St Nicholas' Church

The parish church stands beside the abbey ruins on Church Street, and it is open every day in daylight hours, in its own words to welcome the weary traveller. It is Grade I listed. The north aisle wall and the porch are 14th century, the chancel was rebuilt in the 1400s and the nave in the 1500s, and the tower, about 1400, has three stages and a battlemented top. Six bells, dated 1636 to 1773, are rung again two Sundays a month after years of silence.

Go in for the pulpit. In November 1644 Parliamentarian troops under Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper attacked the Royalist garrison the Strangways family had put in the village. The men in the church gave up, and the two bullet holes in the early 17th century oak pulpit are from that fight. The Strangways' house next door blew up when the fire reached the gunpowder, taking the abbey records and about sixty soldiers with it. Also look for the chancel ceiling of 1638, the reredos given in 1751, the 1910 windows to the fifth Earl of Ilchester, and the tablet recording that no one from Abbotsbury was lost in the Second World War.

Free. Services are on the first and third Sundays only, Communion at 11 on the first and Morning Praise at 10 on the third, so on those mornings wait until the service is out. The foundations of the abbey are in the churchyard, which is managed for wildlife under the Dorset Wildlife Trust's Living Churchyard scheme.

The church, the barn and the ruins are all within two hundred yards of each other, with Cherries café at Abbey Farm at the bottom of the lane. On a wet day this is the one place in the village where you can spend half an hour with a roof over you and six hundred years to read.

St Nicholas' on A Church Near You, The church and the Civil War