West Wellow - <>

Wellow is a village in Hampshire, England that falls within the Test Valley district. The village lies just outside the New Forest across the main A36 road which runs from the M27 motorway to Salisbury. The nearest town is Romsey (6 km) and the nearest city Southampton (13 km). The village has a population of just over 3,000.Confusingly, some people refer to the two villages of East Wellow and West Wellow individually, while others refer to them collectively as Wellow. There is no official administrative or political division which separates the two parts and they share the same parish council, which also covers the small settlement of Canada. Canada is just inside the New Forest boundary and can only be reached by public road from the roundabout on the A36 at West Wellow. King Alfred (d. 899) left "the toune of Welewe" in his will to his eldest daughter Ethelgifu. "Welue" is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086) where it is recorded that Agemund had five hides of about 600acre there. Only the name "Wellow" appears on Saxton's 1575 map of Hampshire, spelled "Wellew" in various maps from the seventeenth century. East and West Wellow appear separately by the time of John Harrison's 1788 map, separated by the River Blackwater. Their exact positions on these early maps are hard to reconcile with the modern road and settlement pattern but until 1895 when the county boundary was realigned, West Wellow was in Wiltshire and East Wellow in Hampshire.

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