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.

An aerial view of the village.

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.