in recent years there has been much talk about the lost villages of dorset random
videos from days of old newspaper articles you name it now they're said to be up to 100
lost villages in dorset and they all are said to have one thing in common
the blue outline on this map gives a rough indication of the county of dorset now if i
plot the table of locations that i've researched which shows all the lost villages i can find well
it doesn't look very exciting but what if i change the underlying map from google maps to this map
so this is wholeness church and it's difficult to date because it's got some different features from
many many different areas but uh mainly one of which is some graffiti just there from the 1600s
and probably a lot more as well if we come inside there's all sorts again
from different areas there's a medieval barrel roof now some of the archways
from the more recent hamwood quarry i think the stone there must have been easy to manipulate and
make some of the more decorative features this is a truly stunning church but we're not going
to be talking about that today as such we'll talk about religion what we want to talk about today is
something that isn't here let's just pan around and have a look outside and what can
you see well what can't you see exactly did this church serve there's no houses that way
nothing that way nothing that way and nothing behind the church there's literally
nothing here for as far as i can see in every direction
further to the south just up ahead of me it's quite a walk but i assure you
it's one that you will want to make when you see what's
just in front of the camera now lyscombe it's recorded as far back as the saxon period
and then presumably on into the doomsday booking the medieval period thereafter
so the stream runs down through this valley looks like it collects from up on this can
bottom there the huge basin that is and just ahead of me here is what looks like it could
be like an old mill or something but i'm guessing actually it was more like a pool
to collect water for maybe like a sheep wash or something like that cattle wash of some kind
but what we really want to show you today is what's just there in the background of this shot
up on the hill just to the north east of the the basin there is an old settlement marked
on the os maps i'd love to think that it had something to do with his old remains just ahead
of me here the chapel just there and of course the old building the house or whatever it was
just here it's a really fascinating landscape now in the 12th century i believe this had
a number of dwellings in the area it was recorded what the people do
and how many there were and i guess that was for taxation a bit like the doomsday book
but this is um quite something else a big half behind me another one through there another
fireplace up there indicates there would have been another floor at least so maybe not perhaps
a manor house but certainly a significant barn right next to the chapel just there
i know i said you should really come to this area a bit of a trek but honestly
i can't recommend it enough let's see if the chapel is open and we can have a look inside
it is wow recently renovated and you can tell that not least by the
the thatched roof um okay some of the
obviously much newer beams and then look we've got some even really old features this beam here
and no idea what that is up there and a mix of features like some of the other churches we've
seen or chapels we've seen today it's got a mix of different areas and again this is not my area of
expertise by any means but you can certainly tell um that there's a lot going on here different eras
it's really difficult to imagine that this old chapel very old chapel and the abandoned
cottage or house that's just here right beside it would have been the only things in this landscape
especially if you consider the old settlement up on the hill at the top of the valley there now
perhaps that would have been quite an era earlier but i'd love to imagine that somehow they did link
over time and this became the place of worship but again the point being you would very much
imagine a number of other buildings around this community for that chapel to serve at the time
if you dig around the beautiful county of dorset it doesn't take much research
to find more of these long forgotten villages this is knowlton and the abandoned
church here sits inside one of three hinges in the local area
the church itself is said to have some extremely old features now if we look up just the top of the
arts well there that archway is supposedly anglo-saxon and just behind me over here
the archway there is supposed to be norman now i'm no expert on that by any means but at least
it gives us some context to how old this church is and how important it was again sat on top of
this landscape on this hill it's also said to be on some ancient trackways well that's
kind of makes sense because again we're on top of the chalk
and we're heading that way towards salisbury and stonehenge
so this church the knowlton church the christians plonked it in the middle of
the henge where exactly did it serve what village did it so because there's nothing around uh the
close vicinity what exactly was the four so let's head down the road just there to the river allen
not sure how well it comes out on camera but the bank just back there you can see that runs
all the way along here is quite important in relation to knowlton the church and obviously
the whole landscape around here so where is the abandoned village well just ahead of me is the
river allen and it said that all this land here was flattened over many decades centuries probably
and was used for farming that's why it doesn't really follow the contour of the land it should
slowly slope upwards to the top of the ditch there you see in the distance so just the other side of
the river just over there there were a number of hollow ways there were boundaries enclosures
and some markings it looked like they resembled what would have been old houses but again
nothing here to speak of today apart from one house and a farm building just ahead of me
so where is all this going what do these villages long forgotten
have in common well let's go back to that map and specifically the overlay because
the map is a geological one and the central belt is predominantly chalk now to the southern end of
the map is west ringsted and just to the west of this car park there is a field containing
enclosures holloways all kinds of worthworks now at the top of this field is glebe cottage
it was once a church that served the local community here which now doesn't exist
but unlike the others this community isn't on chalk land but what it does give us is perhaps
the most important view of today's story the view from west ringsted well it takes us across the
