Sandford Orcas

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Sandford Orcas is a village and parish in north west Dorset, England, three miles north of Sherborne, and surrounded by beautiful countryside. The village has a population of 195 (2001). Just to the east of the village itself is the hamlet Holway. Historically known as Sanford 1086 (Domesday Book), Sandford 1243, Sandford Horscoys 1372, Samford Orescoys 1427. It was in Somerset until 1896, and the land was connected to the Abbot of Glastonbury.

Like many other Dorset villages, its name has a ring of poetry. This delightful place lies in hill country on the Dorset/Somerset county border. Three streams rise in the parish and in Saxon times, the water was forded over a sandy bottom, from which the name Sand Ford derives.

In the century after the Battle of Hastings, the manor became the property of a Norman family known as Orescuilz, and that was not an easy name for the Saxon Dorset men to get their tongues around, so they called it Orcas.

The present Manor House, with a splendid gatehouse, goes back five hundred years to the Tudors and although built at the time Christopher Columbus was sailing west on his famous expedition it has changed little since. The church of Saint Nicholas next door has an interesting 13th century font, shaped like an upturned Canterbury bell.

A strange wall monument of carved and painted alabaster shows a knight in armour, kneeling between his two wives and eleven children. Seven children kneel, in black gowns and the others are in swaddling clothes of red and lying in a heap behind their mother. The knight, who rests below the memorial is William Knoyle who died a few years before Shakespeare.

The reading on the stone gives us more information on this strange tomb, dated 1607. It seems he married 'fillip, daughter of Robert Morgane by whom hee had yssve 4 children and bee dead'. The knight's second wife was Grace Clavel, by whom he had three sons and four daughters, who survived him.

This pretty village is near Trent and is approached via a leafy lane from Poyntington.