Leverton

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You are in [Places] [Leverton]

Leverton appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as lands owned by the Abingdon Abbey, with 9 households, and valued at 2 shillings and ten pence. (See: Domesday manor of Leverton).

It became the estate village of Chilton Lodge estate. By the middle ages there were approximately 13 farmsteads associated with the village. These were demolished over the course of the 19th century.

Leverton was a hamlet under the civil parish of Chilton Foliat, an unusual parish as it was split across Wiltshire and Berkshire. Leverton, however, was situated completely on the Berkshire side of the parish, and would be transferred to Hungerford parish in 1895.

A set of six thatched cottages, known as Leverton Cottages, were built some time after 1767, and over the following hundred years a further four were built in the same style to match.

The village is a complete survival of an 18th/19th century estate village and comprises a model farm, Gardener's bothy, Head Gardener's cottage, kitchen garden with a full set of boiler houses and potting sheds, thatched apple store and as well as the Leverton Cottages originally inhabited by estate workers.

The kitchen garden was restored to production in the late 1980s by the BBC for the Victorian Kitchen Garden series and also featured in subsequent spin-offs such as The Victorian Kitchen and The Victorian Flower Garden. The hamlet also retains a set of stocks, although the originals were removed to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in the 1990s and were replaced by a (non-functioning) replica.

The Leverton Stocks:

It is not yet known when stocks were first placed at Leverton, but those shown in the old photographs on the right are thought to have been installed in about 1898.

Those were in a very poor state by the early 1990s, and a new set of stocks and whipping post were built by Hugh and Geoffrey Doel (who run Swift Cleaners), and fitted with a plaque in commemoration of their father Ken Doel, who lived at Leverton Manor. They were installed in Oct 1994. See "Return of the Leverton stocks", NWN 6th October 1994.

Pror to the replacement in 1994, Thames Valley Archaeological Services carried out an excavation to determine the history of the stocks which had last been replaced in 1898. You can read the report here.