Beechbourne (market town)

Beechbourne (market town & CP)

Sponsored by the Beechbourne *Herald & Courier*

Some material from the *VCH,* by kind permission

**Beechbourne** is the post town and primary market town for The Woolfonts, part of the Downlands, and an extensive economic hinterland including portions of the Duke of Taunton’s estates; the villages of Woolhead St Margaret and Woolhead St Aldhelm; and much country to the North and East, towards Belbourne St Peter and Belbourne St Paul.

## **Geography**

Sited East North Eastwards of Woolfont Magna and Northwards of Woolfont Parva, in the midst of the Southern England Chalk Formation, Beechbourne owes its prosperity, and quite likely its existence, to its situation between the old Roman road (and Anglo-Saxon Here Way, the military road, which thereabouts largely follows it) to its North and Eastwards and, at Beechbourne Hythe, the head of navigation and non-seasonal flow of one of the tributaries of the River Wolfbourne: the Beech Bourne, from which the town takes its name. Owing to the Beech Bourne, Beechbourne has wide arable cornlands and dairy country immediately about it.

Westwards of Woody End, just at the limits of the town corporation’s bounds to the West South Westwards, the Ramsditch Way – a public footpath and bridlepath – crosses the Chickmarsh Road, just above the point at which that road intersects Wool Lane and becomes Beechbourne High Street for a time. The Ramsditch Way developed from an ancient trackway of, quite probably, Neolithic date; its intersection with the Here Way – Roman road complex, West and Northwards of the town, strongly suggests that the Roman and later Anglo-Saxon ways were equally built upon very ancient foundations.

The highly nucleated settlement has, on its Southward side, three suburbs: Woody End; Thorndown; and, beyond these, at the head of navigation of the Beech Bourne, Beechbourne Hythe. To the Northwards, there is open country.

Of these, Woody End is, as its name reflects, a remnant of the ancient beech wood (*F. sylvatica*) which named the bourne and thus the town. Base-rich soils, typical of the chalk downs even in their arable portions alongside the calcareous grasslands, predominate in the area, and the beech forests in their high days were clearly typical of the English Lowlands beech forests terrestrial ecoregion, PA0421; their remnants in all likelihood reflect the ancient woodlands, as being a W12 *Fagus sylvatica – Mercurialis perennis* (dog’s mercury) woodland plant community under the NVC classification. The canopy and shrub layer in the remnant wood at Woody End is highly typical of this classification, consisting of ash, hazel, whitebeam, and beech saplings, the field layer being dominated by dog’s mercury, *Allium ursinum* (wild garlic), *Hyacinthoides non-scripta* (bluebell), and *Sanicula europaea* (wood sanicle), of which the first two at least are notoriously indicative of ancient woodland. This field layer is quite dense, as the remnant wood’s canopy is *not* dense. It is a cherished ‘bluebell wood’ much loved by Beechbourne folk.

Thorndown is a small chalk elevation between the town and the Beech Bourne and its Hythe, and anciently, as its name attests, notable for *Crataegus monogyna,* common hawthorn, of which it retains several stands.

Beechbourne Hythe itself is a riverside community which acted as the Ostia to Beechbourne’s Rome at the height of the wool trade and before the coming of early modern transport; it is now very much shrunken, but has become something of a haunt of anglers, the Beech Bourne being after all a chalk stream. It is marked by remnant riparian beech-willow woodland; early and March orchids and marsh valerian; and alder-willow sequences long managed by man, of which the willows have been pollarded for centuries.

## **History**

As a discrete property, what is now Beechbourne appears to have been two properties – proto-‘manors’ – granted by Ine, and demarcated and divided by the now-lost verge of the ancient beech wood: the Northern or open lands to his kinsman and king’s thegn Ingild *Cild* (a nephew or cousin, not Ine’s brother Ingild),who was married to the Lady Ælfflaed; the Southern, consisting of the wood, Thorndown, and the bourne-side lands which became Beechbourne Hythe, to the minster founded by Aldhelm at Wolf Down: which after the Conquest became the Abbey there.

The geographical position of what became Beechbourne: between the Beech Bourne and the Here Way, with a good ford crossed by the Ramsditch Way above the Hythe; at the head of navigation for the Beech Bourne; and a situation, like that of Devizes, where different ‘manors’ met: naturally attracted trade and settlement. Equally, the growing settlement enjoyed, as manorial lordships evolved, the advantage (for its residents) of jurisdictional confusion and an easy means of avoiding the low justice by crossing to the other side of the lane; and, equally, it came to endure, in consequence, centuries of squabbling over its control, carried out with a marked lack of charity and forbearance by the rival secular and ecclesiastical lords.

