Corsecombe Parish, north

The northern part of Corsecombe parish with a base over a raster map and basic terrain hillshade. An overlay of turnpike roads

Corsecombe Parish, north

This year 2017, sees the 1000th anniversary of the crowning of Danish King Cnut in 1017. And a pleasure to say that we will be joined by Dr Ken Lawson ‘an acknowledged expert on the late Anglo-Saxon period’ and author of Cnut, England’s Viking King 1016-35; 1993/2011) who recently forwarded me as an attachment his re-translation of Ethelred’s 1014 Corscombe charter of 1014 suggesting it may have been ‘tampered with.’ He notes this will be the first time he has ever walked an A-S charter boundary ‘for real’ ‘on the ground.’ (And not least – one in the name of King Cnut).

Winyards Gap Inn presents itself as an appropriate place for our ‘sit down’ post field-meeting session – noting that it closes at 3pm. Further to this, we have been invited by John Peake of Corscombe Court (a moated site recorded by the OS as ‘Court Farm and remains of Grange’) to visit the 15c barn; Grid Ref St527055, DT2 0NS, sited at the bottom of the hill opposite the Fox Inn. This would be an atmospheric but not overly-comfortable place for our post field-meeting session and suggest that we perhaps visit this (as it were) on the way home. Certainly a site of very considerable interest . . . ‘focus’ of this early ecclesiastical estate where (we may posit), those 11c land surveyors were commissioned to conduct an estate boundary perambulation. The weather may play a part here – and we can talk about this on the day as how to best organise this.