England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Poxwell St John the Evangelist

The Parish

The parish of Poxwell lies in southern Dorset not too far from its English Channel coastline. Poxwell is located roughly 6 miles southeast of the county town of Dorchester and stands on the A353 road which links the port & resort of Weymouth with the A352 (Dorchester to Wareham) road. There is very little to Poxwell today just the manor house and a few cottages sitting on the A353 on the northern side of the chalk ridge that rises westwards to White Horse Hill. This is a landscape filled with signs of early occupation from the pre-Roman tumuli that dot the hilltops to the medieval strip lynchets, remnants of the open field systems, that surround the hamlet. The manor house, built in the early 17th century for the county sheriff of that era dominates the area. At the time of this transcript the chalk downlands would have been the home of sheep grazing the short & sweet turf, today with modern machinery & fertilisers the area has gone over to arable. Poxwell sits on porous substrates with no surface drainage but halfway to the sea a spring forms a brook which descends rapidly to meet the English Channel at Osmington. Poxwell is sited at between 80 & 90 metres above the sea, the ridge rises steadily westwards reaching 158 metres on White Horse Hill above that chalk hill-figure. Poxwell was one of the smallest parishes in its county covering just 851 acres and supporting close to 150 parishioners. In Domesday times Poxwell had just 13 households, a holding of Cerne Abbey its assets amounted to 6 ploughs backed by meadows & pastures.

The Church

Sadly Poxwell is a village which no longer has a church, the medieval church sat just north of the manor house on the western side of the A353, it was demolished in 1866 and replaced by a new St John finished in 1868, the replacement church sitting a little closer to the road. That church, too, was eventually demolished in 1969 leaving the few parishioners to make use of nearby Osmington.