1833 A fine butterfly.
Child Okeford in the newspapers. A series of stories about a previous generation of villagers as related in the newspapers of the time.
February 1833 Dorchester County Chronicle.
“A fine butterfly was last week seen and taken at Child Okeford on Mr Ingram’s farm,[Church Farm] as strong on the wing as in the middle of May.“
Nature notes about the village are nothing new as regular readers of The Hill will attest. Few are as short as this one or less informative. Curiosities always made their way into the newspapers. In August 1925 a heifer belonging to a local farmer Mr Oliver was “found dead in a field…in the usual course the carcase was sent to the kennels when the men were astonished to find an adder 18 inches long in the stomach.” It had been swallowed alive.
Faced with relentless countryside, relentless weather and little opportunity to escape to other climes appreciation of nature’s beauty is not to be found in early newspaper accounts. In the later part of the 19th century though, faced with the awfulness of some towns, journalists were prone to wax lyrical. In 1867 the following description was published in an account of the local friendly society, the 20th anniversary of which “was held on Thursday last at Child Okeford, a pretty secluded village..about one mile and a half from Shillingstone Station of the Dorset & Somerset Railway, a short distance from which the traveller proceeds along a quiet road, showing, by the prolific vegetation in it’s hedgerows, its proximity to the lovely Vale of Blackmoor and at this time gemmed with all the fairest flowers of spring. The village is embosomed in gardens and orchards, and from the west and north-west affords many such pictures as a lover of rural scenery would delight in, the dark mass of Hambledon Hill, on which appears the remains of ancient earth works, looming in the background, and forming a setting of a green deep as malachite for the whole.”
Well the village can no longer be regarded as secluded, it’s roads are far from quiet, it’s orchards have gone and the railway has just a few yards of track left, but, as was proved by the success of last year’s ‘Open Garden’ event it is still embosomed in gardens.
Author’s Note
The original newspaper article has been digitised by British Newspaper Archive in association with the British Library. The transcription is the author’s own work from images downloaded as a part of a paid subscription to the BNA.