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The village developed at the foot of the Chiltern Hills, on the spring line. The
hills provided beech trees for feeding pigs, brushwood, timber and building
material. The soil on the plain is both chalky and clay, being highly productive
for farming. Newcomers pronounce the oun in Blount as in round. It is
usually taken to be lazy speech but in fact Blunt, used by the people born and
bred in the village, is the more correct because the village takes its name from
the Le Blunt family, lords of the manor in the 13th to the 15th centuries.
The nearby Icknield Way carried a lot of sheep drovers and travellers who needed
sustenance and lodgings during the Middle Ages. The village expanded in the 18th
and 19th centuries and was self-sufficient. It was described in 1852 as a large
and respectable town. It had a number of pubs, a draper, grocers, wine
merchants, a smithy, a corn merchant, a butcher, baker, post office and a
school. Today there remain just two pubs. The shops have all closed. With the
decline of farming the villagers mainly travel to work.
Even the telephone exchange has moved. In the early days of the telephone one of
the local merchants knew the chief engineer. He felt that Kingston Blount would
benefit by having the exchange. He heard that the decision would be made on a
particular day according to how much use the telephone system had. The gentleman
arranged for many of his clients to use it that day, thus making Kingston Blount
the name for all the local village telephone numbers.
The school in the village was always small. The land had been given for the
building by a local landowner whose wife took an especial interest in the
attendance of the children. Elderly residents tell how she walked the village in
a long black dress, a black walking stick with a silver top swinging as she
walked. Whenever she found a child potato-picking or stone-gathering she gave
several sharp slaps to the bottom and sent them off to school. Later she would
stalk into school to check that the children were there. After the schools
closure, the building became a village hail, and later when a new hail was
erected, a private house.
The present village hall is run by the Hillwerke Trust and is situated alongside
the allotments. Many years ago the villagers had rights to collect brushwood and
fuel from a part of the woods called the Poors Hillock. Village rumour had it
that in the 19th century firewood was not the only thing to come down the hill,
but that more appetising things came down too. In those days of harsh poaching
laws, villagers were taking great risks. The rights were exchanged in 1864 for
four acres of land to be used as allotments by the poor of the village. The new
village hall was built on a field next to the allotments and it was fitting that
the old medieval word Hillwerke was used.
The railway line which ran through the village had a railway halt at Kingston
Blount and was popular as a starting point for conveying agricultural produce to
the towns.
Trains apparently never went very fast for there is a story of a keen horseman
challenging the train driver to a race to Chinnor from the halt at Kingston
Blount. The rider won.
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