DENTON WITH WOOTTON
A brief History of our Parish
Denton, midway between Canterbury and Folkestone, lies in the folds of the North Downs in a valley that runs from North to South and the hills that rise sharply to both East and West. They are well wooded and sheep can be seen grazing on the slopes; the whole village is very park like. It is listed as an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and any building is tightly controlled.
The village consists of a small number of houses on both sides of the street. In 1705 the population was recorded as 86 and this has risen to 144 in 1959 and stands at 153 in 1998. At the present day there is only one Inn although formerly there were two. No shops survive, though there used to be Bakers, General Store, Butchers, Cobblers, Carpenters and a Post Office which was the last one to close in 1992.
The main road from Canterbury to Folkestone runs through the centre of the village and the fast traffic makes a dangerous environment. Despite this, the village still manages to maintain the strong feeling of community with the Church, Village Hall and Inn as its focus.
The Manor of Wootton, or Wootton Court, was given to Athelard, Archbishop of Canterbury, in AD 800 be Cenulf, King of Mercia. The manor house, and the church, were supposedly built by Ivo de Woditon in the 12th century. The Manor passed to the Crown during the Reformation and was sold by Henry VIII to Leonard Digges in 1547.
The Digges family owned the nearby Manor of Barham but, as the youngest son, Leonard wanted his own family home. Leonard and his son Thomas are regarded as the two finest English mathematicians of the 16th century. It was at Wootton Court that they invented the telescope, more than 30 years before Hans Lipperhay and Galileo are said to have invented it. The Digges work on telescopes and planetary orbits has only recently been discovered in an unpublished manuscript of 1576. It seems to have been kept a state secret so as not to warn the Spanish and their threatening Armada of the “secret weapon” invented by the Digges. Leonard has been called the “Einstein of the Tudor Age” and also laid the foundations of the modern sciences of surveying and meteorology