Wormshill, historically Wormsell, is a small village and civil parish within the Borough of Maidstone, Kent, England. The village contains a number of heritage-listed buildings, which include a Norman church, a public house and one of the oldest surviving post office buildings in the UK. Wormshill was listed under the name Godeselle in the Domesday Book of 1086. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman.
About Wormshill in brief
Wormshill, historically Wormsell, is a small village and civil parish within the Borough of Maidstone, Kent, England. The village contains a number of heritage-listed buildings, which include a Norman church, a public house and one of the oldest surviving post office buildings in the United Kingdom. Wormshill was listed under the name Godeselle in the Domesday Book of 1086. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman. A Lower Palaeolithic hand axe was unearthed in the garden of Blacksmiths cottage in the village. The parish was originally appended to the village and parish of Boughton Malherbe, since both had the same patron; the patron of a parish was the land-owner who often built the church on the estate and who had the right to appoint the parish priest. Patronage of the parish subsequently transferred through a number. of landholding families, vesting by the 17th century with the prominent Kent family of Sir Charles Sedley, at times held the barony of Aylesford. During this period the Tylden family, believed to have had significant links to the Crusades, were also landholders in the area in the early 16th century. Around the same time, recruits of Sir Francis Drake’s navy may have used a track, now known as Drake Lane, in the south west of parish or camped nearby as they marched from the dockyards at Weerness to the Weerness dockyards in the late 16th.
century. The name of the village is thought to be much older, its name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon god Wōden and meaning \”Woden’s Hill\”. The area was also described in a paper in Archaeologia Cantiana, 1961, as an ancient possession of the Kings of Kent, the hill where they worshipped the heathen Woden. In 1966, the remains of a U-shaped mediaeval pastoral enclosure for controlling themovement of stock were recorded. The extensive woodland in the parish also meant that it was one of several sources of wooden planking for the piers of Rochester Bridge away) from the early 11th century. The village’s only church, and whose name is given to the farm at the north of the church, is called St Giles, and its name is derived from the name of a nearby farm. The population of 200 is a mixture of agricultural workers employed by local farms and professional residents who commute to nearby towns. It has a low population density compared to the national average, and the village itself remains rural with a high population density. It lies on an exposed high point of the North Downs, within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is approximately 7 miles south of the Swale and 8 miles east of Maid stone, and lies 0.6 miles to the east of Frinsted and Bicknor.
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This page is based on the article Wormshill published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