Ælfwine *Deorling,* one of the more notable of the successors of Ingild *Cild,* was a scrupulously fair man, who respected the rights of the minster clergy, their charters in Woody End, Thorndown, and the Hythe, and the bookland with which they had been endowed. This was perhaps the easier for him to do because the community, though an Aldhelmian foundation, was centred on his family’s lands and had come to be led by successive connexions of his; and because the original settlement that became Beechbourne was centred upon its later (and nowadays misnamed) High Street, Northwards of the present town. The embryonic ‘Beechbourne’ of that period straggled along the track, the later High Street, Southwards of what is now Manor Farm and Northwards of what is now Wold Farm; today’s Monk Street and Church Street, then mere ways, ran through open country to Thorndown and thence to Beechbourne Hythe.

By the time of Alfred, the church at Thorndown ran a grammar school, teaching the *trivium* and *quadrivium* both; and despite the occasional jurisdictional jars and clashes, the villagers of the infant Beechbourne and those in the hamlets of Thorndown and Beechbourne Hythe were prospering together.

Beechbourne, Thorndown, and the Hythe escaped Danish plundering in pre-Alfredian times, and avoided it even in the disasters of the reign of Æthelred Unræd; the communities continued to grow, as the beech wood was increasingly assarted and advances in ploughshare technology and ox-power put more land in cultivation.

The Conquest – like, perhaps, the Adventus Saxonum before it – was productive of far less upheaval than might have been expected, for all that Beechbourne and Chickmarsh were, like the Woolfonts, held by king’s thegns descended of the House of Wessex; and this was largely due to the success of the Malets in securing the grant of these lands from William the Bastard. Edred *Cild,* the contemporary royal (in both senses) thegn, found himself, in Gilbert Malet of Étretat, the first Malet holder of what had been Edred’s lands, not a feudal lord, but rather a son-on-law and cousin.

Gilbert of Étretat was the brother, or possibly the half-brother, of William Malet, lord of Graville, one of the proven Companions of the Conqueror at Hastings.

William Malet, at least, claimed an Anglo-Saxon mother, and allegedly had a sister who married Aelfgar of Mercia, son of Leofric and Godgifu (Godiva) of Mercia. Aelfgar was the father of Ealdgyth (Edith), probably by Aelfgifu, the alleged sister of William Malet, and of Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria. Edith married, firstly, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, king of all Wales, and, secondly, as his second wife, Harold king of England. William Malet de Graville appears to have married Helise Crispin de Brionne, purportedly a great-great-granddaughter of Rollo (Hrolf) 1st duke of Normandy, and held the Honour of Eye in Suffolk. His younger son, another Gilbert, founded the Malets of Shepton Mallet in Somerset; William Malet de Graville’s brother Gilbert Malet of Étretat, husband to Ælflaed the daughter of Edred, founded the Wolfdown Malets.

This sort of succession, half by conquest and half by marriage, seems to have been a local characteristic. Cerdic, Ceawlin, Cynegils, and Cenwalh bore names suggestive of British and Sub-Roman Romano-British descent: Cerdic’s name is of course British: Caradoc: and there is some suggestion he was the son of Elasius or Elafius, a Romano-Briton who had some tribunician or legatal command or authority over either Venta Belgarum (Winchester) or St Albans (Verulamium), and who met with and supported Germanus of Auxerre. The branch of the House of Wessex to which Edred belonged in 1066 was sprung of one Cynric *Atheling;* they were sometime referred to accordingly as the Cynricings. Thus, the Cynricings who culminated in Edred, father-in-law to the first Malet to hold the Honour, were Cerdicings; and they had made certain all knew it for half a millennium. And if the Malets claimed Breton as well as English blood to leaven their Norman lineage, there were hints enough that the Cynricingas of Edred’s ancestry had done no less. They had made politic political marriages, when events dictated, with Mercian women of status and Kentish noblewomen. One at least of Edred’s distaff ancestors had had a Danish name, Gytha, although said to have been born in Dublin, of an Irish mother of the Northern Uí Néill; and one of Edred’s grandmothers was Breton, and the other, Norman. (Small wonder that there are hints and whispers in the annals that the Cynricings of Wolfdown, warding the Dumnonian March, made canny marriages as well with their British neighbours, including with a grandniece of Culmin ap Petroc of Dumnonia.) The Malets, themselves claiming English and Breton blood as well as Norman, perhaps of the same families as Edred’s, peopled their new Honour with others like them – Anglo-Normans – in subinfeudation, married into the dispossessed thegn’s family, and gave their Saxon kin fiefs held of them, in their usual habit of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

