The fires, and what was built after them

Almost nothing in Abbotsbury is medieval apart from the barn, the chapel and the church, and the reason is that it burned. There were fires in the late 17th and 18th centuries, the worst in 1784, and between them they destroyed most of the old timber-framed village. What went up in its place is the village we have now, limestone cottages with thatched roofs, built from the abbey's own stone, along Market Street, Rodden Row, Back Street and West Street. Nearly a hundred structures in the parish are listed, six of them Grade I. The houses that came through the 1784 fire can still be picked out on West Street. Rodden Row mixes 17th-century thatch with the Victorian terraces the estate put up between 1850 and 1890. Dorset Council's Historic Towns Survey of the village, published in February 2011, found that the medieval street plan survives almost complete, and that the late Saxon layout before it may still be readable in the shape of the village.

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