"It is a tiny place near Dorchester with a stream running between the road and the cottages. The country round is rich in the turf-covered tombs of an immemorial ancestry. There, in the grass-grown barrows, the rude fore-fathers of the hamlets lie. In these great mounds lie men who fell before the legions of the Emperor Claudius and, far back beyond Caesar, mysterious craftsmen of the Stone Age, who built for their dead small houses of stone underground. There are 118 barrows of almost every type and they are older than any written history of England, older than anything of Rome, and the great showpiece of this corner of Dorset's countryside is perhaps the masterpiece of Prehistoric Britain, Maiden Castle. If not the largest it is perhaps the most impressive prehistoric earthworks in the land."

There appear originally to have been three riverside settlements in the parish, Martinstown, in the centre, Ashton in the east and in the west, Rew - meaning a Row of cottages or trees (not recorded as such until 1283, but probably much older).