page_title: Simonsbath
section_title: Purchase by John Knight
hierarchical_section_title: Simonsbath / History / Purchase by John Knight
caption_attribution_description: English: Simonsbath Parish Church, Exmoor
context_page_description: Simonsbath is a small village high on Exmoor in the English county of Somerset. It is the principal settlement in the Exmoor civil parish, which is the largest and most sparsely populated civil parish on Exmoor, covering nearly 32 square miles but with a population, at the time of the 2001 census, of 203 in 78 households, reducing to 156 at the 2011 Census.
  The River Exe rises from a valley to the north, and the River Barle runs through the village and is crossed by a triple-arched medieval bridge that was extensively repaired after floods in 1952.
  The settlement lies on the route of the Two Moors Way and close to the Macmillan Way West.
context_section_description: The highest bidder was John Knight of Lea Castle, Wolverley, Worcestershire, whose bid was £50,122. He thus acquired 10,262 1/4 acres, and soon thereafter set about buying up the allotments made to the former graziers and owner of the tithes. This brought his holding to about 20,000 acres. Knight was descended from a wealthy family of Ironmasters. Knight set about converting the Royal Forest, covering land now within the Exmoor National Park, into a huge industrial mining complex with canals and railways together with an agricultural estate. He had previously bought and reclaimed uncultivated land in Worcestershire and used similar techniques including burning rough grass, applying lime to change the pH, and ploughing to increase the productivity of the land. He also introduced the Cheviot sheep to the area which are now common throughout Exmoor.
  Knight and his son Col. Sir Frederick Winn Knight (1812–1897), KCB, MP, who assumed management in 1841, built most of the large farms in the central section of the moor and laid down 22 miles (35 km) of metalled access roads to Simonsbath. He built a 29 miles (47 km) stone wall around his estate, parts of which still survive. However, progress was slow, and Richard Nicholls Worth stated in 1879 in his "Tourist's Guide to North Devon and the Exmoor district":
  "The mansion was never finished; cultivation has not spread far from the farmstead centres; the walls bother the sportsman more than the deer; and the bogs are as deep, the inner recesses of the moors as wild and solitary, and the coarse grass, and the bracken, and the heathers supreme in their occupancy mile after mile, as if no effort had ever been made to redeem its mingled wildness and sterility."
caption: Simonsbath Parish Church, St Luke's, viewed from the south, with tomb monument of Frederick Winn Knight (d.1897) and his wife Dame Florence (d.1900) and their son Frederick Sebright Knight who pre-deceased both his parents in 1879
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