England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Alton Pancras St Pancras

The Parish

The parish of Alton Pancras lies in the western portion of central Dorset roughly 8 miles north of the county town of Dorchester. Alton Pancras sits on the B3413 road which links Dorchester through the valley of the River Piddle to the A357 (Sherborne to Sturminster Newton) road. Alton Pancras is a long straggle of a village confined to the bottom of the incised valley in which it sits with most properties lining either side of the B3413 for a little over a quarter of a mile. Alton Pancras sits in the upper reaches of the Piddle Valley surrounded by rolling and steeply sided chalk downland, a landscape once the haunt of countless sheep but nowadays increasingly ploughed. The parish is drained southwards by the intermittent Piddle, after Puddletown it turns east to enter Poole Harbour through the town of Wareham and the Wareham Channel before reaching the English Channel. Alton Pancras is sited on a rising valley site between 110 and 130 metres above the sea but is surrounded by high chalk hills capped by the local Wessex Ridgeway Trail, the highest summits, Ball Hill reaches 250 and Little Minterne Hill at 261 lie to the east and west respectively. Alton Pancras parish was toward the larger end of the Dorset scale, covering just under 2,300 acres it would have supported a population of close to 250 parishioners. In Domesday times Alton Pancras was a holding of the Bishop of Salisbury and was a typical southern rural holding offering 7 ploughs, backed by meadows, pastures and woodland and also held a mill.

The Church

St Pancras' church sits west of the B3413 accessed along a dead-end lane which passes between two impressive stone gate-piers that Pevsner dates to c1740. Sadly only the western tower remains from the medieval period as the main body of the church was completely rebuilt between 1874 & 1875, thus much of the church would be unrecognisable to the participants in these marriages. The medieval tower is late even for that early period being 15th century and Perpendicular in style. The tower has a flourish at its top with battlements and crocketed corner pinnacles all sitting above a typical 15th century base. Two architects were responsible for the designs of the replacement nave and chancel, the former retains the style of the Perpendicular whilst the latter, jarring slightly follows the earlier style of the 13th century Early English Gothic. The dead-end lane broadens sufficiently for a car or two to safely park outside the gates of the churchyard, unusually only a corner of that protrudes beyond adjoining properties. Sadly for the photographer St Pancras is a church with many challenges to photograph with close set trees, in particular in the favoured quadrants, hugging it closely, a real challenge to accurately convey.