Holcombe

- a shifting Somerset Village?

The word "Holcombe" translates from Old English into "The cave in the valley" and is derived from the ancient words hol and cumb.

You'd expect a village which had been given a geographical tag like that to have the courtesy to stay in the same place, wouldn't you?

Well, there can be no doubt that the village has moved. Not far by today's standards, but just consider the effort and co-ordination that must have gone into moving an entire village - and it's ancillary services, a mile distant, in the latter part of the 18th Century.

It's difficult to determine exactly when Holcombe Village did move. The expanse of open land that today is called "Holcombe Old Village" has yet to be fully excavated and explored.

The "new" village with it's "new" church (1885 AD) has grown up half a mile or so away from the site of the "old" village.

But it is here, on the edge of the deep wooded combe from which the village originally derived its name, where stands - isolated from any other evidence of human settlement - the Old Church.

Holcombe Old Church has been most carefully restored, as has the small burial ground (its most notable monument is a memorial slab to Captain Robert Scott - Scott of the Antartic, whose father lived in the present manor house in his capacity of manager to the local brewery).

Nearby at the top of a small hill there is one old farmhouse, the former rectory, and an uneven hillside with some telltale fruit trees - the supposed site of the lost village.

Legend asserts that the village was wiped out by the Black Death; indeed amongst the older inhabitants of the area the old church is still known locally as the "Plague Church"; and when some abortive excavations were being carried out on the site by the Downside Archaeologicial Society, inhabitants were heard to express their anxiety that if the graves were found and disturbed, the amateur archaeologists might "let the germs out again".

Black Death stories are often apocryphal though, and hardly ever substantiated. But from whatever cause however, the old village of Holcombe did decay, and by the late 1700's a new village had grown up nearer the coal workings on the edge of the Nettlebridge valley.

The original Holcombe Manor was demolished around 1874. Both its site and its appearance are fully documented. The present Holcombe Manor, which stands in the middle of the village opposite the village green, was formerly known as Holcombe House.

The "newer" Holcombe Manor is a solid square late Georgian house, built by one of the family of Ashman Green who owned the brewery in the village, and later, as we have seen above, occupied by Captain Scott's father, the last manager of the brewery.

The old manor house, however, was set out in the fields, half-way to the old church, where we have assumed the original village stood. There is a sketch of it in the 1884 Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological Society.

Edford colliery at Holcombe closed in 1916. It is now occupied by a stone and concrete works.

Some road names go back to the Saxons. The Mendip villages of Shipham, Cheddar, Churchill and Holcombe all have Lippiatts (Lipyeates), literally "leap gates", an early form of cattle grid dividing lowland and upland grazings.

Written by Brennig Jones,
January 1997

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.