wagon-roof" in the nave. The church is a Grade I listed building. Next to the church are Court House and Court Farm. Court House is the village manor house and was the venue for meetings of the local Court leet. Court Farm has a large Elizabethan tithe barn which overlooks the churchyard; it was built in 1590 and constructed from flint, with stone buttresses and oak roof beams. In his 18th-century History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, John Hutchins stated that one of the beams in the barn was inscribed with 'L.V.W. 1590', the initials being those of Lady Ursula Walsingham, though searches by subsequent writers have failed to find them, and the beam may have been removed when the roof thatch was removed in the 20th century. The Old Vicarage is based on an early Tudor building which was expanded and altered in 1640. Adjoining it is the mullioned old bakery, dating from 1733 upon a 17th-century core. In literature and film Thomas Hardy names the village as Sidlinch or Broad Sidlinch in his story 'The Grave by the Handpost' (1897) published in The Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). These names are reminiscent of previous forms of the village's name, such as 'Broadsidlynch' in 1333 and 'Brodesedelyng', in a legal record, in Latin, dated 1440, where John Tidde was a clerk. The parish church was used as a location in the 1967 film adaptation of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, in a scene that involved water pouring from one of the church's gargoyles onto the grave of Fanny Robin. The Sydling valley is used as a location within Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel Rogue Male. Demography In the 2011 census Sydling St Nicholas parish had a population of 414 in 206 dwellings, with 89.8% of households having at least one usual resident. The average age of the population was 46.6, compared to 39.3 for England as a whole; 26.1% of residents were 65 years old or older, compared to 16.4% for England as a whole. The historic population of Sydling St Nicholas parish from the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below. See also List of liberties in Dorset. References External links Villages in Dorset Liberties of Dorset