All Cannings

Friends of All Saints' Church, All Cannings

Volunteers wanted for the Flower and Craft Festival from June 30 to July 2.

A rota form will be in the village shop for anyone who feels they can
contribute a couple of hours to this new fundraising event. The money raised is to go to the fabric of the church, and not to day to day running costs.

Please do have a look and see if you are able to help in any way, or
contact Belinda Mead 860348 or Hilary Antrobus 860669 if you have any queries that we could help you with.
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All Cannings Parish Council

The council is concerned that the footpaths are being abused by cyclists
using them illegally.
Please do not cycle along these narrow paths, they are there purely for
pedestrians.

They are also worried by the increasing amount of dumping of rubbish that is taking place on the glebe field behind the houses which back on to it. This also is illegal and will be dealt with in the appropriate way if it continues.

Eartliest concrete houses?

Reading the local Parish magazine there is an excellent article by the local historian Rick Ozzard about houses made of concrete.

There doesn't sound much to interest one in the subject until one starts to consider where are the earliest ones. The little village of All Cannings in Wiltshire is in a very rural farming community with Black and White thatched cottages etc. It is probably the last place you would expect to have been the site of an amazing Victorian experiment in the use of Concrete.

In 1868 the Lord Ashburton and his tenant farmer Simon Hiscock decided to each build a pair of semidetached workers cottages. They had two plots adjacent of the same size. The tenant built his pair of brick, his Lordship of concrete - the only major difference is that in the absence of internal shuttering the concrete chimneys are straight rather than bent to combine into a single chimney stack. Both pairs of cottages still stand largely unaltered.

We can only surmise this was a trial into the efficacy of using shuttered reinforced concrete as a building method. It obviously was successful as two more pairs were then built, followed by a more elaborate villa style pair of cottages and finally a large Farmhouse.

This amazing experiment is unknown and unacknowledged outside the area. While these houses may not be the very first concrete houses built, they were built within a couple of years of the first one - the time-line is not clear and are certainly the biggest example of a group of dwellings built then. They are worthy of note!

History

The following is the text from the Church information bulletin.

"All Cannings is one of the ancient villages of the Pewsey Vale. It is thought to originate from a Saxon settlement, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as 'Caninge'. From at least until the Reformation, the manor of All Cannings was held by the Abbey of St. Mary, at Winchester.

At the Reformation, in 1536, Henry VIII presented 'the valuable manor of Allecanynges' to Edward Seymour, who later became the Duke of Somerset. His family retained the estate until the late 17th century.

The estate then passed through various hands, and remained intact until 1909, when, at a sale at the Bear Hotel in Devizes, the estate was broken up into smaller farms and properties.

All Saints or St. Annes? There has been uncertainty as to the dedication of the church. Today it is All Saints, but in the last century, and early this century, there are records indicating Saint Anne. There is a fifteenth century reference to 'Cannings All Saints.'

All Cannings or Old Cannings? The name 'All Cannings' is thought either to derive from 'Old Cannings' to differentiate the village from nearby Bishops Cannings, or else to be a shortened form of 'All Saints Cannings' referring to the dedication of the church. The name 'Cannings' is thought to derive from the name of the Saxon tribe which settled in the area."

1610 Map of All Cannings and surrounding area in Wiltshire
(click on map to view larger image.)

Thanks to My Hitchcock Heritage: pictures

Public Lecture 1st July 2004 - Village Hall

Food and Identity:
The making of the Iron Age at All Cannings Cross, the Vale of Pewsey and beyond

Professor John Barrett
(University of Sheffield)
&
Mr David McOmish
(English Heritage)

All Cannings Cross

Following the 2003 dig a preliminary report has been published:Get it here

Fascinating stuff abouit the importance of this early Iron Age Midden site, there will be a public talk soon about this, and more digging this year. More on this site as I know it.

Cannings Cross Iron Age Site

An initial field investigation took place of the archaeological deposits at All Cannings Cross between September 8th – 20th 2003. This was the preliminary stage of a wider fieldwork programme designed to investigate landscape, social, and economic change around the Vale of Pewsey in the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. In the long-term it is intended that the project will contribute to our wider understanding of this important period of landscape and settlement development around the northern chalk lands of Wessex in particular and in southern Britain more generally.

All Cannings Cross and the Vale of Pewsey has full details: