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| Introduction |
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Shapwick is a very small village on the River Stour in Dorset, overlooked by the ancient hill fort of Badbury Rings.
Despite its size, Shapwick has many a story to tell. This web site will try to recount some of these, along with my memories of my childhood days in the village during the 1950s and 1960s. I arrived in Shapwick as a toddler in the very early 1950s with Mum and Dad and at first we lived with my Gran in a very small house called New Barn Cottage. Soon we all moved to a bigger house, the old farmhouse at King's Farm or King's Dairy. This was a super house for a toddler. Flagstones on the floor and an old farmyard with chickens, surrounded by black wooden thatched barns. When Dad left the farm and joined the Railway, we moved to a brand new Council House, with all the mod cons of the day! Gran stayed put for a while but soon moved to the next Council House, beyond Hathaway's thatched cottage. My schooling was all at Wimborne, first at the Infants, then Primary and then Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School (this was Queen Elizabeth I which shows how old the school was!). We were taken by Billy Budden's blue coach, and later by Hants & Dorset buses who provided a fantastic variety of single decker buses and coaches. When not at school, we lads mooched around the village, much like William Brown, doing this and that, having great fun in the big outdoors. Celandines grew in profusion along the ditches and boggy areas and will always remind me of my days at Shapwick. I will include photos and maps and hope that more will come to light through contributions from other Shapwick people.
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