Handbook of Devon Parishes
Publishers: Halsgrove of Tiverton
Pages: 192 (black and white photos)
Price: £19.95

Labour of love, or what...? Devonian Helen Harris woke up one day and thought, what a good idea it would be to produce a book listing and describing every single parish in Devon.

There are 422 of them in Devon's districts plus the island of Lundy, the city of Exeter, and the unitary authorities of Plymouth and Torbay.

Together, the 422 parishes make up one of the most beautiful and geologically diverse counties in England

It's the first time such a painstaking task has been undertaken since the gazetteer in Hoskins' Devon was first published half a century ago in 1954.

Looking up to Haytor, in the parish of Manaton

It's not simply a dull and boring A-Z list...Helen Harris has highlighted the unusual and quirky bits about the parishes and items of historical note.

Such as the clockface on Buckland-in-the-Moor church, which instead of numbers, has the words My Dear Mother.

Among the most beautiful parishes is Manaton in east Dartmoor, which takes in Haytor, Becky Falls, Lustleigh Cleave, and Grimspound - an enclosed Bronze Age settlement which includes hut circles and prehistoric remains.

Then there's Lundy - the bit of Devon which is set adrift from the mainland, a granite island 10 miles north west of Hartland Point. It is so named because Lund-ey is Norse for Puffin Island.

In the 19th century it was owned by William Hudson Heaven, who succeeded in making the island free of mainland jurisdiction, earning it the name, 'Kingdom of Heaven.'

The Lundy coast

And there are some great names in there, which people from other parts of Devon may not even have heard of: Woolfardisworthy (East) and Woolfardisworthy (West) - I bet you didn't know there was an east and a west Woolfardisworthy, did you? East is in Mid Devon and West is in Torridge.

In each case, the parish is usually pronounced Woolsery.

Heanton Punchardon, in North Devon, is another favourite of mine, and it's so called because the Punchardon family once held the Manor of Heanton.

The book studies civil parishes, which in most cases correspond to the ecclesiastical ones. In Devon, the parish system was largely in place by the end of the 13th century.

The book contains information about roads, and the latest population figures, together with the population in each parish in 1901.

There's a useful grid map, so you can see where each parish is situated.

The author travelled hundreds of miles, sifting through the parish records at most of the county's churches (those which weren't locked).

She also got some of her information from previously pubished works, and sources for further reading are listed.

Article published: November 2004.