[2] The house was built by Sir Oliver Lawrence (1507–1559), who acquired the land from the former Bindon Abbey, near Wool, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.

It was Thomas Bond who in Stuart times laid out the London Street over fields of swamp and refuse tips and lost a fortune in the process.

Only fragments remain of the original house built by Lawrence before his death in 1559, partly because it was damaged by fire by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War, and finally because in 1846 the entire front was taken down and rebuilt in the Tudor style.

In 1746, Denis Bond erected a folly known as Grange Arch on the highest local point on the Purbeck Ridge, Ridgeway Hill (199 m).

After the blur of the Poole/Bournemouth conurbation, the ruins of Corfe Castle conclude the sweep as the eastern view disappears into the Purbeck Ridge.