Portal:Cheshire/Selected settlement/9



Acton is a small village and civil parish lying immediately west of Nantwich. The civil parish covers 762 acre and also includes Dorfold and part of Burford, with an estimated population of 340 in 2006. The area is agricultural, with dairy farming the main industry.

The parish is believed to have been inhabited since the 8th or 9th century. Acton appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, when it was one of the wealthiest townships in the Nantwich Hundred, being valued for the same sum as Nantwich. The name means "oak town", referring to the pedunculate oaks that predominated in the adjacent Forest of Mondrem. During the Civil War, the village was taken by siege several times. The Shropshire Union Canal reached the parish in 1835, using a long embankment to avoid Dorfold Park. The parish contains many historic buildings, notably Dorfold Hall, considered by Nikolaus Pevsner to be one of the two finest Jacobean houses in Cheshire, and St Mary's Church, whose 13th-century tower is among the earliest in the county.

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