Penselwood

A couple of miles north of the village amidst the trees are the remains of Kenwalch's Castle, an Iron Age hill fort which may be the location of the Battle of Peonnum in 658, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The English also made a stand here against the Viking invader Cnut the Great in 1016. Pen Pits quern quarries north of Combe Bottom are a series of bowl shaped pits which were used as stone quarries during the Iron Age, Romano-British and Middle Ages. The parish of Penselwood was part of the Norton Ferris Hundred, and from the early fifteenth century until 1609 and the death of Nicholas Wadham (1531-1609), co-founder of Wadham College, Oxford with his wife Dorothy Wadham, the…