Mappowder is a village and civil parish in the county of Dorset in southern England. The parish lies approximately southeast of the town of Sherborne and covers about at an elevation of . It is sited on

Corallian limestone The Corallian Group or Corallian Limestone is a geologic group in England. It is predominantly a coralliferous sedimentary rock, laid down in the Oxfordian stage of the Jurassic. It is a hard variety of "coral rag". Building stones from this geol ...

soil at the southern edge of the Blackmore Vale, close to the northern

scarp Scarp may refer to: Landforms and geology * Cliff, a significant vertical, or near vertical, rock exposure * Escarpment, a steep slope or long rock that occurs from erosion or faulting and separates two relatively level areas of differing elevatio ...

face of the

Dorset Downs The Dorset Downs are an area of chalk downland in the centre of the county Dorset in south west England. The downs are the most western part of a larger chalk formation which also includes (from west to east) Cranborne Chase, Salisbury Plain, Ham ...

. In the 2011 census the parish had 71 dwellings, 69 households and a population of 166. The village name comes from ''mapuldor'', Old English for 'maple tree'. In 1086 in the Domesday Book Mappowder was recorded as ''Mapledre'' and appears in four entries; it was in

Buckland Newton Hundred Buckland Newton Hundred was a hundred in the county of Dorset, England, containing the following parishes: *Buckland Newton * Glanvilles Wootton *Mappowder *Pulham (part) See also *List of hundreds in Dorset This is a list of hundreds in the c ...

, had 33.3 households and a total taxable value of 8.3 geld units. The church, dedicated to St Peter & St Paul, is Perpendicular and was built in the late 15th and 16th centuries. However, it includes features remaining from an earlier 12th-century church. The chancel was extended in 1868 by the Wingfield Digby family of

Sherborne Castle Sherborne Castle is a 16th-century Tudor mansion southeast of Sherborne in Dorset, England, within the parish of Castleton. It stands in a park which formed a small part of the Digby estate. Old castle Sherborne Old Castle () is the ruin ...

, who owned the village in Victorian times. Mappowder was once the home of the Coker family, who built a large mansion here in 1654,Treves, Sir F., ''Highways and Byways in Dorset'', Macmillan, 1905, p331 although this was pulled down in the mid-eighteenth century. The building which occupies the site now, Mappowder Court, is mostly of mid-eighteenth-century origin, with some earlier remnants. The stone gateposts at the entrance remain from the original Coker manor; these are topped by carved human heads which in 1905 Sir Frederick Treves described as " Blackamore's" these being "those indefinite natives of the tropics having been used for the crest of the Coker family." In 1559 Henry Coker (c.1528–1596) was member of parliament for the constituency of Shaftesbury. Mappowder Court is listed by English Heritage as Grade II*, with the gateposts and courtyard walls as Grade II. Novelist and short story writer Theodore Francis Powys lived in Mappowder for the last 13 years of his life; he died and was buried here in 1953.

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