page 3

A station was built at Smokam on the road to North Eggardon complete with~goods sidings for £260. A notice on the front of the Parish Magazine for September 1857 - a bit premature perhaps - states that ‘Copies may be obtained at ihe book depot at Powerstock Station’. The line then served the parish well for many years. Besides passengers there was a large amount of goods- traffic. A milk factory was built at Maiden Newton and milk from Powerstock farms was taken daily from the station for turning into cheese, a big~~improvement on having to make cheese and take it from the farms to Bridport or Dorchester markets. Fat cattle, sheep and pigs were sent direct to Smithfield and, of course, coal, fertilizers and other requirements were brought in by rail. In 1963 the line provided the only link with the outside world for Bridport and other places served by it when severe weather conditions closed all road links. Eventually it fell victim to the Beeching axe and was closed in 1975.

The Railway was replaced by a bus service heavily subsidised by the County Council. It was not convenient for certain people who had to make other arrangements. This meant fewer passengers and the timetable was curtailed So it goes on - a vicious circle.
The first Post Office was established in Powerstock in 1859 in Ivy Cottage. It was later moved across the road and a telegraph key installed. Unfortunately, all early records of postal services in the area were moved for safe keeping at the outbreak of war in 1939 and have not been seen since!
For many years mail was delivered by a Postman who walked Out daily from Melplash, spent his spare time mending shoes in a hut at North Poorton and then walked back in the evening emptying the boxes on the way. The present Post Office was opened in Nettlecombe in 1971.
The roads of the parish were largely built and certainly maintained by the Gale family of Knapp Farm who in 1922, tarred and chipped the road to the village from Bridport. To bring the place right into the twentieth century electricity came in 1935.
Once the road was metalled the motor car moved in and the demise of the parish was speeded up~ The carrier’s cart was no longer needed as trades-people could come from town easily with groceries, meat, coal, clothes and at the same time take away eggs, nets made in the cottages; the milk lorry collected the milk and of course, people themselves could travel. With the car came more and more farm machinery which replaced the men who went into the towns to work. They did this when the railway came but the road was so much more convenient. It ran past almost everyone’s door. The machinery pushed the men off the land but they could earn more in the town and they still can - one man walked to Beaminster every day - so that the population started to fall. We have seen the effect on the school but that wasn’t the only thing that suffered. The village cobbler went. His shop is still standing opposite the ‘Three Horseshoes’. The slaughterhouse closed its door and the baker went.
In twentyfive years Milton lost its Inn, Chapel and Church, Post Office and shop. It lost its w6rking population who could not afford the high prices paid for property by retiring people from the towns.
Powerstock village has still got a Church and a pub. The school is under threat and the vicarage has already been auctioned off as was the original school a few years ago despite the fact that the land it stood on was given to the parish ‘for a school in connection with the Established Church of England for ever’.
Wytherstone today is accepted as part of the Parish of Powerstock but in 1847 it had~a Rector, the Revd. Charles Forward. There was no church at that time and services were held in the open ‘The Legg family being musical’. According to Hutchins ‘the inhabitants~of the village of Wytherstone come to Poorstock Church, have seats there and join in all the duties to Church and poor but pay no tythes to the parsonage or vicarage and it is a sinicure at £20 per annum.’ Wytherstone is said to have been built with stones from the Castle at Powerstock.
North Poorton, in Domesday book Powertone, was held by the Abbey of Tavestock, is on the northern boundary of the parish and is part of the civil parish. In Edward’s (?) time it was taxed for two hides. In 1430 Robert Pokeswele held lands here of the Abbot of Milton. In 1881 the census showed sixtyone inhabitants, enough for an Inn!
Whetley on the road to Eggardon was big enough at one time to support a Dames &hool as indeed did Poorton and Powerstock itself. Today it consists of three houses.
Mappercombe Manor, in the southwest of the Parish was granted by Queen Elizabeth to Edward and Nicholas Browne. Some sixty years later there was a quarrel in the family between Henry and Hugh Brown? and the Manor was split into two farms, Browne’s Farm and Mappercombe Farm and they are still part of the same estate. For many years the Browne family hatchment has hung in the Parish Church. In 1900 Capt. Nicholson bought the estate of Mappercombe and set about modernizing it. Typical of the cottage dwellings of the area is a cottage off the square in Nettlecombe. Modernized inside it was left in its original shape without. In 1911 Nicholson had water piped about the Parish from Eggardon Hill in cast iron pipes which are still in use today.
Nettlecombe. ‘Netelcombe’ belonged to the Abbey of Cerne. For many years much of it has been part of the Mappercombe Estate.
Milton - West Milton - too, belonged to the Abbey of Cerne in Domesday book ‘The same Church holds Middlestone’ ‘A mill there pays 65d and there are sixteen acres of meadow.’ In 1650 it had a vicarage and a decent and substantial chapel.’
Kelly’s Directory of 1848 shows the population of Powerstock Village only as 1,090. It lists a blacksmith, a wheelwright there was one in Milton too - and a shopkeeper called Hansford. Eleven years later it adds a Miller - he must have been missed in the earliest edition surely! - a dressmaker, Post Office Receiving House (John Gale, post clerk and carpenter) Everard Willet, Schoolmaster and organist, Sam Wrixon, Asst. Overseer. R. W. Handsford (Tax collector and Farmer) Shoe-maker and Sextoji (Peter Newlyn).
In 1873 Kelly’s notes a school at Nettlecombe with Harry B. Score as Headmaster but it is the only such record and appears to be wrong. 1885 gives us a Tailor, a Higgler (a buyer of eggs) and a Coal and Coke dealer -the railway was well established by now. It also mentions Miss Virtue Hansford as Asst. Overseer. We have already heard of her sister Fanny and they lived in Lindisfarne, a house almost opposite the vicarage.
In 1871 Everard Willet, schoolmaster under Thomas Sanctuary, lodged in Nettlecombe with Thomas Churchill, cordwainer. In 1851 the census tells us that there were six cordwainers in Nettlecombe and Powerstock, more than ample to look after the footwear of the 1,044 people who lived in the Parish. When times were bad on the farms and men were laid off, either because of economics or weather, they seemed to take up boot repairing and this is repeated in many village statistics.
In the same year, 1871, there were 80 houses at Powerstock and Wytherstone and 23 at Eastwater and the Knapp. There are, today, three houses on the Knapp down including Knapp Farm. The bank which runs from Knapp down to ‘Under Road’ is on the edge of the village today. It is about two hundred yards long and, starting from a point not far from the ‘Shoes’, it finishes up near the river making a triangle, steep at that. Within recent living memory, it contained 19 houses and there is mention of a shop at this time. Today - nothing.
It seems that about 59 houses have disappeared from Powerstock and one must assume that this means the parish immediately around the village. Six Council houses and two private dwellings have been built in the last fifty years. Milton has fared better with a considerable development of some ten houses since 1965 and Nettlecombe has had two Council houses.
Many of the houses that have gone would have fallen in any case. They would not be fit by today’s standards for living in, but lived in they were as is shown by the documents of the last two hundred years. A boy was sent to be apprenticed to a fisherman at Burton Bradstock in 1749 who undertook to provide “sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging, washing and all other things necessary for an apprentice”.
People who wished to reside here were taken to the Bridport magistrates in 1845 to undergo a Settlement Examination to prove that they could keep themselves and not become a charge on the already overloaded Poor Rates.
A warrant was made out for the arrest of one, William Greening, because “He did beget the said child on the body of the said Sarah Hounsell” and he was required to indemnify the Parish against the cost of the bastard soon to be born. This was in 1810 but, fifty years earlier, Robert Northover, a sackcloth maker, bound himself and his family to the Churchwardens and Overseer of the Poor to pay the sum of six-pence weekly to them for the keep of his mother, Elizabeth Northover. She had become “very old and poor and is chargeable to the inhabitants of the aforesaid Parish of Powerstock”.
An Overseer’s account of 1757, the earliest available, charges:-

