limestone on which the village sits, the underlying geology of the vicinity is Oxford Clay, which here results in moist and fertile soil that yields rich dairy pastures. Although the dominant industry is dairy farming, other local industries have included stone-quarrying and more recently land has been given over to orchards. In the early eighteenth century at least five attempts were made to find coal in the area; this was documented by the local vicar William Sharpe. Demography The population of the village rose regularly from 216 in 1801 to 339 in 1851,and then fell steadily until in 1931 it was only 241. In 1971 the inhabitants numbered 292 and during that decade increased by 44% to 420 by 1981 when a small housing estate was built on the south western edge of the village. The population has since increased slowly from 414 in 1991 to 435 in 2001 and 470 in 2011. Architecture The parish church is dedicated to Saint James the Great. It was originally a chapelry of Sherborne Minster. Most of it was built in the fifteenth century although the square tower was built local of rubble with freestone dressings about two hundred years earlier. The tower's upper storey has a crenellated parapet which was added as part of the main fifteenth-century development. The tower holds six bells with the tenor tuned to G#. Local superstition had it that if the tenor bell sounded dull someone in the parish would die within the week. West Hall is a Grade I listed Elizabethan manor house to the north of the village. It was owned by the Hymerford and Moleyn families, and later by the 17th century MP Thomas Chafe. In the 20th century, the house was used by the Royal Army Medical Corps. The seventeenth-century houses in the village are traditional two-storeyed Dorset cottages, and some retain their thatched roofs. After the Second World War some bungalows were built in the heart of the village. Burton House, just north of the church, is a modern building incorporating a mixture of decorations and structural elements of different periods from all over Dorset. Set apart from the village is Leweston Farm, which may have been the old Long Burton manor house. The farm also has a late seventeenth-century five-bay barn. Two substantial buildings mark the southern extent of the village on opposite sides of the road. The Methodist chapel built