The new secular lords, then, with a now formal manor in the full sense in Beechbourne proper, were kin to the old. The minster at Wolfdown had become, in the late Tenth Century, a Benedictine abbey, counting the Cynricings as its secular founding benefactors under the overall grace of King Edgar the Peaceable; in the post-Conquest period, it remained so, being refounded, to the glory of the new Malet lords, before 1077, and *not* as an alien or dependant house. For the next two centuries, abbey and Honour, the abbatial and the secular lords, managed to jog along amicably enough, including as to Beechbourne, Thorndown, and the Hythe: quite likely because the abbots, wanting protection from the acquisitiveness of Shaftesbury, relied upon the Malets as defenders of their rights, commonly to the extent of ensuring that successive abbots, or at least their priors, were Malet second sons or connexions.

The communities – Beechbourne, Thorndown, and the Hythe – burgeoned accordingly: which became an increasing issue, pregnant of problems. Town growth began to impinge upon monastic lands; and abbots, Malet or otherwise, grew sternly solicitous rather of their abbatial prerogatives and the claims of the Church than of the interests of their earthly kin. In the reign of John, these tensions were exacerbated, during (and owing to) John’s great Treasury wheeze of flogging market charters for ready cash: when, as it happened, it was the abbey which secured a market and an additional fair for the lord’s town of Beechbourne, and these moreover chartered to be held on abbey lands South of the town, the gloves came off.

The then lord of the manor, Sir Geoffrey Malet, countered this move by securing a market charter for Chickmarsh, in which, and in the surrounding countryside of which, the Abbey had no interests; the Abbot of the time, Wakelin, retorted by erecting a dependant and obedientiary prior at Thorndown, answerable to the abbey for its vigilant defence of the abbey’s rights to the Peter and Michaelmas fairs – and for its impressing a sense of obligation upon Beechbourne town for the abbey’s good lordship in having secured the town’s market charter. It was at this time that the abbey, through its daughter priory at Thorndown, erected Prior’s Postern on Monk Street, where the town lands ended and the abbey’s prior’s walled Thorndown lands began.

This state of cold war did not last. The Barons’ Wars against John – in which the Malets, although always with friends and connexions in the other camp, sided mostly with the baronial party – diverted attention from quarrels over any charter issued by John Lackland save the Great Charter; and by the time these great matters were settled, the local issue was less pressing. In the year in which Henry 3d attained his majority, dismissed his regents, and began to rule on his own, Abbot Wakelin being long dead, the new Abbot, Hugh, a Malet born, and the aged Sir Geoffrey, who was to die at Candlemas next, agreed and secured a regrant, to lord and abbot jointly and their successors, of the Beechbourne and Chickmarsh charters alike. (These charters were to be reunited in the Malets many generations after, at the Dissolution, yet another Sir Gilbert Malet being the then lord and John Malet being the last, submitting abbot.)

The rivalry between Malet Chickmarsh and the more independent-minded Beechbourne, however, began during The Anarchy, and persisted through the Wars of the Roses into the Civil War, although it is nowadays confined to the pitch. (Chickmarsh supported Maud; Beechbourne, Stephen; Beechbourne was Lancastrian, Chickmarsh was Yorkist; Beechbourne was moderately Parliamentarian, where Chickmarsh was Cavalier to a man....) All the same, the ‘Moorchicks’ of Chickmarsh and the ‘Cowmen’ of Beechbourne continue to needle one another at every opportunity – and general election.

The expansion of the town towards the Bourne was accelerated by the losses sustained in the catastrophe of the Black Death, when the centre of its population shifted decisively Southwards of the old High Street, which preserves its name, but not its function, as such. A modern epidemiologist should consider this precisely the wrong response to epidemic bubonic and septicaemic plague, but it seemed reasonable to most of those living and surviving at the time – although Prior Martin, in Thorndown, argued that bad air and bad humours were more prevalent the nearer to the bourne and all plashy places, and the drier and wider lands were healthier, and downlands even more so. All the same, Beechbourne as we know it today is concentrated well Southwards of its original centre.

