Sampford Spiney Parish Council

Sampford Spiney is a small rural parish in the Walkham valley on the western edge of Dartmoor, around four miles south-east of Tavistock in West Devon. Home to fewer than 150 residents, the parish takes in the hamlet of Woodtown and a scatter of farms set among the fields and moorland fringe below Cox Tor and Pew Tor. Its name derives from an Anglo-Saxon "sandy ford", with "Spiney" added from the family who held the manor in the thirteenth century. At its heart stands the Grade I listed Church of St Mary, a granite church with a tall pinnacled tower typical of the Devon style, first recorded as a chapel in the thirteenth century and rebuilt in its present form in the fourteenth. Local government for the parish is delivered jointly with neighbouring Whitchurch through Plasterdown Grouped Parish Council, which meets alternately at Whitchurch Community Hall and at Sampford Spiney Church itself, keeping decision-making rooted in both communities it serves. The council handles matters such as planning consultations, footpaths, highways and local amenity issues on behalf of both parishes, while each village retains its own distinct identity, history and parish boundary. Cover photograph: Sampford Spiney, Church of St Mary, by Nigel Cox, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.