East Dundry
East Dundry is a south-facing hamlet some 160 metres above sea level in a sheltered valley of Dundry Hill just south of Bristol. The hamlet is in the parish of Dundry and about two kilometres east of its village church. The iron-age Maes Knoll tump (2.5 kilometres to the east) and tumuli (in the field just north-east of North Hill Farm) are evidence of long occupation of the valley.
The original settlements probably owed their existence to the quarrying of the local Dundry stone, which is found at Cardiff Castle and was used in mediaeval Bristol. Nearby Dundry, was originally a Roman fort built as part of the local defences against the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons.
The hamlet today has some 16 houses including two active farms – there were five active farms until the 1950s, then mostly supplying milk to Bristol. Most buildings are built from the oolitic limestone quarried locally, probably mostly by the sites of the houses. Until 1930, the inhabitants were almost entirely farmers and farm workers: gradually since then the hamlet has become a dormitory village for Bristol.
East Dundry Lane in the 1920s was the first to be tarred into the hamlet. Bristol, with its centre only 6 kilometres away, had mains water, electricity, gas, dial telephones and mains drainage by the 1930s – but the Second World War and its ten years of ensuing austerity stopped all extension of these facilities to places such as East Dundry.
Bombs and shrapnel fell in East Dundry: bombs fell in the bull pen of North Hill Farm on 3 January 1941.
Negotiations with the Electricity Board started with a meeting in Walnut Farm in 1952 and installation in 1953 of an 11kV supply from across the valley in 1953.
The houses and farms built before about 1890 (and dating back to mediaeval and earlier times) are all geologically close to the division between clay and the higher layer of Dundry hill’s oolitic limestone – this allowed wells to be sunk for them, with a reliable supply. The farmhouses North Hill Farm and Walnut Farm were built on the village’s higher and flatter land in the late 19th century – they were served by separate hydraulic rams until the 1950s (for instance North Hill Farm had a pipe from the spring below Upton Farm to its ram by the stream and on up to the farm). Mains water (needing to be pumped up Dundry hill) was only supplied to the hamlet in 1957/8 after negotiations since 1952 (Dundry village had mains water supplied several years earlier than East Dundry).
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Wikipedia