After the slow recovery from the Black Death, Beechbourne shared in the general wealth generated by the wool trade, as its parish church reflects; but it did so only by reason of its being a Malet holding. Its own work and wealth was in maltings, corn, butter, and cheese, not in wool, excepting the mixed-use Wold Farm and the small stretch of calcareous grassland kept as pastoral to the Westwards of the town; and as trade flourished and transport improved, Beechbourne, as a market town, became an entrepôt outright, as it remains.

Much of the ancient beech forest the fag-end of which survives as Woody End seems to have gone into the building of Beechbourne, first along High Street and then in its present centre; early Beechbourne must have been largely timber-framed. The Hythe and its stretch of Beech Bourne do not command clays serviceable for brick-making; but from a very early period, and certainly since the effective rebuilding and all but re-founding of Beechbourne after the Plague Years, Chickmarsh stone has been readily available, if by a circuitous route by water, even for domestic architecture. (It was of course always used for ecclesiastical and manorial buildings; but the quantity which could be moved along the Chickmarsh Road by draught animals and sledding was quite limited in relation to the expense as inflated by the cost of transport.) Beechbourne today is largely a stone-built, where not a stone-faced, town.

The coming of metalled roads and turnpikes increased the town’s prosperity, gave it in many parts a Georgian air, brought fame to its coaching inns, and dowered it with such markers of wealth as Wine Street, Snuff Street, and Silk Street. In the very dawn of the reign of Victoria, construction of an otiose Corn Exchange, first planned in the last years of the Prince Regent and quarrelled over all through the reign of William 4th, commenced. Sadly – or, architecturally speaking, fortunately –, what might have been expected to have been a high noon of Victorian prosperity failed of its promise owing to the absorption of the original Woolfonts & Chickmarsh Railway by the GWR, followed by the GWR’s decision to minimise scheduled traffic to and through Beechbourne.

The death of the ninth Duke of Taunton at the Somme left Beechbourne, as well as Chickmarsh and The Woolfonts, in amber, preserved by trustees who kept it just ticking over; during this somnolent period, the advowson of the church living was given to the bishop, and portions of the freehold in the town, sold, in order to preserve the Estate’s grasp upon its core properties.

Since the accession of the tenth Duke in 1975, however, and much the more under the direction of the current and eleventh Duke, Charles, Duke of Taunton, Beechbourne has begun to hum, looking to His Grace to give a lead, in quite the old style: although, in the case of the late Brigadier Duke and of His present Grace, this is based not upon rank or class, but upon their commanding personal qualities. It was in the days of the tenth Duke that the former coaching inn, The Thee Buckles (a charge from the ducal arms), was converted to the core of the Beechbourne care home; and, on the advice of the then Lord Templecombe, the present Duke, that the old grammar school, successor to the priory grammar school at Thorndown, revived and returned to its Edwardian name of the Beechbourne Free School. Legally, it is in fact an academy, not a free school; but its name antedates that recent distinction.

The *Herald & Courier,* one of the oldest remaining business concerns in the town, was created by the merger, in the year the Second Boer War broke out, of the Beechbourne *Courier* – wittily called by its detractors the *Courtier* –, founded in 1739 partly in the then duke’s admitted interest and largely to preach destruction to Walpole and all his works, and the *Herald,* the paper of the Liberal-Radical ‘town’ and burgess interest, founded as a daily penny-paper in 1847, the year after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Its offices, converted from another of the 18th Century coaching inns of Beechbourne, make one of a fine range of buildings on the Westward side of the market square and green.

Beechbourne today is a tourist destination, but also yet working town, as a market town for a substantial region, the post town for the District, and the centre of numerous service firms, legal professionals, media, and dairy production and maltings in the immediately adjoining countryside. Ford’s of Beechbourne, Bakers, are perhaps the leading and most prosperous, as they are the oldest, of the town’s retail concerns.

The Holly and The Ivy: Tea Rooms: West Country Cream Teas: Est. 1999, is a popular spot, as is the Agnini’s Italian restaurant; there are numerous public houses, most them free houses.

