Dorchester Holiday Accommodation Guide

His sleeping quarters on High Street are now a restaurant, and his courtroom is reported to have been a room in the Antelope Hotel on South Street. In 1834, the old Shire Hall on the High Street was dismantled. Another historic trial took place on this street: that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The T.U.C. presently owns the courtroom as a monument, and it is available to the public.
Dorchester is now a cattle marketing and farming town." "A large brewery and other minor industries are located in a retail centre. It is best known for the works of Thomas Hardy (l840–1928), whose posthumous renown it has worked hard to maintain. He was born in the neighbouring town of Higher Bockhampton and spent his final years at Max Gate on the town's eastern outskirts.
The County Museum, which is located approximately midway up the High Street, is arguably Dorset's best museum, with numerous good Roman and pre-Roman artefacts, spectacular fossils, poacher traps, and Hardy relics, including a reproduction of his study. St Peter's Church, next door, is mostly 15th-century, with an effigy of Denzil, Lord Holles, one of the five "the birds are flown" M.P.s whom Charles I went to the House of Commons to arrest, restored by a local architect with the young Thomas Hardy as an assistant; it has an effigy of Denzil, Lord Holles, one of the five "the birds are flown" M.P.s whom Charles I went to A monument of William Barnes, a 19th-century dialect poet who, like Scotland's Burns, is more revered than read in his hometown, stands just outside. A few doors up is the Shire Hall, and a statue of Hardy by Eric Kennington may be found a bit farther on. A good example of the foundations and tessellated pavements of a Roman villa may be discovered 200 yards north in Colliton Park, near the new County Hall.
The keep, which is housed in the former army depot barracks, is located at the top of the High Street and houses a museum. A Roman amphitheatre, built on the site of a Bronze Age stone circle known as Maumbury Rings, is located just under a mile south of the Weymouth road. It was used for beast-baiting until the Middle Ages, and for public, well-attended executions until the 18th century. Napier's Almshouses (1610), one of the town's oldest structures, located on the route to it, in South Street, roughly opposite the Post Office. St George's, Fordington, is the most attractive church and may be found by going south "West of the river, there is a street called High Street. It contains a magnificent Norman tympanum depicting St George, on behalf of the Crusaders, piercing Saracens with his sword. The Walks, which encircle the town on three sides with avenues of limes, chestnuts, and sycamores, are claimed to follow the line of the Roman fortifications. The little church where William Barnes, the poet, was rector from 1862 until his death in 1886, and the thatched rectory where he resided, both in open parkland filled with oak trees, are one and three quarter miles south south east at Winterborne Came. Here is also one of Dorset's best-looking Palladian mansions, constructed in 1754 by architect-builder Francis Cartwright for John Damer, a former M.P. for Dorchester and younger brother of Milton Abbas' founder. It is easily visible from the highway and is only available by appointment. Wolfeton House, the Trenchard family's ancestral house, located one and a half miles north of Charminster and may be visited by appointment. The church at Charminster contains a 13th-century porch and a 15th-century tower.