[2] Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the parish consists of five round barrows on the chalk escarpment in the east, and the site of an Iron Age settlement in the southwest, near Park Farm.

The settlement, which takes the form of several pits, was excavated by General Pitt-Rivers in 1897; finds included a bronze brooch and silver coins.

Pegg's Farm in the northwest of the parish is probably a secondary settlement; it was in existence by the early 14th century, though the present buildings are mostly 18th-century.

Iwerne Minster remained in the Bowyer Bower family until 1876, when they sold the estate to George Glyn, 2nd Baron Wolverton.

[15] Measured directly, Iwerne Minster village is about 5 miles (8 kilometres) north of Blandford Forum and 5 mi (8 km) south of Shaftesbury.

[16] Iwerne Minster is in the northern part of the electoral ward called the Beacon Ward, which extends to includes Sutton Waldron, Fontmell Magna, Ashmore, Melburry Abbas & Cann, Twyford, Hartgrove, Compton Abbas, Todber, Stour Row, Stour Provost, East Orchard Shroton.

[19] The population of the parish in the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below: Virginia Woolf and her husband spent five days in Iwerne Minster in April 1926; she wrote to her friend Raymond Mortimer about how, even though the appropriation of images of rural England for patriotic purposes made her "almost ashamed of England being so English", she and her husband had nevertheless been enchanted by the Dorset landscape in spring.

[22] A pre-Norman conquest Iwerne Minster is imagined, along with neighbouring village Shroton, in Julian Rathbone's 1997 novel The Last English King.