### **Town layout; economic and social history**

Beechbourne High Street, running roughly East- and Westwards, although in the town curving and tending to run from the West South West to the East North East, has long since ceased to *be* a high street. The centre of commerce, and, to an extent, population, has drifted Southwards of it since the Black Death, and by the time of Bosworth fight its functions as a high street had passed to its roughly parallel sister to the Southwards: which, on a marked North East to South West axis, begins as Silver Street at Trivia Corner, becomes (since the days of the Second James) Duke Street in its central reaches, and, upon its intersection with the East-West-tending Staple Lane, becomes – in its Georgian guise – Snuff Street, before curving back Northwards as Silk Street to rejoin the High: fathering on its way a thoroughfare running Westwards, Wool Lane, which rejoins the nominal High Street in Woody End to the Westwards of the town.

Trivia Corner is the meeting place not only of Silver Street and High Street, but – as the name implies – the road running Northwards from that junction to Manor Farm: Corn Lane. At Trivia Corner, the old High Street resumes its name and function as the Sharpington Road, with Manor Farm to its North and Wold Farm to its South; at Woody End, where Wool Lane joins the same High Street and where, a few yards Westwards, The Drove branches off to run its Northing course, Beechbourne High Street becomes again both nominally and actually the Chickmarsh Road.

Chickmarsh struggled, early on, to justify its market charter; but it possessed, quite as much as ever did Beechbourne and a trifle over, navigable waters. Indeed, at Chickmarsh, these are nearer the parish church, which stands anciently at some distance from the town, with the suburb hamlet of Little Pinfold having grown up between, and the old Priory Mill upon the bank. Beechbourne, in the great days of the staple, must needs have contented itself with landings at Beechbourne Hythe, at the very head of navigation, ‘Ostia to its Rome’; and with smaller barges and craft of shallower draught, if more frequent and numerous to make up for it. But Beechbourne was nearer the Woolfonts, and that had more than made up for that disadvantage; and Beechbourne knew only Thorndown and Woody End as its fringes, where Chickmarsh and Little Pinfold had, beyond manor farm, mill, and church, Plague Pit End.

Within Beechbourne proper, what must certainly once have been the centre and market is marked by the juncture of the High with Wine Street, which runs South by just East from the High to Silver Street, and thence to that blind lane turning Eastwards to the fences of Wold Farm, which is known time out of mind as, ‘Aleconners Lane’; and by Wine Street’s Northwards-running counterpart, offset a few yards to the Westwards, which extends Northwards by a trifle West from the High Street into the countryside under the name of ‘Butter Street’, whence it becomes in time a route to the Woolheads.

Aleconners Lane is quiet nowadays; it was not so in the times of generations of publicans, topers, and brewers, when it was thick with pubs as a hedge is thick with brambles and boasted most of the coaching inn, the Three Buckles. Nowadays, it is given over to the stillness apposite to the purlieus of the Beechbourne care home. The drinking trade, like all trade in Beechbourne, has gone largely elsewhere: to Church Street, Duke Street, and Staple Lane.

Westwards of the ancient centre of the early town, Church Street, its nomenclature obvious, and boasting so considerable a wool church that the town wanted no other, runs Southerly by Easterly to and across Duke Street and then ’round to Staple Lane, which is the base of the rough triangle formed by Duke Street, Church Street, and Staple Lane itself. Within that triangle are the village green, the duck pond, the War Memorial, and the market and its cross; Duke Street boasts the town’s shopping parade, in premises Pevsner and Betjeman had lauded and which Alec Clifton-Taylor should, had he been spared, have approved this very morning; and the *Herald & Courier* surveys the doings of the town from its premises – once a coaching inn – upon that portion of Church Street between Staple Lane and Silver Street, looking across the green towards the Guildhall, the Assembly Rooms, the Theatre, and the Victorian Corn Exchange: this last a surprising exercise in Georgian survivalism despite the Victorian tendency to blatancy and the utter want of any necessity in it save civic one-upmanship. Being a haunt of journalists, the *H&C* offices are not infrequently almost untenanted, as the press are well aware that the best place for news is the public house at the corner of Silver Street and Wine Street, for all that the inn at the corner of Church Street and Staple Lane is the nearer to the newspaper’s offices and the market-life of the town.

Staple Lane is, in its way, a significant street, indeed a mystical liminal space, a threshold and portal: for Southwards of it, the names of thoroughfares change: Duke Street, as noted, becoming Snuff Street and then curving back to parallel itself as Silk Street from which Wool Lane runs Westwards, and Church Street becoming, at its juncture with Staple Lane, Monk Street, which name it retains on its Southwards journey through Prior’s Postern into the exurb of Thorndown, once site to the priory, and thence into the open countryside or off to Beechbourne Hythe. Beechbourne itself, as a town of John’s foundation, like Chickmarsh which was chartered as a town by the first Richard, had never been walled. Although the Beechbourne Free School nowadays occupies much of the land between Snuff Street and Silk Street, its street address – parents being tetchy about such things – is not that of Snuff Street itself, but of Duke Street.

