Place:Buckland Monachorum, Devon, England

Watchers
NameBuckland Monachorum
Alt namesBochelandsource: Domesday Book (1985) p 78
Bochelandasource: Domesday Book (1985) p 78
Buckland-Monachorumsource: Family History Library Catalog
Clearbridgesource: settlement in parish
Harrowbeersource: settlement in parish
Yelvertonsource: settlement in parish
TypeAncient parish, Civil parish
Coordinates50.483°N 4.133°W
Located inDevon, England
See alsoRoborough Hundred, Devon, Englandhundred of which the parish was a part
Tavistock Rural, Devon, Englandrural district 1894-1974
West Devon District, Devon, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area since 1974
:the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Buckland Monachorum (#4 on map) is a civil parish and a village of the same name in the West Devon District of Devon, England, situated on the River Tavy, about 10 miles north of Plymouth.

In 2006 the village neighbourhood had an estimated 1,511 residents and 654 dwellings. The electoral ward of the same name gave a population of 3,380 at the 2011 UK census. The parish also includes other settlements: Clearbridge, Harrowbear and Yelverton (see below). Horrabridge has a separate article.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records Buckland Monachorum ("Bocheland") as having 46 households, land for 15 ploughs, a salt pan and a fishery. It was in the possession of William de Poilley, one of 17 estates he held in southern Devon as a tenant-in-chief of William the Conqueror.

Near to Buckland Monachorum is Buckland Abbey, home of Sir Francis Drake(c.  1540 – 1596) during the Elizabethan era. Buckland Monachorum is the site of St. Andrew's, a 12th-century church with a Saxon baptismal font and the tombs of the Drake family and Lord Heathfield (1717-1790), the defender of Gibraltar, many historic buildings, and a complex of interesting gardens, known as "The Garden House". The Gift House, a seventeenth-century almshouse, was built by a descendant of Sir Francis Drake.

Image:Tavistock small.png

Yelverton

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Yelverton is a large village on the southwestern edge of Dartmoor in Devon, England. It is located on the border of the parish of Buckland Monachoram. (On the Ordnance Survey map of Devon of 1900 only the railway station is shown.)

When the village's railway station (on the Great Western Railway (GWR) line from Plymouth to Tavistock) opened in the 19th century, the village became a popular residence for Plymouth commuters. The railway is now closed, but the Plym Valley Railway has reopened a section of it.

At the beginning of the Second World War, an airfield (RAF Harrowbeer) was constructed at adjacent Harrowbeer as a fighter station for the air defence of Devonport Dockyard and the Western Approaches. Some American airmen and anti-aircraft battery units were stationed here during the second half of the war. A plane carrying President Roosevelt landed here when its original destination was fogbound.

Yelverton is well known for Roborough Rock - a prominent mass of stone close to the Plymouth road on the fringe of nearby Roborough Down, near the southern end of the airfield. It gave its name to the Rock Hotel, built as a farm during the Elizabethan period, but converted in the 1850s to cater for growing tourism in the area. The area to the south and west of the roundabout at the centre of the village was settled in late Victorian and Edwardian times, with many grand and opulent villas.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

  • Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
  • GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.
  • Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.
  • There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.
  • Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.
  • This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
  • Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.
  • Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.
  • There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Buckland Monachorum. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.