Milborne Port | |
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Church of St John the Evangelist |
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Milborne Port shown within Somerset | |
Population | 2,802 (2011) |
OS grid reference | ST677186 |
District | |
Shire county | |
Region | |
Country | England |
Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
Post town | Sherborne |
Postcode district | DT9 |
Dialling code | 01963 |
Police | Avon and Somerset |
Fire | Devon and Somerset |
Ambulance | South Western |
EU Parliament | South West England |
UK Parliament | |
Milborne Port is a village, electoral ward and civil parish in Somerset, England, east of Sherborne, and in the South Somerset district. It has a population of 2,802. The parish includes the hamlets of Milborne Wick, Kingsbury Regis and Stowell.
The village is surrounded by green fields and countryside on the banks of the River Gascoigne, a tributary of the River Ivel or River Yeo.
The village has a primary school, which occupies the site of the former infant school. The junior school was closed and all pupils and staff moved to the infant site. In 2006 a new three-classroom extension was opened.
The nearby Laycock Railway Cutting is the best single exposure of the Bathonian ’Fuller's Earth Rock’ in South Somerset.Ammonites indicating the Morrisi and Subcontractus zones of the Middle Bathonian are frequent.Miller's Hill is a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest which is an important and historically famous locality for studies of Middle Jurassic (Bajocian) stratigraphy and palaeontology.
Prehistoric features and finds have been located on the Iron Age hill fort on Barrow Hill, in the north of the parish.
In the Saxon period Milborne Port was important as a mint town, between 997 and 1035. It is one of at least nineteen mint towns which were neither an Alfredian borough nor an eleventh-century shire town, but a minster site. The market was the most profitable in Somerset in 1086,and the town was eighth in the county tax collection in 1340.