Parish history
The origin of the name Blackawton is also uncertain. The earliest documentary evidence, from the Domesday Book of 1086 is that ‘…the King holds Avetona. Asgar the Cramped held it before 1066…’ Avetona appears to combine the Celtic afon with the Saxon tun to mean ‘settlement on the river’. The prefix ‘Black’ was first recorded in 1281 and could mean ‘bleak’ or be a reference to the very dark soil found in some parts of the parish.
The Domesday Book goes on to say of Avetona ‘…there are 25 villagers and 22 smallholders….with 24 ploughs and 3 1/2 hides…’ It was a farming community then and remained substantially so for nearly 1000 years. It was only after World War II that people started to move away to find work and the number of working farms started to decline; now there are only a few left. Blackawton is still very much a working village, though, with some of its parishioners travelling from it to work elsewhere.
The parish has not, however, always had the boundaries it has today. The ancient ecclesiastical parish of Blackawton included Strete, but excluded a block of land west of the River Gara and Hutcherleigh Brook, including Abbotsleigh, Larcombe, Seccombe and Pasture farms. This block was in Halwell parish from the 13th century until the reorganisation of rural parishes in 1870, when it was added to Blackawton. Strete became a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1881 but only became a separate civil parish in 1935, when Blackawton Parish Council voted the fledgling Strete Parish Council the sum of seven pounds, with which to get started.
Anne Harvey, June 2009