Dorchester occurs as market town in southern central Dorset, England, situated on the River Frome and A35 road 20 miles west of Poole and five miles n of Weymouth. Inside 2001 the town had the people of 16,171 & the catchment population of approximately 40,000. There were 7,386 home around 2001 & 205 shops around 1991. Dorchester has been a County town of Dorset since 1305.

The market is held in the town in Wednesdays & Sundays.

A town has deuce railway stations, which connect a town to London, Southampton via the South Western Main Line and to Westbury, Bath and Bristol via the Heart of Wessex Line. Dorchester South railway station on a South Western Mainside Line, it used to be that an idiosyncratic structure inside which trains heading in a single counsel would reverse and so rejoin the across line, was rebuilt in 1989, however Dorchester West railway station on a Heart of Wessex Line is still the original Low American Railway structure designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

In the late 1980s Dorchester was bypassed.

Charles, Prince of Wales has recently built the self-contained village of Poundbury on the western fringes of the town.

In December 15, 2004, Dorchester was granted Fairtrade Town status.

History
2 miles southwest of the town centre, sat in the steep chalk hill, is the large Iron Age hill fort Maiden Castle, which was one of the virtually all right settlements around pre-Roman Britain. A fort was significant to a Romans & the Saxons, whose invasions of Dorset weren't seen as complete until it experienced captured capitol hill.

A town, originally known as Durnovaria, was founded per Romans in AD 70. the town however has a bit of Roman features, including section of a town bulwarks & the foundations of a Roman town house, which are freely accessible touching County Hall. There are several Roman finds in the County Museum. In the southern suburbia is Maumbury, an ancient British earthwork converted by the Romans for apply as an Amphitheatre, and north west is Poundbury Hill, another pre-Roman fortification.

In a 17th century a town was at the centre of the Puritan emigration to America, and local Rector, John White, organised the payout of Dorchester, Massachusetts. A town was heavy defended against a Royalists in the English Civil War.

Around 1685 the Duke of Monmouth failed around his invasion attempt, & well-nigh 300 of his men were condemned to demise or even transport in Judge Jeffreys' "Bloody Assizes" in Dorchester.

In the 1613 and 1725 two great fires destroyed big area of the town, however a few of the mediaeval buildings, including Judge Jeffreys' lodgings, and a Tudor almshouse can still exist as observed in a town centre, amongst the replacement Georgian buildings, many of which are then built around Portland limestone.

Thomas Hardy's Cottage at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester Local creator & poet Thomas Hardy based the fictional town of Casterbridge on Dorchester. Healthy's childhood at home may be observed to the east of the town, & his home within town, Max Gate, is open to the public. William Barnes, the local idiom poet, was Minister of religion of Winterborne Come, the little hamlet touching Dorchester, for several years, & ran the school in the town. Two men use at times statues in the town centre. Two Thomas Healthy & poet Cecil Day Lewis are buried in Stinsford, 1 mile from either Dorchester. a statue of Healthy stands beside the independent intersection in the town.

On the hills south east of the town stands Hardy's Monument, a memorial to the other local Thomas Hardy, Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, who served with Horatio Nelson, which looks out over Dorchester, Weymouth, the Isle of Portland and Chesil Beach.

Athelhampton is a fine 15th-century manor house five miles east of Dorchester.

" a man might as well spend time in Dorchester as in any town in England". -- Daniel Defoe