The parish is 5 to 9 miles (8.0 to 14.5 km) northwest of the county town Dorchester and covers most of the valley of the small Sydling Water in the chalk hills of the Dorset Downs.

Sydling St Nicholas village was recorded in the 11th-century Domesday Book, though evidence of much earlier human occupation has been found in the surrounding area.

Over the last thousand years the village has been owned by Milton Abbey, Sir Francis Walsingham and Winchester College.

In addition, parts of the parish lie within the Hog Cliff National Nature Reserve and the Cerne and Sydling Downs Special Area of Conservation.

[2] People have lived in the area for nearly 5,000 years,[4] though in pre-Roman times human habitation was confined to the hilltops.

[5] Early artefacts found in the vicinity include Neolithic hand-axes and Bronze and Iron Age pottery.

[9] In subsequent centuries the village has been owned by Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth,[10] and by Winchester College.

[5] The stream used to flow along the High Street in an open course,[4] resulting in occasional floods; after a thunderstorm in June 1889 one local man, Tom Churchill, drowned after having been swept away,[4] and his body was found about a mile downstream.

[16] In 1905 Treves described the church as being "quite famous for its numerous and amazing gargoyles",[10] although seventy-five years later Dorset-based writer Roland Gant noted it instead for being "Light, open, airy, free of restorers' excesses", and for possessing a "noble wagon-roof" in the nave.

Court Farm has a large Elizabethan tithe barn which overlooks the churchyard; it was built in 1590 and constructed from flint, with stone buttresses and oak roof beams.

[26] In the 2011 census Sydling St Nicholas parish had a population of 414[1] in 206 dwellings, with 89.8% of households having at least one usual resident.