Parish Map Unearths Village Roots

Buckland Newton, between Sherborne and Dorchester and near historic Cerne Abbas, is to have a new map. This won't be in Ordnance Survey style, but a pictorial, archival account of the parish which will give its residents (about 600 adults) a chance to capture the flavour of homeland with reference to its past, which has been traced back to pre-Roman times. The Iron Age hillfort of Dungeon Hill lies inside the north limits, and here part of an early granite quern for grinding corn was discovered. It now sits beside an old house (a 1773 halfpenny was recently unearthed in a bread oven), lived in by archaeologist Gillian Frost. She and a couple of neighbours are devising the map – whose progress is being filmed by the Trilith rural video unit of Bourton, also in Dorset, for Channel Four's conservation series Worldwise Reports this spring.