All Cannings
All Cannings is a
village and
civil parish in the
Vale of Pewsey in the
English county of
Wiltshire. The parish includes the nearby smaller settlement of
Allington.
The earliest settlement in the area of All Cannings was at
Rybury Camp, on the downs above the village. The
Iron Age settlement at the farm of
All Cannings Cross is an important site in study of that period. There is also evidence of settlement from
Neolithic and
Roman times.
The name is believed to be a derivation of
Old Canning and a village probably existed on the current site by the 10th century as the invading
Danes at that time referred to Canning Marsh. There was a church from the early 13th century and the earliest features in the current All Saints' church are late
Norman. By the 14th century the village had a
water mill, although this had disappeared by the 18th century.
The
Kennet and Avon Canal was built just north of the village and opened in 1810. The village's population peaked in the middle of the 19th century with the 1841
census showing 663 inhabitants.
In 1868 the
Francis Baring, 3rd Baron Ashburton and his tenant farmer Simon Hiscock decided to each build a pair of semidetached workers cottages. They had two plots adjacent of the same size. The tenant built his pair of brick, his Lordship of
concrete - the only major difference is that in the absence of internal shuttering the concrete chimneys are straight rather than bent to combine into a single chimney stack. Both pairs of cottages still stand largely unaltered. One of the concrete houses has had an extension added in June 2006.
The concrete house
The brick "template" house next door
We can only surmise this was a trial into the efficacy of using shuttered reinforced concrete as a building method. It obviously was successful as two more pairs were then built, followed by a more elaborate villa style pair of cottages and finally a large Farmhouse.
This amazing experiment is unknown and unacknowledged outside the area. While these houses may not be the very first
concrete houses built, they were built within a couple of years of the first one - the time-line is not clear and are certainly the biggest example of a group of dwellings built then. They are worthy of note!
All Cannings is a civil parish with an elected parish council. It falls within the areas of
Kennet District Council and
Wiltshire County Council. All three councils are responsible for different aspects of local government.
In the 2002 census, the parish had a population of 616.
Note that the ONS website (see 'Sources' below) refers to the civil parish as
Allcannings; it is not clear if this is a valid alternative name or a clerical error on their part.
Position: Nearby towns and cities: Devizes,
Marlborough,
Swindon,
SalisburyNearby villages: Bishops Cannings,
Stanton St. Bernard,
Pewsey*
List of places in Wiltshire*
List of civil parishes in England*
All Cannings Village Website*
Wiltshire County Council Website page on All Cannings, retrieved 15:30 Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
*
Kennet District Council Website page on All Cannings Parish, retrieved 15:40 Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)
*
All Cannings Village Website history page, retrieved 14:00 Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)
*
Office for National Statistics (ONS) - List of English parishes, retrieved 14:00 Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)