bay here around about three miles south west and it's time to consider the most important date here
when we try and understand what happened to all these villages on the chalk the 25th of june 1348
and the port of malcolm now weymouth two ships sailed in one of which was carrying the plague
which had been working its way across europe for the last year or so it was only a matter of time
before it started infecting the population and working its way northwards up across the chalk
dorchester and its surrounding villages and small populations would have probably been
one of the first places that the plague hit on that fateful day in 1348 and it said that
the play could have halved the population of the uk and when you consider that so much of that
was already on the chalk uplands of the south in dorset well in front of me now is perhaps
a great example of one of these early villages that is no more the lost village of holworth
here we are in this field which has got earthworks of plenty whole worth was mentioned in 933 a.d
it was mentioned in the doomsday book and on each occasion it had a small population a modest
population but a dig in 1936 found all sorts of old pottery here 12th century and up to the 15th
century uh rubbled houses uh rubbled floor on some houses and old properties here and yeah looking
ahead of me now you can see a sea of earthworks and boundaries all kinds of things going on here
now the archaeological evidence that was found here
dated the abandonment of this village as early as around about the 1600s
so many of the ancient rootways came inland from the south up onto the chalk here the high
and dry route inland so it's no surprise that many settlements ancient settlements grew up
here along those routes and there's countless evidence of that all around us to the north west
you had the more densely forested area to the southeast of here you had a more acidic soil
that of sort of the sort of the new forest area so it really made these chalklands the best place for
rootways and of course thereafter settlement and sort of early neolithic farming i guess
all around us here is the ancient settlement of gusset and there's earthworks everywhere
it probably highlights really here the importance of all of this area gussets the
settlement sits pretty much uh in the middle of the curses which is said to be a 5 000 year old
parallel ditches and it really shows that they have been using this whole landscape for numerous
reasons for millennia perhaps those people had indeed been traveling up from weymouth or the
malcolm regis port for millennia and making their mark on this landscape ever since all the way up
through here and and leaving random amazing earth works and mysteries for us to try and solve today
so how does that theory sit with you it certainly fell into my net of obsessions and i spent the
last few weeks doing a spreadsheet of all these abandoned villages and dorset and then
plotting them on the map so i spent ages researching that idea and researched into
all the different villages that became abandoned and read their story and the idea being that as a
population finned out the people the villagers all went to the lower lands where the anglo-saxons had
traditionally been and the forests were cleared and the land became much more workable now that
meant that the the higher villages of the talk became abandoned in the truest sense i love that
idea i love the romance behind it but then you start digging into some of the actual individual
stories of the villagers themselves and it doesn't quite add up so this is hazelbury brian and i'm
just gonna scout to the left of the church to get myself away from the local leaf blowing society
so hazelbury brian serves a few of the villagers around here but none of the villagers are that
close they're all at least sort of a kilometre away in a circle this remains in droop the small
hamlet of droop and it only has a manor house and maybe one other house so why would that be so
droop here where the church remains and the manor house remained was said to be the original
original location of the village until of course the black death and then it was seemingly hit in
two separate waves and that obviously shook people to the core that they reputedly burned
down their village and they moved their settlements to slightly higher ground
all around here now if you have a look on an old os map or a current os map
you can see that the villages that are now in place at this church serves the parishes well
they're actually almost in a circle around this church but quite a distance from it
so back here at wholeness well this is a classic dorset abandoned village there's nothing
in sight maybe a small farm community at the top of the hill there but quite like the others maybe
there's one thing we're missing here the fact that this isn't on chalk it's on that northern
ridge where maybe more of the forestry was so i don't know maybe it's more like hazelbury
brian where they up sticks and they left the community and they burnt the village down
nope not at all because this village was abandoned in the 1600s so maybe we're completely barking up
the wrong tree maybe we need to look at this like evolution rather than just a snapshot in time
maybe this needs to be looked at over decades and perhaps centuries
i love this place i love this old knowlton church and who knows what was here before who knows if
there was a hinge here as in a stone henge in its traditional sense that we know it because a lot of
these blocks could well have been from those sort of days from that period so they may well have
recarved them into the church perhaps who knows now when we first made this video we had every
intention of coming to the same conclusion as jack hargreaves and more recent reports which suggested
all these abandoned villages up on the the chalk here were there because of the black plague and
it thinned out the population and they had to move down into the more fertile soil but
it really shows that actually when you do dig into some of the individual cases around here you can
use more modern research you learn that actually there's there's always a story behind each and
every village and it doesn't always quite add up to that theory now i'm sure that that theory
does ring true in a lot of cases i'm not here we don't want to be the people that sort of challenge
every accepted uh theory every accepted notion but yeah i think that social change happens over
decades and decades and there's always something else to consider but yeah the black plague is
certainly high up there on the agenda so i've been pulled and i've been moseying around dorset
really appreciate your time for watching this video if you liked and you like this sort of thing
which is just me sometimes rebecca wandering around the countryside
then click on that subscribe button and uh yeah we'll see you next week
you