Information

About Dorset

Dorset, one of the ancient counties of England, lies on the south west coast, and it was a part of the kingdom of Wessex before the emergence of the English state in the ninth century.

The 'Wyvern' of Wessex - the dragon that was the symbol of the kingdom - has left a somewhat hazy whirl of Arthurian myth, but we have some concrete knowledge about what went before the winged beast. The Romans founded what is until today the 'county town' of Dorset - Dorchester - in about AD 70. The vestiges of Roman rule are not as plentiful as at nearby Bath, but the town retains elements of its Roman past.

The first mention of Dorset ('Dorsetshire') was in 841. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, Dorset endured, becoming one of the historic 39 English counties (largely unchanged since the Domesday Book of 1086).

The thunderclaps of history did not strike often over the Dorset countryside. The county remained a decidedly rural backwater, popular with kings and nobles who came here on hunting trips. None of the major battles of the English Civil War was fought in Dorset, although curiously enough, a band of incensed country folk joined the so-called 'Clubmen' - a troop loyal to neither the King nor Cromwell's parliamentarians. These rustic renegades, armed with only clubs and picthforks, had had enough of soldiers interfering with their harvest, and they made some spirited stands. They were chastised as 'poor silly creatures' by Cromwell, who refrained from 'sending them for the chop'.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Dorset became infamous as a bastion of the smuggling trade. Sometimes entire villages became involved in the scam. The Industrial Revolution largely bypassed the region, and thus Dorset has preserved it's rural character. The county was an inspiration to authors such as Trollope, and above all Thomas Hardy. The latter was a Dorset man through and through, and most of his novels incorporated specific local settings.

During the 2006 survey, Dorset counted about 710,000 inhabitants. However, about a third of these resided in the major towns of Poole and Bournemouth. Mirroring the balance found in other English rural regions, ethnic minorities are very small, with 98.7 percent of the region being white (compare London).

Although about three quarters of Dorset remains in agricultural use, farming is no longer the single greatest employer in the county, owing to the advance of modern technology.

Dorset people are proud of their county. However, the aims of the eccentric Lord Bath, patron of over 70 'wifelets' and champion of autonomy for a revived kingdom of Wessex, have not revealed any splittists in the Welsh mold. All in all, Dorset is considered amongst the most 'English' of England's counties. It's a region whose charms lie in the conservation of what is ancient, be it the splendid jurassic coastline, the verdant countryside, or the delightful old villages that dot the region.