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Welcome to the official website for Holt in Wiltshire.
For a thousand years the village of Holt was part of a tithing of the Parish of Bradford on Avon. Its church, St Katharine's, was a chapel of Holy Trinity Church in that parish. In 1001 A.D. King Ethelred's charter, a copy of which is in the British Museum, made a grant of Bradford, which included Holt, to the Abbey of Shaftsbury. An interesting description of the boundary which referred to Holt is translated from the Saxon script as follows:- ''First from seven pear trees on the herewai (highway) which runs southwards outside Acceslegle (Oxenleaze) comes out of Wrindesholt, and so along the herewai to Alwine's leap-gate; from this leap-gate forth along his boundary to the Avon.'' The name Holt comes from a very ancient word meaning a wood, and possible interpretations for Wrindesholt are boundary wood, cleared wood, or the personal name of Wrinda's wood. A leap-gate is a low gate, or stile, which can be leaped by deer but not by sheep. In 1846 an ecclesiastical parish of Holt was created, but it continued to be part of Bradford for legal and local government purposes until December 1894, when the civil parish of Holt was formed.
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