Butleigh

Butleigh is a small village and civil parish, located in Somerset. The nearest village to it is Barton St David, and it is located a short distance from Glastonbury and Street. Its population is 823. Butleigh has a church, small village shop, a Church of England primary school and Butleigh Nursery School.HistoryThe parish of Butleigh was part of the Whitley Hundred.Butleigh Court, which was abandoned for many years and has now been brought back into use, is noted for its interesting architecture including the tall carved chimney stacks, which are all different. Another interesting landmark is the cedar avenue, just outside the village. It was built in 1845 by J. C. Buckler, for Henry Neville-Grenville, on the site of an earlier building.The village history is told in a slim book, Butleigh: One Thousand Years of an English Village, by E. F. Synge, a former vicar at the parish church. A reconstruction of life of one farm worker, John Hodges, who lived in the village during the Victorian era, is illustrated at the Somerset Rural Life Museum in Glastonbury.There is the lofty column on the nearby Combe Hill of the Admiral Hood Monument raised to the memory of Sir Samuel Hood on a hill near Butleigh, and in Butleigh Church is another memorial, with an inscription written by Robert Southey.