England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Ellingham St Mary

The Parish

The parish of Ellingham lies in the extreme southwest of Hampshire not too far from its border with neighbouring Dorset. Ellingham is located roughly 2 miles north of the market town of Ringwood and sits within the valley of the River Avon. Ellingham is a tiny place, today, just a handful of farms and cottages sitting a quarter mile west of the A338 road which connects Ringwood with Salisbury. Sitting on the broad flood plain of the Avon would have given Elingham an economy dominated by pastures with rich grazing for primarily cattle underpinning the incomes. Such a situation would also, unfortunately, have made Ellingham prone to sporadic flooding. Today the valley floor has been extensively mined for gravel leaving a patchwork of flooded pits and much wintering wildfowl. The Avon drains the parish southwards reaching the English Channel within just a few miles through Christchurch Harbour. Ellingham is sited at around 20 metres above the sea, outwith the valley land rises westwards into Ringwood Forest reaching around 50 metres whilst to the east within the New Forest 75 metres is reached within a couple of miles. Parishes in this area are often extensive but Ellingham was a typically sized lowland parish of around 1,400 acres, within that acreage a population of around 350 parishioners would have been supported. In Domesday times Ellingham was a holding of one Cola the Hunter, one of the lesser landholders in those times, his holding comprised a modest 5 ploughs, extensive meadows & woodland and there was a mill, presumably on the adjacent Avon.

The Church

St Mary's church sits to the north of Ellingham's notional centre accessed along the dead-end route of Ellingham Drive which terminates at the churchyard. Despite the extensive restoration in later centuries Pevsner still describes St Mary as a "gem of a church", perhaps it is the artful gentrification of more modern times that serves to continue its picturesque attractiveness. Certainly the church has its origins in the 13th century showing Early English Gothic style in the much-modified chancel but notably in the northern doorway. Unusually for an English church much work followed in the 18th century, a period when little generally occurred, in 1720 the brick southern porch was added followed, in 1747, by a renewed western facade. Victorian restorations followed, as is more normal, both in 1869 and more thoroughly in the 1880s when the current bell-turret replaced a prior Georgian effort, that tower needed extensive repair being rebuilt in the 1950s. Ellingham Drive widens outside the churchyard to permit parking, the entry is through local sandstone walls by a wooden gateway. The churchyard is open and uncluttered with no obvious obstacles for the photographer.