page_title: Puriton
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Puriton / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Archway to Puriton Manor
context_page_description: Puriton is a village and parish at the westerly end of the Polden Hills, in the Sedgemoor district of Somerset, England. The parish has a population of 1,968. The local parish church is named after St. Michael. A chapel on Woolavington Road was converted to a private house some 20 years ago. The parish includes the hamlets of Dunball and Down End.
  In 1996, the village was described as "now becoming a rural commuter village". The built-up area is mostly between 5 and 50 metres above sea level.
  The village has a full range of facilities, such as a primary school, parish church, pub, post office, butcher and hairdresser. It started to expand considerably in the 1960s and 1970s when new houses were built on former farm land, a former infilled stone Blue Lias quarry, Puriton Park, and on fields between the existing houses. The old Victorian school near the church was converted into homes and a new school built elsewhere. The Manor House was sold in 1960 and four houses were built on its former tennis courts: the House is in multiple occupancy.
context_section_description: Puriton was mentioned in the Domesday Book as growing pears, and was held by the Church of St Peter's, Rome. Its parish church was St Michael's.
  Just north of Dunball is Down End which is the site of Down End Castle, a motte-and-bailey castle, which has been designated as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
  The parish was part of the Huntspill and Puriton Hundred,
  A cement and lime works was at the western end of the Polden Hills, at Dunball. It used Blue Lias stone quarried at several locations in the village, transported to the works on narrow-gauge railways. This area of the Polden Hills was used for quarrying stone and lime burning from 1888 until 1973. Quarrying may have taken place on the hillside as early as the 15th century.
  In 1910 exploration for coal discovered a 36 metres (118 ft) thick seam of Rock salt 183 metres (600 ft)  beneath the mudstones. Between 1911 and 1922 this was commercially extracted by dissolving the salt with water pumped down bore holes, which was brought to the surface and evaporated in boiling pans.
  Until just after World War II the village still had apple and pear orchards. The village is mentioned in the Domesday Book as growing pears (1086 - Peritone 'a Pear Orchard or farmstead where Pear trees grow') and this is one possible reason for the village's name. A German pilot was captured in one of the orchards after his plane was shot down and he landed by parachute. The orchards have now all gone, houses having been built on them. The last was Culverhay, which at one time had housed both a dairy and a cider press. One working farm is still in existence.
  In 1941, ROF Bridgwater, an explosives factory, was opened midway between Puriton and the adjacent village of Woolavington. The factory lies mostly in Puriton parish, with a small portion in Woolavington. Several million gallons of water per day were extracted from the nearby artificial River Huntspill. Now the extraction rate is probably very much lower, and most, if not all, of the water is returned after use, after clean-up through a reedbed sewage treatment plant. A large explosion occurred at the factory in the early 1950s, with workers dying or being injured. Its current owners, BAE Systems Land and Armaments, closed it in spring 2008.
  The village's stone quarries began to go out of use during World War II.  The cement and lime works, next to both the King's Sedgemoor Drain and the Bristol and Exeter Railway line, became run down by the early 1960s and was demolished when the M5 motorway was built through part of the site. The church, and the boundary walls, in the old part of the village, are built of blue lias blocks. Puriton Park was built over part of the site of an in-filled blue lias quarry, at the eastern end of the village.
  The headquarters of the British Institute for Brain Injured Children, or BIBIC, has been in a former 19th century house, Knowle Hall, since 1983.
caption: The archway to Puriton Manor House, Rye to the north (left), Middle Street to the east (right)
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