Our Ambitions

If anyone can help, or has suggestions, please get in touch here.

Community engagement – we have over 40 members, we hold monthly meetings, annual exhibitions, we publish progress monthly in three local magazines, we have this website and a Facebook page.

Contact us and let us know what you would like to see on this website.

Dorset County Museum have many artefacts from Milton Abbas – we would love to photograph these and record them for our catalogue.

There are also some documents, photographs (including aerial photographs) and books in the Dorset County Museum library which need digitising and recording.

The place, field, road and track names and their origins are given in A D Mills, Place Names of Dorset, Part 3, 1989. We would love to map and photograph these and record in Pinterest, Google Earth or GIS.

We have 100 listed buildings and monuments in Milton Abbas. These need to be photographed and recorded.

Milton Abbas has the most wonderful Capability Brown landscape, believed by the country’s leading expert to be in the top 5 and a prime example of his late work.  The views were designed to be seen from horseback or carriage on rides and viewpoints around the estate. Wouldn’t it be great to record it by drone mounted camera?

We would like to record the Parish Boundary, including photographing it, and recording the plant species in the hedges.

We have not yet found the Diocesan archives for the peculiar of Milton Abbas. We know they did exist because we have the calendar of wills proved there.

Our earliest map dates to 1652 and is at the Dorset History Centre. We have a digital copy which we would love to annotate and digitally overlay onto a modern map, possibly using GIS or Photoshop.

For family history we wish to explore adjacent parishes for births, marriages and burials, then carry out demographic analysis to see if Milton Abbas was in any way different. We also need to know who moved into and out of the parish.

No archaeology has been done in Milton Abbas parish in the 20th century, except from exploratory trenches near the Abbey by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in the 1950’s. With all the modern techniques now available there are ample opportunities for non-invasive surveys.

Apart from the base of the market cross, there is now no known Anglo-Saxon artefact (the last one may have been stolen).

Metal detecting: we know that detectorists are around because they have been seen, and one object has been reported to the County Finds Officer. It would be great to be in touch with them.

We would like to develop a history trail for visitors and walkers. We have the information (not least from Chris Fookes’ guide book), but it would be great if a walker could develop a trail.

Thanks to Pamela we now know exactly what the weather was like in the second half of the 18th century. We have historical average monthly temperatures and rainfall. For example it has been suggested that the lake failed to fill after about 1780 because of a series of dry years. Now we can discover if this was true. We know that the prices of grain fluctuated during the years of war with France, but how did the weather affect agricultural production from 1750 – 1830? There are many incidents in the Overseers of the Poor Books e.g. extra payments for wood, high mortality, which we can now correlate with hard winters or wet summers.