The village is in the Piddle valley, just north of the Purbeck conifer plantations and heathland, in a valley beside the villages of Tolpuddle and Puddletown.
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After the Dissolution the village became an estate of the Lawrence family, an ancestor of whom married the heiress of a branch of the Washington family, from another branch of which descended George Washington.
Lawrence was an ancestor of the first American President, George Washington, and the joint arms of the two families - the famous stars and stripes of Washington's signet ring and the American flag - appear in memorials at Steeple and Affpuddle.