The very street-names of the old market town reflect its history: the original High Street and Church Street; Monk Street, and the reminder, at Trivia Corner, that there had always been a school of some sort in Beechbourne or Thorndown, since the days of tonsured teachers dinning the *trivium* and *quadrivium* into student pates; the mediæval staples recalled in Corn Lane, Butter Street, and Aleconners Lane, and the mediæval Staple itself remembered in Staple Lane and Wool Lane; the markers of ever-increasing prosperity and commerce, from the 14th Century to the days of Anne and the Georges, marked by Wine Street, Silk Street, and Snuff Street in turn; and the recognition of that Stuart political fact which Duke Street recognises.

Architecturally, as Alec Clifton-Taylor insisted, ‘so much had been good from the beginning’, and has happily been preserved: jettied houses and shops; proper bargeboards and excellent doorcases; the arcaded shopping parade beneath the jetties; the absence of tiles and cresting in the slate-roofed town; the cutwaters of the little bridge at the Hythe: ‘the right styles and materials in their proper places’.

The Market Square – in fact a triangle, with duck pond and village green as well as the Cloth Market Cross, the Butter Cross, and the Clock Hall – is notably extensive.

So, also, Wold Farm, where the wood had been felled to extend the downland Champion Country whose sheep had proved the wool and the staple and contributed to the market prosperity of the town, and Thorndown, and Woody End, are pleasing echoes of history, and of economic history not least.

It is Westwards of Woody End, just at the limits of the town corporation’s bounds, that the Ramsditch Way – a public footpath and bridlepath and an ancient trackway – crosses the Chickmarsh Road, just above the point at which that road intersects Wool Lane and becomes Beechbourne High Street for a time.

Although Beechbourne Hythe itself was in the Abbey’s possession through its obedientiary Priory at Beechbourne, and the Bourne there fordable, commerce required a bridge, and it was built: by the Malets, who charged a toll for its use. Abbot’s Gatehouse, like Prior’s Postern, in turn demanded tolls for passage by Monk Street through the Priory’s walled grounds.

## **Antiquities and archaeology**

In addition to the parish church of S Hugh Beechbourne, the redundant church of S Mary Thorndown, the ruins of the old priory, and the mediæval buildings in the town, the antiquities of Beechbourne are concentrated primarily upon the ancient ways: the Drove, the Ramsditch Way, the Here Way, and the Roman road the last follows or parallels in the vicinity. Archaeological investigation in the area has been surprisingly wanting, although Her Grace the Duchess of Taunton – professionally, Professor Millicent Lacy, The Baroness Lacy *suo jure* – intends that that change in short order.

## **Religious Sites**

Thorndown church – S Mary Thorndown – was reduced in size and repointed for parish use after the Dissolution, from the priory church; Beechbourne itself, as a market town, always had its own parish church. S Mary Thorndown is now redundant, but has been kept up in perfect order and never deconsecrated. The remainder of the priory site was for many years a local quarry for what was always primarily a stone or stone-faced town, given its site.

The town church of S Hugh Beechbourne was a 12th Century church on its present site, but rebuilt in the late 14th to early 15th Century as a ‘wool’ church, in expectation of continued, rebounding population growth which did not eventuate to anything like the expected extent suggested by its architecture. S Hugh Beechbourne is part of the combined benefice which includes S Osmund Chickmarsh and the eponymous churches of Woolhead S Margaret and Woolhead S Aldhelm (Margaret of Antioch and Aldhelm have a surprising number of patronal dedications in West Wiltshire and the adjoining bits of country, sometimes all but cheek-by-jowl with neighbouring parishes with the same dedicatee). The Team Rector is the Revd Canon Judith Potecary; her Team Vicar is the Revd John (Jock) Birdwell. There is an 1878 Victorian-Gothick Methodist chapel in Staple Lane, which now serves as a joint Methodist / URC place of worship, Ms Patricia Mullin being the Methodist Local Preacher; the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady & S Edith of Wilton stands, appropriately, in Monk Street, just Southwards of Prior’s Postern, across from the priory ruins. The church itself is markedly undistinguished without, if not plain and rather mean, but a jewel within, done by Pugin and ecumenically paid for by the seventh and eighth Dukes; the equally Victorian presbytery, which was *not* run up or touched by Pugin to any degree, is an unabashedly and uncompromisingly ugly building within and without, and the subject of a rather perverse pride and admiration in some quarters – and not least on the part of the present Duke, who compares its hideousness to the magnificently unconscious and uncaring ugliness of the Albert Memorial. The parish priest of the Church of Our Lady & S Edith of Wilton is the Revd Monsignor Timothy Folan MA (TCD, Dub) STB & STL (NUI / Pontifical University of Ireland (Maynooth)) STD (Pontifical Gregorian University), whose geographically extensive and demographically minuscule parish, centred upon and named for Beechbourne, extends through the Woolfonts and the Downlands to the edge of the Vale.

