Dunchideock

Dunchideock is a small civil parish on the north eastern slopes of the Haldon Hills in Teignbridge, Devon, England. It covers an area of 392 hectares (970 acres) and lies about 6 km (4 miles) south-west of Exeter and 11 km (7 miles) north-east of Bovey Tracey. The parish, with a population of 262 in 2001, has no compact village, but consists of scattered dwellings.

The name Dunchideock is one of the few place names in Devon of Celtic origin. Recorded in Domesday as Donsedoc, the two parts of the name derive from dun (fort) and coediog (wooded), which, according to W. G. Hoskins, refer to the nearby Iron Age hill fort of Cotley Castle.

The parish church is dedicated to St Michael and is Grade I listed. It originated in 1308 at the latest, but the present church building, built of red sandstone, was started in the late 14th century. It has been partially rebuilt and restored many times. There is a good font dated to around 1400, some notable carved bench-ends, roof-bosses and rood-screen; and several memorials, most notably to Aaron Baker, who rebuilt the chancel aisle in 1669, and Stringer Lawrence. The theological writer Bourchier Wrey Savile was rector of Dunchideock with Shillingford St. George from 1872 to his death in 1888.

Within the parish was the former Haldon House which was the home of Robert Palk. Mostly demolished in the 1940s, the remaining wing is now the Best Western Lord Haldon Hotel. Also in the parish is Haldon Belvedere, a triangular tower on top of Haldon that was built by Palk in 1788 in memory of his friend Stringer Lawrence.

A retired Brigadier established an orchard of apple and pear on the slopes at Dunchideock, ideal for ripening and growth under the supervision of Christopher Withington Harper, recently returned from New Zealand, the Haldon Hills are rated as one of the most shallow soil Forestry Commission plantings in the U.K. in contrast to this reception zone for sediments that make the area so farming rich and the work has always been fishing and agriculture based, Bartlett and Dennis, Bovey and similar family associations dominate the region over the decades, small estates and employed gardeners, specialists such as William Dennis and C W Harper, who went onto Sherbourne and then Cadbury, Portishead C.E.G.B. and to Sycamores, Long Ashton Research Station, the foundation of modern field and orchard, bush harvest agriculture, chapel formed and thorough, village supporting village through the late 1800s, the Depression, both the wars and the 1950s struggle to survive. Preachers, men of the land, ladies of the community, principles of the C. of E. parishes and mainstay of England's stability. They are still there and the farms are little altered in essence (M. D. Stagg E. S. Stagg C. W. Harper M. J. Harper D. Stagg W. Bartlett L. F. Curtis Alice Stagg May Stagg D. R. Weyman H. A. Osmaston K. Crabtree University of Bristol Cheltenham G.C.A.D. G.W. Hyden, Stagg Curtis websites and family held records of the Tyley farm Rodney Stoke).

Archie Winckworth, the former owner of Dunchideock House, posted a memoir about the village and its history, including an account of its buried treasure. The cellars of Dunchideock House are fancifully supposed to contain a treacle mine.