Long Crichel is a hamlet

Hamlet (place)

A hamlet is usually a rural settlement which is too small to be considered a village, though sometimes the word is used for a different sort of community. Historically, when a hamlet became large enough to justify building a church, it was then classified as a village...

 in east Dorset

Dorset

Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, situated on Cranborne Chase

Cranborne Chase

Cranborne Chase is a Chalk plateau in central southern England, straddling the counties Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. The plateau is part of the English Chalk Formation and is adjacent to Salisbury Plain and the West Wiltshire Downs in the north, the Dorset Downs to the south west and the...

 five miles north east of Blandford Forum. The hamlet has a population

Population

A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...

 of 81 .

Long Critchel House was bought in 1945 by Edward Sackville-West, from 1962 the 5th Baron Sackville

Edward Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville

Edward Charles Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville was a British music critic, novelist and, in his last years, a member of the House of Lords. Musically gifted as a boy, he was attracted as a young man to a literary life and wrote a series of semi-autobiographical novels in the 1920s and '30s...

, the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor

Desmond Shawe-Taylor (music critic)

Desmond Christopher Shawe Taylor, , was a British writer, co-author of The Record Guide, music critic of The New Statesman, The New Yorker and The Sunday Times and a regular and long-standing contributor to The Gramophone.-Biography:Shawe-Taylor was born in Dublin, the elder of two sons of...

 and art critic Eardley Knollys

Eardley Knollys

Eardley Knollys was an English artist of the Bloomsbury School of artists, art critic, art dealer and collector, active from the 1920s to 1950s...

, who established "what in effect was a male salon, entertaining at the weekends a galaxy of friends from the worlds of books and music" in Long Crichel, including James Lees-Milne

James Lees-Milne

James Lees-Milne was an English writer and expert on country houses. He was an architectural historian, novelist, and a biographer. He is also remembered as a diarist.-Biography:...

, a close friend of Knollys. By the mid-1960s Sackville, who died in 1965, and Knollys had been replaced by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer

Raymond Mortimer

Charles Raymond Mortimer Bell , who wrote under the name Raymond Mortimer, was a British writer, known mostly as a critic and literary editor....

 and Patrick Trevor-Roper

Patrick Trevor-Roper

Patrick Trevor-Roper , British eye surgeon and pioneer gay rights activist, was one of the first people in the United Kingdom to "come out" as openly gay, and played a leading role in the campaign to repeal the UK's anti-gay laws....

.

External links

• Census data