It’s easy to look back with longing at the old countryside of England, the sort you read about in Agatha Christie or see on Masterpiece Theater. Indeed, British geographer Richard Muir called the 1880s to the 1940s “The Golden Age of the English Country­side”—explaining that people had enough money for good sanitation and nice gardens but were too poor for anything else. Since then, 20th-century prosperity has left no corner of Britain unscathed, but some places have been a lot less scathed than others. In this regard, Dorset’s county town of Dorchester is a pleasant step back.

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Dorchester is a step back in another sense as well; it might be one of the oldest cities in Europe. Evidence of settlement goes back to 4500 bc; London, in comparison, goes back no further than ad 50. By the time the first Roman traders had set up shop in London, Dorchester was already a center for aboriginal Neolithic farmers (who built a meeting and trading place there), the mysterious Megalithic Builders (whose henge temple still stands near the town center) and the Celts (whose fortified city is Dorchester’s most remarkable landmark).

One of Dorchester’s endearingly old-fashioned features is its compactness. The entire town of 16,000 people is completely contained by the River Frome on its north and a belt highway encircling its other three sides, a sprawl-free oval with open country always an easy walk away. It’s the sort of place where you can arrive by train and do without a car, which, as it turns out, is a good thing; Dorchester is a hard three-hour drive from London, some of it on two-lane roads. This remoteness explains some of Dorchester’s quaintness, but land ownership is another factor. Much of Dorchester’s potential building land is owned by the Duke of Cornwall, aka Charles, Prince of Wales, a resolute foe of Modernism.

As its name implies, Dorchester was the stone-built Roman town (ceaster) for administering the Celtic Durotriges tribe (Dur). Roman roads, the engineered and paved superhighways of the ancient world, converge at the town’s center, and one of them still forms the town’s High Street.

The region’s finest Roman site is only two blocks from the train station: The giant oval embankments of Maumbury Rings served the Romans as the town amphitheater. It wasn’t built by the Romans, however, or even the Celts. The mysterious Late Stone Age civilization known as the Megalithic Builders constructed it as a henge, or circular embanked temple, around 2500 bc. No one knows for sure what the Megalithic Builders did with their henges, but they built similar structures at Avebury and Stonehenge at about the same time, and their henges and stone circles can still be seen as far north as Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

Until the Romans rebuilt Dorchester in the 1st century ad, the Celtic Durotriges ruled the region from the next hill west, where they built Europe’s largest hillfort, Maiden Castle. The distance is only a mile and a half, but you still might want to take a taxi; you’ll get plenty of walking once you arrive.

Maiden Castle’s triple ditch-and-bank ramparts, each up to two stories above the other, form a 1.2-mile circle around the central 45 acres that housed its pre-Roman settlement, and it has commanding views the entire way. Hillforts of this sort typically served as royal compounds, where the aristocratic leaders of the British Celts lived in circular timber houses, kept their garrison, and stored the booty they collected as tax for “protecting” the region’s farmers. The farmers themselves lived on their farms with little or no fortification, so evidently this protection scheme worked.

Maiden Castle reached its present form around 400 bc, but earlier settlements on the site go back to 4500 bc. Underneath the Celtic fort, archeologists found a square “camp” surrounded by a low ditch and bank with an open causeway at one end, probably used by the area’s original Stone Age farmers as a permanent community center where they could trade cattle. Counting this as the first settlement means that Dorchester may have been a town of some sort for 6,500 years—old even by Egyptian standards.

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