Puckington and its Church of St. Andrew. A South Somerset village having "an old world look".

The charmingly named South Somerset village of Puckington straddles the B3168, or The Curry Road, between Ilminster and Curry Rivel.  Puckington appears in the Domesday Book as Pochintone.  However it appears to be derived from puc and tun; puc being the Old English word for Hobgoblin and tun meaning enclosure, farm or smallholding.  One could say that Puckington was once The Hobgoblin’s farmstead!

The South Somerset village of Puckington viewed from the south. The tower of St. Andrew's Church can be seen above the treetops in the centre of the photo.

Kelly’s Directory of Somerset (1914) tells us:

“Puckington is a village and parish, on the River Ile and on the road from Langport to Chard, 3 miles north-east of Ilminster Station on the Chard branch of the Great Western railway and 7 miles south west from Langport.”

Today the railway to Ilminster and Chard is no more, a victim of the Beeching cuts, and the River Ile is more commonly spelt Isle.

Kelly’s also informs us that:

“Viscount Portman is Lord of the Manor and chief landowner.  The soil is partly sand and partly sand and clay, and the subsoil is limestone.  The chief crops are wheat, barley, oats, beans and roots.  The acreage is 774; rateable value £1,001; the population in 1911 was 136.”

The Portman family also held estates around Durston and Hestercombe, including Hestercombe House, but by 1976 the family had disposed of their land in Somerset and the 9th Viscount Portman had moved to Portman Square in London.

Puckington, with its thatched cottages, farmhouses, and Church of St. Andrew is described by Arthur Mee in his The King’s England – Somerset (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. 1968) as having “. . . an old world look, especially about its 15th century church, with a chancel 200 years older in which is still the original piscina and the triple sedilia added when the church was 100 years old.  In the sanctuary are two old carved chairs.  The font has the Norman mason’s cable moulding around it, and in the tower is still a bell which rang out before the Reformation.”

Church of St. Andrew in the village of Puckington, South Somerset. 

I came across this interesting tomb in the churchyard at Puckington in July 2015, but could not decipher the inscription.

The Church was restored in 1857 and again in 1910, when a new organ was provided.