include remains of the once famous Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter,
founded about 1040 by Orc, a one-time steward of Canute and afterwards
in the service of Edward the Confessor. At the Dissolution the abbey
came into the possession of an ancestor of the Strangeways who owned
the Swannery when that first became known to history. The abbey, like
many others, is said to have been built on the site of an older
religious house, dating from very ancient days. There is a gatehouse,
with an arch of later date, remaining, besides the fragmentary
portions in the farmhouse. Many houses in Abbotsbury have pieces of
ecclesiastical stonework or carving built into their heavy walls, and
arched windows seem to have been transplanted bodily from the
dismantled abbey to the dwellings in the village.

By far the most notable building in Abbotsbury is the
fifteenth-century Monastic Barn, a fine structure 276 feet long. Its
plan is as perfect as its simple but imposing architecture; the
ecclesiastical appearance is heightened by the lancet windows between
the heavy buttresses and the slight transeptal extensions that give
the structure the form of a cross. The abbey fish pond, fed by the
stream that runs through Portesham street, till remains below the
tithe barn, and though its farmyard surroundings are very different to
those it had when the brethren gathered around the banks on Thursdays
of old, it is still, with its island centre of old trees, a
picturesque finish to the scene.

St. Catherine's Chapel on the hill above the sea is an erection in a
situation similar to that of the far older building on St. Aldhelm's
Head. Its appearance, however, is quite different, and it is
Perpendicular in style. The turret at the north-west corner, the two
porches and clerestory, are very evidently of another age to the heavy