| Evershot | ||
Evershot is about 700 feet above sea level and is sometimes wrongly described as the highest village in the county but this honour goes to Ashmore which lies on the border with Wiltshire. The parish is the source of the River Frome (pronounced Froom) and this originates at a spring in St John's Well before beginning its journey of 35 miles to Poole harbour. The name Evershot comes from the Anglos Saxon word Edfor (Wild Boar) and the early English word holt which means a thicket. A settlement sprang up here as there was a source of water but the village did not become a parish in its own right until the boundary changes of 1974. The parish church dedicated to St Basil is unusual as he was a saint who was well known to Eastern orthodox Christianity but was unheard of in England. The first church was dedicated to St Oswald. The new church was built by R. H. Shout the architect in 1853. George Crabbe a favourite poet of Jane Austen was the incumbent here from 1783 to 1787. The railways came in the 19th century and Evershot was provided with a halt, even if it was at Holywell which is over two miles away! The reason for this was that the crumbling greensand in the area caused a lot of problems. But eventually it was completed and just in time as this was the time for economic expansion. The village went through a lot of change in the 19th century, when the village had a face lift! And this gave it raised pavements and bow fronted shop fronts built onto older houses. In 1865 there was a devastating fire when twenty houses were destroyed and this left over a hundred people homeless.
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