The house was built in a large park during the 1650s and the River Allen fees a large lake as it sends its way to Wimborne. The house was built by the first Earl, Anthony Ashley-Cooper in the style of Inigo Jones. Anthony was first of all a Royalist and on the side of Charles during the Civil War but he believed in that fact that Parliament should rule and at the Kings Coronation he became a peer and also Chancellor to the Exchequer. But being a b it too independent he was soon dismissed from the job and a a later date the king attempted to offer a  dukedom as a bribe but he refused. He proposed that the Duke of Monmouth should be the next monarch and he was then sent to the Tower of London for high treason, but escaped and fled to Holland where died in 1683.

One of the most thought of Earl was the seventh who fought the cause of Jews and Poles and he passed legislation to stop much of the child labour in the early part of the 19th century., this made him very unpopular with the mine owners who did not like this idea  as they used children of five years of age in their pits. But this did not deter the earl and in one Act chimney seeping by boys was abolished.

There is a green in the centre of the village surrounded by large brick buildings and the rather long row of almshouses that were put up by Sir Anthony Ashley in 1624 are also of brick with stone details and a weathered verandah.

The church of St Giles was first rebuilt in 1732 by the Bastard brothers of Blandford and then again in 1908 after being badly damaged by fire. There are memorials inside of the Shaftesburys and the main one to the 7th Earl is in London. The statue of Eros in Picadilly Circus meant to show the Christian virtue love and his arrow is aligned with Wimborne St Giles.

Not long after WWII the headmaster and his teacher wife of the school, thought that the children would obviously work on the land after leaving, so they decided to     run the school as a farm. Pigs and sheep were kept and a kitchen garden made and the boys ran this themselves under supervision, while the girls spun the wool and dyed it to make clothes from their own patterns. Mathematics came into the project by the running of the farm and its finances.