Mystery Solved!

Many years ago Jean was told about a hamlet of Upper and Lower Wheaton located somewhere in Devon. All attempts to find such a place have come up empty until now. Susan has solved the mystery. All current maps show this place as Whiddon. Yet again pointing out the difficulty of depending on spelling. Thank you Susan!

In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Northlew like this:

LEW (NORTH), a village and a parish in Okehampton district, Devon. The village stands on an eminence near a head-stream of the river Torridge, 7 miles NW of Okehampton r. station; is a large place, with an ancient cross in its centre; commands an extensive view; and has a post office under Exbourne, North Devon, and a cattle fair on the third Wednesday of April. The parish contains also the hamlet of Wheaton, and comprises 7,247 acres. Real property, £3,611. Pop. in 1851, 1,047; in 1861,930. …

Lower Whiddon

© Copyright Derek Harper and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

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