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 and Kingsbury Regis. 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. History 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. The "port" in the towns name signifies an important market town and was first recorded in 1249. The parish was part of the hundred of Horethorne. In 1770, Milborne Port was the site of events involving an exploding squib at the local fair that would result in a landmark case for the development of modern tort (personal injury) law. The case of Scott v. Shepherd helped establish the principles of remoteness, foreseeability, and intervening cause in modern common law torts. Shepherd tossed a lit squib into a crowded market in the town, where it landed on the table of a gingerbread merchant named Yates. Willis, a bystander, grabbed the squib and threw it across the market to protect himself and the gingerbread. Unfortunately, the squib landed in the goods of another merchant named Ryal. Ryal immediately grabbed the squib and tossed it away, accidentally hitting Scott in the face just as the squib exploded. The