SANDY beaches and traffic jams... To most, the village of Studland is synonymous with summer, be it through the densely-packed seaside or, more recently, the annual Country Fair, but there's a lot more to this unique corner of Purbeck than meets the eye.

Part of Halsgrove's extensive Community Histories collection, The Book of Studland (Halsgrove, £19.95) reads as a kind of memoir from one of Purbeck's best known villages as told to ubiquitous author Rodney Legg.

Its earliest history is recounted through the origins of the Agglestone Rock and Old Harry Rocks, the Ballard Down Barrows and Iron Age/Roman settlements.

St Nicholas' Church vies with St Martin's in Wareham for the crown of Dorset's oldest complete church. It dates from around the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066 and is extensively illustrated in the book with 19th and 20th century etchings and photographs.

Smuggling tales dating back as far as Harry Pay's notorious scourging of Spanish vessels in the early 1400s; and the Munday brothers, Roger and William, who were accused of running brothels for Elizabethan pirates.

Studland and the sea go hand in hand like a bucket and spade; and there are plenty of seafaring and shoreline tales in the book including a potted history of the Sandbanks ferry, a log of various Studland shipwrecks and a passage about gardener Jacob Gibbons who survived the Titanic and lived until 1965.

It also pulls in information on Studland's outlying developments such as the former WW1 army camp that became the Glebeland Estate. After the war, people bought the chalets as holiday homes, but it wasn't long before they had all been replaced by new homes which created the mini-estate.

Legg has mined a rich vein of history in uncovering Studland's past. Although of enormous local interest, few such books detail events that have had international repercussions, but without the use of Studland's beaches as a rehearsal for the invasion of Normandy in 1944, this article may well have been written in a different language.

Indeed, the chapter on Studland and the War bears out many of my dad's stories about his childhood in the village.

It's a theme continued in the book's most fascinating chapter - that on everyday life in Studland and some of the characters who lived it, such as the first Wild Man who lived in derelict cottages near Shell Bay and purported to have lived with the Cree Indians. His successor, itinerant beachcomber Ben Pond, lived until the 1970s.

Famous some-time residents included Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley and assorted members of the London's fashionable free spirits, the Bloomsbury set, whose antics in the first few years of the last century briefly secured Studland's status as Bloomsbury-on-Sea.

HG Wells' ashes were scattered near Old Harry Rocks; and Studland's village bobby, Christopher Rone, was immortalised by Enid Blyton - who wrote many stories at Studland Golf Course - as PC Plod in the Noddy books.

Sandy beaches and traffic jams... you must be joking!