The remains of the old priory are now preserved by the National Trust.

## **Notable buildings**

Of those not previously discussed, the most notable is perhaps the Corn Exchange, a Victorian build first proposed during the Regency as a belated Georgian exercise in the Neo-Classical, and not improved by the delay. It is somewhat naïve; pompous; and, owing to its having accreted Clever New Design Ideas like so many barnacles during the delay between conception and construction, is in fact a surprisingly ugly building, the Georgian and the Victorian in its case having failed to marry and having merely produced a bastard with the worst features of both.

Its pomposity is evident from its proclaiming itself, grandly, upon its ill-proportioned pediment, not as the Corn Exchange, but as the *Forum Cerealis.* Its vicissitudes in its design and construction are revealed in the pediment motto, behind which a favourite Beechbourne anecdote gives the tale. The contemporary Duke of Taunton, a cultivated man and former Acting Governor of Malta, canvassed for a suggestion to adorn a building he thought pointless, rather wearily suggested, *Quoniam meae sunt omnes ferae silvarum, jumenta in montibus, et boves,* from the fiftieth Psalm, *Deus deorum:* ‘For all the beasts of the forest are mine : and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills’.

The then Bishop, whose views were likewise sought as one of the Great and Good of the County, instead suggested that the motto to be carved ought to be, *Domini est terra, et plenitudo ejus; orbis terrarum, et universi qui habitant in eo:* ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’, Psalm 24’s ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that therein is : the compass of the world, and they that dwell therein’. Discovering that the Bishop had (presumptuously) suggested an emendation of his own proposal, His Grace threw the question open on a night upon which he had some of the County magnates – including the Bishop – to dine at Wolfdown, opening the batting with a jest upon ‘Ruth amidst the alien corn’ (which the Bishop found irreverent and wholly unamusing). Some of the more Victorian worthies, conscious of the episcopal eye fixed upon then, piously suggested, ‘the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man’, and, ‘She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant’: which His Grace regarded with cold contempt, not least as somewhat irrelevant to a *Corn* Exchange. Lord Templecombe, his son, the future next Duke, whose opinion of commercial morality was on a par with his view of political probity and aristocratic virtues, suggested, crisply, that Beechbourne simply carve ‘LEVITICVS XIX.11’ into the damned entablature and have done; which was in fact what occurred.

That verse from Leviticus reads, of course, ‘Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another’.

## **Amenities**

Beechbourne possesses a very good (and yet used) Guildhall; Assembly Rooms, the gift of the sixth Duke of Taunton, by Wood the Younger; and one of the three best-preserved Georgian theatres and concert halls in the country. There is a library; and there is a Church primary school, S Hugh’s.

## **Governance**

Effectively all local government functions are carried out by Wiltshire Council. Beechbourne is part of the Beechbourne & The Woolheads electoral ward.

Beechbourne is a civil parish with an elected town council of seven members. This has an almost wholly consultative and ceremonial role, and the chairman of the town council has the title of Mayor of Beechbourne.

## **Politics**

Beechbourne is overwhelmingly Conservative. The Constituency Association is that for The Woolfonts, Beechbourne, and Chickmarsh, of which the co-chairmen are HG the Duke of Taunton and Admiral Sir John – ‘Jacky’ – Collingbourne RN.

## **Demography**

Some 97.7 per cent. of residents in the 2011 Census identified as White British. The remainder identified as Other White (1.2 per cent.) and the rest as Irish (0.7 per cent.) or ‘Any Other (please describe)’. Since that census, there has been a certain degree of increased diversity in the town.

