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Shaftesbury is a town and civil parish in Dorset, England. It is situated on the A30 road, west of Salisbury, near to the border with Wiltshire. It is the only significant hilltop settlement in Dorset, being built about above sea level on a greensand hill on the edge of Cranborne Chase. The town looks over the Blackmore Vale, part of the River Stour basin. From different viewpoints, it is possible to see at least as far as Glastonbury Tor to the northwest. Shaftesbury is the site of the former Shaftesbury Abbey, which was founded in 888 by King Alfred and became one of the richest religious establishments in the country, before being destroyed in the Dissolution in 1539. Adjacent to the abbey site is Gold Hill, the steep cobbled street made famous in the 1970s as the setting for Ridley Scotts television advertisement for Hovis bread. In the 2011 census the town's civil parish had a population of 7,314. ==Toponymy== Writing of Shaftesbury in 1906 in his book ''Highways & Byways in Dorset'', Sir Frederick Treves referred to several different names for the town: Some of these names may have been used more than others. The town was recorded in the Domesday Book as Sceptesberie, and the use of "Shaston" () was recorded in 1831 in Samuel Lewis's ''A Topographical Dictionary of England'' and in 1840 in ''The parliamentary gazetteer of England and Wales''. Thomas Hardy used both "Shaston" and "Palladour" to refer to the town in the fictional Wessex of his novels such as ''Jude the Obscure'' ("Caer Palladour" in the Brythonic language is "Caer Vynnydd y Paladr" or "The Hillfort of the Spears"),〔Brut y Brenhinedd (mid 13th century document largely regarded as an accurate account of the early history of the Britons)〕 though the general use of "Palladour" was described by one 19th-century directory as "mere invention". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shaftesbury」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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