Middle Rocombe
hamlet in Stokeinteignhead, Teignbridge, Devon, England
Middle Rocombe is a hamlet in Devon, England. It lies just over 1 mile to the southwest of the nearest village, Stokeinteignhead, and is located about 3 miles from Newton Abbot, lying within the Teignbridge district of Devon. It is situated in the Rocombe valley surrounded by the neighbouring hamlets of Higher and Lower Rocombe and is bordered by Coffinswell and Haccombe over the valley. The hamlet consists of a handful of houses, including a traditional, thatched cottage.
History
People have lived in the Rocombe Valley for thousands of years; archaeologist, William Pengelly carried out an excavation and found a saddle quern stone – now in Torquay museum – and in a trench found shells, pottery and skeletons; evidence for a Romano-British settlement.
The first record of Rocombe is in the Domesday Book. Its name derives from racumb: -cumb being the old English for valley and ra referring to Roe-deer hence Rocombe is 'the valley frequented by roe deer'. In the Domesday book, Middle Rocombe is recorded as belonging to William Cheever, who also held almost all of the land in Combeinteignhead, and to Edric before the Norman conquest. The hamlet appears again in fourteenth century sources, recorded as Rocombe Blaumoster held by Reginald de Clifford, as part of the manor of Combeinteignhead and consequently the parish. This distinguishes Middle Rocombe from neighbouring hamlets, which were in the parish of Stokeinteignhead - this difference is illustrated on the tithe map of Combeinteignhead, 1839.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q105913384. Authority coordinates are 50.516, -3.539. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1839.
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This entry incorporates text from “Middle Rocombe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.