Of those declaring a religious affiliation – a higher number than the national average, at 72.78 per cent. –, 8.03 per cent. of that 72.78 per cent. declined to specify which religion they adhered to; and 91.09 per cent. of these specified Christianity. No respondents identified as Muslim, Hindu. Sikh, or Buddhist; there is however apparently a professed ‘Jedi’ or three in the town.

## **Transport**

### **Road**

The Sharpington-Road-Beechbourne-High-Street-Chickmarsh-Road succession is the C road linking Sharpington, Beechbourne, and Chickmarsh. Butter Street, becoming the Woolhead Road, links to the Woolheads; Monk Street, becoming the Woolfont Road, links to the Woolfonts.

### **Bus**

There is currently no scheduled bus service to Beechbourne, although there are plans to extend the ‘Woollybus’ service to it.

### **Railways**

The recreation of the W&CR under Charles, Duke of Taunton and Sir Thomas Douty Bt has restored its railway – and its station – to Beechbourne. Beechbourne Station, Jacobean in form, with its train shed like a tithe barn, recreating in wrought iron a hammerbeam roof, has become a popular destination in its own right for trippers; but the early and late milk trains and other goods traffic are perhaps more important to the economic life of the town.

### **Canal**

His Grace being intent upon recreating the never-built Georgian canal in the Woolfonts and Downlands, there has been some hope of an extension to Beechbourne; however, this is unlikely in the extreme, as Beechbourne never had a canal nor any plan to build one or Act of Parliament authorising one.

## **Commerce**

In addition to its functions as a retail centre, market town, tourist destination, and hub for professional services, Beechbourne gains a considerable income from dairying and from maltings, most of the latter going to the Woolfont Brewery and the remainder to Arkell’s, Wadworth, Moles, Hop Back, Downtown, and others.

## **Media and communication**

Beechbourne is served by BBC Wiltshire (wireless) and the BBC West television programming region.

### **Media**

The local weekly (print, Thursdays) and online (continuous) newspaper is the Beechbourne *Herald & Courier.*

## **Culture**

The Assembly Rooms and Theatre regularly see lectures and musical and stage performances of high quality. There is a cinema in Staple Lane. Beechbourne also has an excellent Silver Band.

## **Climate**

Beechbourne experiences an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification *Cfb*) similar to much of the rest of the United Kingdom. In terms of local climate, Beechbourne is amongst the sunniest of Inland areas in the UK.

## **Education**

Local education is provided by S Hugh’s and the Beechbourne Free School.

## **Notable people**

* George Archdale
* Tom le Baker
* Holly Beacham
* Ivy Brodrick
* John ‘Roaring Jack’ Cavell
* Margaret ‘Meg’ Cavell, née Walrond
* Philip ‘Pip’ Cavell
* Philippa (‘Pippa’) Margaret Winifred Cavel (Mrs George Archdale)
* RAdm Sir John Collingbourne RN
* His Honour Judge GMJ Cundick
* Cicely Cundick-Pinnell MB ChB MRCPsych CCT
* Rodger Douty
* George Douty MP
* Simon Douty
* Alfred Ford
* Henry ‘Hal’ Ford
* John Ford (the elder)
* John Ford (the younger)
* Robert Ford
* Anthony Macey
* The Revd Canon Judith Potecary
* Dame Edith Rice
* Jeremy Trulock
* WGM Walrond

## **Sport**

The town has a non-league football club, Beechbourne Town F.C.

Beechbourne Cricket Club play at the Club Ground in Thorndown. The 1st XI play in the Wiltshire division of the West of England Premier League, where, were it not for the all-conquerant Woolfonts Combined CC 1st XI, they should finish regularly in the first five.

## **In popular culture**

Beechbourne was often painted by Sir Bennett Salmon RA.

## **Twin towns**

* Étretat (Normandy)
* Charles City, Virginia USA

## **See also**

* Beechbourne Free School
* Beechbourne *Herald & Courier*
* Beechbourne Railway Station
* Philippa (‘Pippa’) Margaret Winifred Cavel (Mrs George Archdale)
* His Honour Judge GMJ Cundick
* Cicely Cundick-Pinnell MB ChB MRCPsych CCT
* Anthony Macey
* Sir Geoffrey Malet
* Sher Mirza
* Judith Potecary
* Dame Edith Rice
* Sir Bennett Salmon RA
* Jeremy Trulock

**References**

**Further Reading**