Place:Loddiswell, Devon, England

the text in this article is based on one in Wikipedia Loddiswell (#11 on map) is a civil parish and village in the South Hams District in Devon. It lies on the west side of the River Avon or Aune and is three miles NNW of Kingsbridge. There is evidence of occupation going back to Roman times. The villages most famous son and benefactor was Richard Peek (1782-1867) who retired here after being one of the Sheriffs of London. The name Loddiswell is a corruption of "Saint Loda's well", named after one of the many saints that were revered all over the West Country of England, especially in Cornwall. [edit] History Loddiswell was mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086 when the manor was valued at 100 shillings. The manor then belonged to Juhel of Totnes, but had belonged to an Anglo Saxon called Heca before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Domesday recorded that there was a fishery that gave 30 salmon per year as geld.

The parish church of St. Michael's and All Angels, is of the 14th century, enlarged in the 15th century; its font is Norman. The source of the village's medieval prosperity was wool. Woolston House, the manor house of Staunton manor, is a 17th-century house built near the foundations of an earlier structure; rebuilt in the 18th century, it passed from the Wise/Wyse family to the Weymouth and Allin families.

A copper mine opened in the parish in 1825.

In 1848, the Congregationalists built a chapel funded by Richard Peek who also built Hazlewood House (1830). He also funded a local school (The British School), a reading and news room (1838) as well as giving to various other nearby chapels.

In 1850, the village had a population of 1,013 and the church (St Michael's) was then described as ancient. Yellow ochre was collected here for resale complementing the employment at the mine and the mill.

The Great Western Railway's Kingsbridge branch line arrived in 1893 with a stop at Loddiswell station. It was said that Loddiswell was a "brisk walk away" as in fact the station was closer to the less well known and smaller village of Woodleigh. The railway station continued through the steam age but by 1961 it was an unmanned halt and in 1963 it closed for ever. Today the remains of the track is used as a walking route.

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.

• the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter
• the Northern Record Office at Barnstaple
• the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office at Plymouth which is independent of the other two.

• 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.

• The FamilySearch Wiki provides a similar information service to GENUKI. An index of parishes leads to notes and references for each parish.

• Brett Langston's list of Devon Registration Districts and parishes within each registration district from 1837 to the present can indicate where to find details of civil registration entries since the process began in England.

• 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.)
• South Hams, Devon, A Genealogical Information Resource A collection of transcriptions of church registers and the 1841 census, plus a free lookup service in registers and other materials that have not been transcribed, for the South Hams District of Devon, England. The website states that its latest transcription was added 10 Nov 2018.