Stinsford is a village and civil parish in southwest Dorset, England, about east of Dorchester. The parish includes the settlements of Higher and Lower Bockhampton. The name Stinsford may derive from ,

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

for a limited area of pasture. In the

2011 United Kingdom census A census of the population of the United Kingdom is taken every ten years. The 2011 census was held in all countries of the UK on 27 March 2011. It was the first UK census which could be completed online via the Internet. The Office for National ...

, the parish had a population of 334. The parish has five large country houses - Birkin House, Frome House,

Kingston Maurward House Kingston Maurward House is a large Grade I listed Georgian English country house set in a 750-acre (3 square km) estate in Dorset situated in the Frome valley two miles east of Dorchester. History There has been a manor house at Kingston sin ...

, the Elizabethan era Old Manor House and Stinsford House. Much of the land in the parish is occupied by Kingston Maurward College, a further education college.

St Michael's Church

There has been worship at the site 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, and the restored

Purbeck Marble Purbeck Marble is a fossiliferous limestone found in the Isle of Purbeck, a peninsula in south-east Dorset, England. It is a variety of Purbeck stone that has been quarried since at least Roman times as a decorative building stone. Geology Strat ...

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

. St Michael's was the local church of novelist and poet

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Word ...

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 Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis; 27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Irish-born British poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bla ...

, who died in 1972 and had arranged for his burial to be close to Hardy whom he admired. Also here are the remains of the actor and dramatist William O'Brien and his wife Lady Susan Fox-Strangways.

Football

Stinsford has a six-a-side football team which plays in the Dorset six-a-side leagues. The team is noted for its luminous orange strip and has provided players who have later moved on to play for

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

teams such as Yeovil Town F.C.Welcome to Soccerpitch
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References

External links

Stinsford Parish Council
Geography of Dorchester, Dorset Villages in Dorset {{Dorset-geo-stub