The Tent is a huge sumptious marquees in the Cloister Garden behind the Abbey with an adjoining refreshment tent serving tea, coffee, cake and light lunches

Willoughby House is at 73 High Street, a short five minute walk from the Abbey.  Please enter via the driveway just past 75 High Street – the entrance will be signposted.  The kitchen has recently been returned to the full-height medieval structure showing the original timber framing.  It is one of three remaining medieval kitchens in Dorchester.

Dorchester Village Hall is on Queen Street just a short walk from the Abbey.  It is an excellent spacious venue with a sprung wooden floor – ideal for dancing!

The Iron Age fort on Wittenham Clumps dominates a landscape settled since remotest antiquity. To the south, in the Berkshire Downs, is Churn Nob, and here, in 635AD the missionary Bishop Birinus, sent from Rome by Pope Honorius I, preached to Cynegils, King of Wessex. To the north, enclosed between the River Thames and its tributary the River Thame, lies Dorchester, a small village with a great Abbey, a cradle of English Christianity.

The building we now see was begun in the 12th century, replacing two earlier Saxon cathedrals (some Saxon fabric is still evident in the north wall of the nave). The Norman building expanded in the 13th century and was richly aggrandised in the early 14th century when the chancel was added with its wonderful window sculpted with the Tree of Jesse, its stained glass and its exquisite sedilia. The great tower, rebuilt in 1602, but incorporating a 14th century spiral staircase, rises above a lush landscape of willows and flowering water meadows. On this site, perhaps in the Thame itself, Birinus baptised King Cynegils, with Oswald King of Northumbria standing godfather.