The Welds were also Catholic and in 1870-2 Charles Weld designed and built the village's Roman Catholic church in an unusual Romanesque style. It is dedicated to Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, and St Ignatius and remains in trust to the Weld family. Among other surviving relics claimed by this location is St. Thomas More's hair shirt, sent to Margaret Roper the day before his martyrdom and later presented for safe keeping by Margaret Clement. This was long in the custody of the community of Augustinian canonesses who, until 1983, lived at the convent at Abbotskerswell Priory, Devon. More recent sources, however, state that the shirt is now preserved at the Roman Catholic Buckfast Abbey, part of a Benedictine monastery, in Devon. Chideock is in the electoral ward of Chideock and Symondsbury, which encompasses much of the coast between Charmouth and West Bay plus inland beyond Symondsbury. The total population of this ward is 1,745. This ward is one of 32 that comprise the West Dorset parliamentary constituency, which is currently represented in the UK national parliament by the Conservative Chris Loder. Chideock is situated in the Dorset Council administrative area about west of Bridport, east of Lyme Regis and inland from the English Channel. The parish includes the coastal hamlet of Seatown, which is less than to the south on the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site. Seatown has a long shelving pebble beach, with views up towards the hill which forms Golden Cap, which at is the highest cliff on the south coast of England. Fossilised ammonites and belemnites can often be found on the beach due to continued coastal erosion of the soft blue lias clays which make up the cliffs. Iron-rich rocks such as lodestone and magnetite can also be found on the beaches near the village – these are thought to have been transported down the coast from Chesil Beach, having been deposited there by a shipwreck in the 1800s. Similar collections of these rocks can be found on beaches along the Jurassic Coast and in the neighbouring counties of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Dorset County Council's 2013 estimate of the parish population is 550. The population of the parish in the censuses between 1921 and 2001 is shown in the table below:  Results of the 2011 census have been published for the combined populations of Chideock parish and the small neighbouring parish of Stanton St Gabriel; the combined population was 686.