A village so small it is home to fewer than 500 people is rarely frequented by outsiders - as it is hidden down a picturesque country lane. Nether Compton, a parish in Dorset, southwest England, is home to just 403 people and is regularly named one of the UK's most beautiful.
But people other than locals rarely cross the village bounds, and the quiet backwater, despite its quintessentially British appearance, is not centred around tourism like other nearby towns.
The village is a few minutes outside Yeovil, a bustling town once vital to the Romans.
Nether Compton is more difficult to access but has a similarly rich history to its neighbours.
Conde Nast Traveller ranked the village fourth on a list of 20 beautiful communities in England and Ireland, noting the way it contrasts with its surrounding landscape.
The publication also praised the way it was "hidden down a lane that doesn’t take you anywhere else".
The location, it said, gives Nether Compton an "air of immense calm", but it wasn't always this way.
The town was famously targeted nearly a thousand years ago by William the Conqueror as he tore his way through England.
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In 1066, forces serving the then Duke of Normandy burnt the town but left some structures that still stand today.
St Nicholas church, the village's primary place of worship, has a town and chancel that both pre-date 1066.
The church also boasts pre-1150 Norman "graffiti", with other older buildings in the town - including rows of thatched houses - having been built much later, among them the 16th century Griffin's Head Inn.
Nether Compton, despite its size, also has a clutch of famous residents who either grew up in or moved to the village.
Among them is Dame Kristin Scott Thomas, who, along with her sister Serena Scott Thomas, was born in the community.
Harald Penrose, the famed test pilot and naval architect, spent 50 years living in Nether Compton in a house of his own design before he died aged 92 in 1996.
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