The settlement of West Bolton is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Land of Count Alan in Yorkshire.

Other Settlements in Land of Count Alan

The Meaning of the Name

The name West Bolton is of Anglo-Saxon origin. Its final element derives from the Old English word tūn, a farmstead or village. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a farmstead’.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as West Bolton.

Scheduled Monuments Near West Bolton

Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 2 lie within roughly a mile of West Bolton:

Deserted medieval village - 1.24 km
Bolton Castle - 1.55 km

West Bolton Today

Today West Bolton lies within the administrative area of Castle Bolton with East and West Bolton.

Nearby Domesday Settlements

Other places recorded in the 1086 survey within a few miles:

High and Low Thoresby - 1.0 km E
Castle Bolton - 1.4 km NE
Redmire - 2.2 km NE
Carperby - 2.2 km SW
Aysgarth - 2.8 km SW
Eshingtons - 3.2 km S

Heritage Around [West] Bolton

Photographs of churches, listed buildings and monuments in the vicinity, contributed by volunteers to the Geograph project and reused here under a Creative Commons licence.

Images © their respective photographers, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 and reused here with attribution. Photographs depict listed buildings, churches and monuments near this settlement and may show neighbouring villages.

West Bolton in the Domesday Book (1086)