England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Beaworthy St Alban

The Parish

The parish of Beaworthy lies in western Devon roughly 10 miles northwest of the market town of Okehampton. Beaworthy is a tiny place, a hamlet atop a hillside about a mile east of the A3079 road which links Okehampton with Holsworthy. There  is very little in the way of a village to Beaworthy, just a small collection of farms and cottages gathered around a three-way junction of lanes with a wider scatter of the same across the parish. Beaworthy parish has a very peculiar shape being a narrow thin strip of lane along a northwest to southeast alignment, long yet rather narrow. Like most parishes in the area pastoral farming of dairy cattle would have dominated the local economy yet Beaworthy, according to early gazetteers was little used for agriculture with over 60% of the parish acreage described as "waste". Modern developments came and left from Beaworthy, a branch railway line linking Holsworthy through to Okehampton has nowadays been largely dismantled and sections through nearby plantations serve as a hiking & cycling route. Beaworthy is drained northeastwards by a small headwater of the River Lew which joins the Torridge to the north of Hatherleigh and makes its way to the outer Bristol Channel arriving through the port of Bideford. Beaworthy sits on something of a local high spot being 190 metres above the sea but land does continue to rise southwards with a high point of 254 metres on the A3079 at Hender Barrows. The strange shape of Beaworthy parish lead to it covering just over 1,900 acres which would have supported a population of close to 400 parishioners. In Domesday times Beaworthy was a rather small and insignificant rural settlement, held by one William de Poilley it could muster just a pair of ploughs to complement its meadows & pastures.

The Church

St Alban's church is tucked away to the east of the village's crossroads with fronting properties almost obscuring it from view, Sadly there is little of the medieval left following the enthusiastic rebuilding of Victorian times. A trace of the Norman Romanesque from the 12th century can be noted in the southern doorway although these have almost certainly been reused. The basal stage of the tower has a single lancet window albeit it is probably 14th rather than typically 13th from the Early English Gothic period, fashions were obviously slow to evolve in this rural backwater. Most else dates from Victorian times, an extensive rebuild took place in 1871 and most of the church's fabric dates from those times. Parking is slightly tricky along these narrow lanes and should be done with consideration. The best clue for locating the entrance is the remaining village telephone box which stands just north of the entrance gates. From here a shady flagged path leads through a patch of trees to the churchyard. The church sits tightly squeezed into the southwestern corner of the churchyard with dense hedging and trees taking most of the favoured southern aspects and making for a tricky subject on a sunny day.