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Concept
Shaftesbury
Summary
Shaftesbury (ˈʃɑːftsbəri,_ˈʃæfts-) is a town and civil parish in Dorset, England. It is on the A30 road, west of Salisbury, near the border with Wiltshire. It is the only significant hilltop settlement in Dorset, being built about above sea level on a greensand hill on the edge of Cranborne Chase.
The town looks over the Blackmore Vale, part of the River Stour basin.
Shaftesbury is the site of the former Shaftesbury Abbey, which was founded in 888 by King Alfred and became one of the richest religious establishments in the country, before being destroyed in the dissolution in 1539. Adjacent to the abbey site is Gold Hill, a steep cobbled street used in the 1970s as the setting for Ridley Scotts television advertisement for Hovis bread.
In the 2021 Census the town's civil parish had a population of 9,162.
Shaftesbury has acquired a number of names throughout its history. Writing in 1906, Sir Frederick Treves referred to four of these names from Celtic, Latin and English traditions in his book Highways & Byways in Dorset:
The city has had many names. It was, in the beginning, Caer Palladour. By the time of the Domesday Book it was Sceptesberie. It then, with all the affectation of a lady in an eighteenth-century lyric, called itself Sophonia. Lastly it became Shaston, and so the people call it to this day, while all the milestones around concern themselves only with recording the distances to "Shaston".
The original Celtic name is first recorded in Medieval Welsh literature as Caer Vynnydd y Paladr (The Mountain Fort/City of the Spears) and Thomas Gale records the name as Caer Palladour in his work of 1709. Though "Palladour" was described by one 19th-century directory as "mere invention", it has continued to be used as a poetic and alternative name for the town.
The English name was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Sceptesberie, and the use of "Shaston" (ˈʃæstən) was recorded in 1831 in Samuel Lewis's A Topographical Dictionary of England and in 1840 in The parliamentary gazetteer of England and Wales.
Official source
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