acre estate, including ancient oak woodland, all managed by the National Trust. The famous Exmoor ponies can be found on the estate, as can red deer, buzzards and otters. The whortleberry, a fruit similar to the bilberry, grows here, and makes excellent jam. The rivers contain salmon and trout when in season, hence its popularity as a fishing spot.

The nearby coast is home to some spectacular sea cliffs, including those at Countisbury. believed to be the site of the battle of Cynuit, where the West Saxons, led by Alfred the Great, overwhelmed an invading Viking force, and slew their leader.

There are four Iron Age hillforts in the area, Two fortified farmsteads, Myrtleberry North and South, are now scheduled monuments, though not much of them remains. The East Lyn River was also the site of one of the UK’s first hydroelectric power stations, built in 1890; and of the Lynrock mineral water factory between 1911 and 1952, when it was destroyed in a flood.

The postcode of Watersmeet House is EX35 6NT, and it is served by bus numbers 300, 309 and 310 to Lynmouth.

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Wessex Attractions: Hook Norton Brewery

Hook Norton Brewery is a traditional brewery near Banbury in Oxfordshire that acts almost as a living museum. It was operated by steam until 2006 (its historic Victorian steam engine is still on view to visitors), and its beer is delivered to the village of Hook Norton on a horse-drawn cart.

The brewery operates a network of 47 pubs in northern Wessex and southern Mercia. 23 of these pubs are in Oxfordshire, and a further three in Gloucestershire. They brew a wide range of beers; and two ciders, original and berry.

Brewery tours can be organised via their website. The brewery offers a shop, a restaurant, and two meeting rooms. The postcode is OX15 5NY, and it is served by Stagecoach bus service 488, from Banbury to Chipping Norton (get off at Pear Tree Inn)..

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Wessex In Literature: Far From The Madding Crowd

Far From The Madding Crowd (1874) is a seminal moment in the identity of Wessex as a region. Thomas Hardy was not the first author to mention the name Wessex in a modern context, William Barnes and Charles Kingsley had already beaten him to it, but he was the first to popularise it. “The appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from”, Hardy observed in his Preface to the 1895 edition of the novel.

In the first edition, there is but a single reference to Wessex, but later revisions increased its use. Hardy had always been a regional writer, but giving his “partly-real, partly-dream country” a name rooted in English history solidified it in the public consciousness. Hardy’s literary Wessex expanded over the course of his career from basically a synonym for Dorset, to a six-county region that was still continuing to expand when his final novel, Jude The Obscure (1895) apparently included Christminster (Oxford) within its bounds.

The plot concerns Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, her neighbour William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the flash Sergeant Troy. The novel was notable for its social realism, depicting the harsh lives of the rural poor in Victorian England. It had been adapted for film at least three times, the first being a lost silent version made in 1915. Hardy himself adapted it for the stage in 1879, and it has formed the basis of a ballet, a musical and a 1998 ITV mini-series. In addition, Suzanne Collins borrowed the surname Everdene for her heroine Katniss in her Hunger Games series of young adult novels, and Posy Simmons updated the plot to the present day for her 2007 graphic novel Tamara Drewe, which was itself fimed in 2010.

Far From The Madding Crowd remains as popular now as it was when it was first published nearly 150 years ago. It planted a seed that has grown into today’s Wessex movement, and for that, we can all give thanks.

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Wessex Attractions: Over Bridge

Before the opening of the first Severn Bridge in 1966, traffic wishing to cross the River Severn from Bristol and points south had two choices: the Aust Ferry, and Over Bridge in Gloucester. The latter was built in the late 1820s from a design by Thomas Telford (1757-1834), the Scottish civil engineer nicknamed “the colossus of roads”, whose other achievements include the Menai Bridge. The design was based on Jean-Rodolphe Perronet’s design for a bridge over the Seine at Neuilly.

Telford’s 150-foot, single span stone bridge replaced an earlier bridge dating back to Tudor times, though there had been a bridge there for much longer, as one is recorded in the Domesday Book. It closed to traffic in 1974, when the present A40 bridge was opened, but remains as a pedestrian bridge.

The bridge is currently maintained by English Heritage, and is a scheduled monument. It is two miles from Gloucester railway station and is well-served by local buses. The postcode, for satnav purposes, is GL2 8BZ.

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Wessex Attractions: Branscombe

Branscombe is a village at the Western end of Devon’s Jurassic Coast, It features a sand and shingle beach, and three National Trust properties: a blacksmith’s forge dating from around 1580; a 19th century watermill; and a thatched bakery which is now used as a tea room.

The name is Celtic in origin, from the personal name Bran, and the word “cwm”, a valley, which later became one of the few Brythonic loan words into Old English (as “combe”). The order of the syllables suggests that the name is Saxon in origin, as a Celtic name would have put the personal name element after the topographic one, as in Cwmbran in Wales.

Branscome was once the haunt of smugglers, and a network of tunnels was discovered in the first decade of the last century. More recently it was the site of the salvaging of the shipwrecked cargo ship MSC Napoli, a salvage operation that took two and a half years.

The village was formerly a centre for the lace industry, giving its name to Branscombe point, a style used by lacemakers to this day. Unlike neighbouring Honiton, Branscombe lace was made using needles rather than bobbins, The lace was thicker than Honiton lace, and slightly quicker to make.

The postcode for satnav purposes is EX12 3DB, and the village is served by Axe Vale Mini-Travel bus number 899, from Sidmouth to Seaton.