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- the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia
Stinsford (#17 on map) is a civil parish and a village in Dorset, England, one mile east of Dorchester. The parish includes the settlements of Higher Bockhampton and Lower Bockhampton. The name Stinsford may derive from stynt, Old English for a limited area of pasture. In the UK census of 2011 the parish had a population of 334.
The parish has five large country houses - Birkin House, Frome House, Kingston Maurward House, the Old Manor House (Elizabethan) and Stinsford House. Much of the land in the parish is now occupied by Kingston Maurward College, a further education college.
There has been worship at Stinsford since at least Norman times, but the only remaining parts of the earliest structure are the sculpture of St Michael, inside the west wall of the south aisle of the church, and the restored Purbeck Marble font.
St Michael's was the local church of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and he was baptised here. Stinsford is the original 'Mellstock' of Hardy's novels Under the Greenwood Tree and Jude the Obscure.
Hardy's heart was buried in the churchyard in 1928, alongside the grave of his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who died in 1912 and his second wife, Florence Dugdale, who died in 1937. The churchyard also contains the grave of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who died in 1972 and had arranged for his burial to be close to Hardy whom he admired.
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Governance
Stinsford was originally a parish in the George Hundred, one of the hundreds or early subdivisions of the county of Dorset. From 1894 until 1974 it was part of the Dorchester Rural District.
In 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, all urban and rural districts across England were abolished and counties were reorganized into metropolitan and non-metropolitan districts. Dorchester Rural District joined the non-metropolitan West Dorset District.
Under another set of local government reforms adopted on 1 April 2019, West Dorset Dorset District was abolished, and the county of Dorset (excluding Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole) became a single unitary authority. The area is now administered by Dorset Council.
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