Cholesbury
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Cholesbury (formerly known as Chelwoldsbury) is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, on the border with Hertfordshire. It is situated in the Chiltern Hills, about five miles east of Wendover. It is one of the smallest villages in Buckinghamshire.
The village name is Anglo Saxon in origin, and means 'Cealwald's fort'. This name refers to the Iron Age hillfort close to the centre of the village which was constructed around 100BC. Within the hillfort there is a church, dedicated to St Laurence. The hillfort, is almost circular in shape and the 10 hectare site is enclosed by a double rampart or vellum. Associated with the fort is a pond, known locally as the 'Holy Pond', which is fed by a spring, that is perpetual: it has never been known to run dry, even in the severest of droughts. The modern village runs either side of Cholesbury Common. Buildings of note include the Manor House and Cholesbury Windmill, both of which are private dwellings. The windmill was first built in 1863 as a smock mill but was rebuilt in the style of a tower mill in 1883. It became accociated with the Bloomsbury Group around the time of the First World War and a number of well-known artists of the period frequented it. Gilbert Cannan who rented the mill for a time and whose wife Mary was previously married to J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, invited his friends including D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry to stay there. The artist Mark Gertler, also lived there for a time and painted a famous picture of the mill now on show in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with Cannan and his dogs in the foreground. One of the dogs is understood to have been the model for the original illustrations of Nana the dog in the first edition of Peter Pan.
The village is one of four, known as the Hilltop villages (the others being Hawridge, St Leonards and Buckland Common), which form part of Cholesbury-cum-St Leonards parish.
