Winterbourne Gunner

Winterbourne Gunner is a village in Wiltshire, England, about 4 miles (6 km) northeast of Salisbury. The village is near the River Bourne and the A338 road and is close to Winterbourne Dauntsey. It is part of the civil parish of Winterbourne, formed in 1934 by amalgamating the three ancient parishes of Winterbourne Earls, Dauntsey and Gunner.[1]

Winterbourne Gunner

Post Office, Winterbourne Gunner
Civil parish
Unitary authority
Ceremonial county
Region
CountryEngland
Sovereign stateUnited Kingdom
Post townSalisbury
Postcode districtSP4
Dialling code01980
PoliceWiltshire
FireDorset and Wiltshire
AmbulanceSouth Western
UK Parliament
WebsiteThe Winterbournes

The Defence CBRN Centre, providing training for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear events, is to the southeast of the village, beyond the West of England Main Line railway.[2]

Location of the Saxon graves excavated by Time Team at 51°6′57.18″N 1°44′26.23″W.

Toponymy and Archaeology

The place-name 'Winterbourne Gunner' is first attested in 1275 in the Rotuli hundredorum, where it appears as Winterburn Gonnore. The name means 'winter river (ie. one dry in summer) belonging to Gunnora de la Mare', who held the manor in 1250, according to the Book of Fees in the National Archives. Gunnora is a Norman woman's name of Old Scandinavian origin, as in Old Norse Gunnvor or Gunnor.[3]

Winterbourne Gunner has considerable archaeological interest. In 1960 workmen digging a pipeline came across a series of early Saxon graves. A subsequent excavation showed them to be particularly rich in grave goods.[4]

A 1994 dig in a nearby building plot owned by villager, David Buckland by television programme Time Team (series 2, "The Saxon Graves") found several more early 6th century Saxon graves near Salt Lane, and discovered a series of Bronze Age features including a pond barrow and associated round barrows and urn burials, which the Saxons appear to have respected when selecting their burial sites. These show up as circular crop marks, with a diameter of 20 to 30 feet, indicating barrows. The Bronze Age features were designated as Scheduled Monuments in July 1994.[5]

In 1999 a house at Winterbourne Gunner was the subject of a Series 2 episode of the BBC television series Meet the Ancestors.[6]

Parish church
St Mary's Church

The Church of England parish church of St Mary was designated as a Grade I listed building on 18 February 1958. It has twelfth- and thirteenth-century origins with additions in 1687 and 1810, and a restoration in 1886. It is constructed of flint with limestone dressings. The twelfth-century tower is at the west end and is rendered and whitewashed, and topped with a pyramidal tiled roof. The nave is short, and a porch was added on the south side at the time the south aisle was removed. The interior has a fourteenth-century roof over the nave with arch-braced trussed rafters with a moulded central tie beam. The font is late twelfth or early thirteenth century while the panelled limestone pulpit is nineteenth century.[7][8]

gollark: Probably not good enough for transmitting big documents or whatever, but that's fast enough for some things.
gollark: You can probably distinguish 4 colors at a decent distance, and switching twice a second seems vaguely plausible, so that's 4 bits a second.
gollark: Can you generate and detect different *colors*?
gollark: Assuming you can switch the light on and off pretty fast, and the magic can respond quickly, you might actually get decent data rates out of it.
gollark: Well, in that case I guess you could do automatic Morse code (or some variant), and if you could make a bright enough light (and maybe focus it on the receiving tower with mirrors or something), that might be longer-range than having to actually see the individual semaphore arms.

References
  1. "Winterbourne". Wiltshire Community History. Wiltshire Council. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
  2. "Defence Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear Centre". GOV.UK. 12 December 2012. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  3. Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names, p.525.
  4. Musty, J.; Stratton, J. E. D. (1964). "A Saxon cemetery at Winterbourne Gunner, Near Salisbury". WANHM. 59: 86–109.
  5. Pastscape Scheduled Monument 966594 (A pond barrow and a bowl barrow 200 metres to the southeast of St Mary's Church, Winterbourne Gunner). 51.115892°N 1.740509°W / 51.115892; -1.740509 (Winterbourne Gunner scheduled Monument)
  6. "Meet the Ancestors". Series 5: Episode 3 of 6. BBC2. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  7. Historic England. "Church of St Mary the Virgin, Winterbourne Gunner (1184486)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  8. "Church of St. Mary, Winterbourne Gunner". Wiltshire Community History. Wiltshire Council. Retrieved 3 September 2016.

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