West Orchard
West Orchard is a small village and civil parish in the county of Dorset in southern England. It is situated in the Blackmore Vale in the North Dorset administrative district, approximately halfway between the towns of Shaftesbury and Sturminster Newton. It is separated from the adjacent settlement of East Orchard by a stream. In 2013 the civil parish had an estimated population of 50. For local government purposes the parish is grouped with the parishes of East Orchard and Margaret Marsh, to form a Group Parish Council.
St Luke's Church was rebuilt in 1876–77 to the designs of Thomas Henry Wyatt, but the chancel is 15th-century.
Etymology
The name of West Orchard is first attested in a charter of 939 (surviving in a fifteenth-century copy), in the form Archet. The name derives from the Common Brittonic words that survive in modern Welsh as ar ("on") and coed ("wood"), and thus the name once meant "at the wood". Its modern form shows assimilation to the English noun orchard through folk-etymology. The element West was added to the name later when the settlement became distinct from East Orchard.
References
- ^ "Parish Population Data". Dorset County Council. 20 January 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
- ^ The Orchards and Margaret Marsh Group Parish Council, dorsetforyou.com
- ^ Historic England (16 August 1960). "CHURCH OF UNKNOWN DEDICATION, West Orchard (1110395)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 12 January 2021.
- ^ Watts, Victor, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521168557., s.v. Orchard.
- ^ Coates, Richard; Breeze, Andrew (2000). Celtic Voices, English Places: Studies of the Celtic Impact on Place-Names in Britain. Stamford: Tyas. ISBN 1900289415..
External links
Media related to West Orchard at Wikimedia Commons
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