Leusdon

Leusdon is a hamlet on the eastern side of Dartmoor in Devon, about one kilometre north of Poundsgate and six miles north-north-west of Ashburton. It was a chapelry of Widecombe in the Moor parish. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1870 to 1872 says it was constituted in 1863, when it had 400 people, while Wikipedia gives 1864 for the new parish. No dated history of the settlement itself has turned up beyond its church and hall.

The church of St John the Baptist was built in 1863 in granite by J W Rowell of Newton Abbot, architect to the Palk estate, and is Grade II listed. It replaced a medieval chapel of St Leonard, mentioned in a grant of 1284. Two windows by Arthur Anselm Orr remember Lieutenant William Torquill MacLeod Bolitho, who died at Ypres in 1915, and his younger brother. Sir Robert Richard Torrens, the Irish-born land reformer, is buried in the churchyard.

Leusdon Memorial Hall dates from 1923. Frederick Struben made his money from gold at Johannesburg in the 1880s and bought the Spitchwick estate. After his son Leicester died in 1916, aged 21, when his aircraft was shot down near Bapaume, the family chose a hall for the community rather than a private monument.