For streeching out Jn. Gale and carrying to Church 4 0
Pd. for a coffin 5 6
Pd. for beer 4
Pd. for Shroud 2 11

Things got better for, by 1906, there were, in the village, a Girls’ Friendly Society, Girls’ Sewing and Bible Class, a Women’s Union, Ancient Order of Forresters, a Carving Club, a Branch of the Dickens Fellowship, Dancing Classes, a Mothers’ Meeting, Church of England Temperance Society and a Band of Hope - the hand of Sanctuary in the last two! There was a thriving Company of Shakespearian Players with tutors coming from Dorchester by ponytrap. The Mummers too survived until 1930, or thereabouts. There was seWhelp with a Clothing Club, a Coal Club and a Sick and Needy Fund administered by a committee who also organised a Parish nurse.
To supply the basic need of the people, there was a slaughter house and a baker. The baker had rights to cut wood on Powerstock Common to fire his oven. One 5th November, suspecting the worst, he spent the whole night on the Common beside a rick of faggot wood. Eventually at dawn, after feeling the risk had passed, he set off home but, about half-way, he stopped and looked back to see the rick gong up~in flames. His tormentors had obviously had the most patience - we are not told what he said! It was also the custom on this date for the blacksmith.to ‘tire the anvil’. Holes in the anvil would be charged with~powder and a w6~n peg driven in. A red hot iron rod was applied to the underside of the holeand the explosion would blow the plug up to 500 yards!
The Harvest Su~pper was> a regular feature of the place at one time. Indeed, in earlier days, it was part of a man’s wage. A football match took place in the afternoon in which the whole of the male population took part and there was dancing in the Glebe barn in the evening. There is an interesting sidelight on this. In 1906, a parson named Dalison held the living. His wife was sister to Bishop Montgomery and Aunt to the late Lord Montgomery of Alemein. As a young man, he took part in the Glebe dances and is still remembered in uniform dancing with the village girls. The Harvest Supper died out, but was revived about 1948.

page 3