Yes, and with unusually little standing in your way. Not a single listed building in the area. No conservation area. One scheduled monument, and unless your garden contains it, that is somebody else's problem. Alderholt is a village that heritage protection has largely passed over, which is bad news for anyone shopping for period charm and very good news for anyone who wants a bigger kitchen.
The heritage register is genuinely empty here. Zero listed buildings at any grade, and no conservation area covering any part of the village. That absence is the single most useful fact on this page for anyone planning work. Most of the pain in a rural extension project comes from listing consent or conservation-area controls over windows, materials and what you are allowed to do to a roofline. Neither applies. The bungalows and post-war semis that make up much of the stock were never going to attract a listing, and nobody has drawn a line around the village centre to preserve its architectural coherence, on the reasonable grounds that there is not much to preserve.
There is one scheduled monument in the area, a length of deer park bank and ditch at Alderholt. Scheduled monument status is the strictest protection in the system, tighter than listing, and works affecting one need separate consent from the national heritage body rather than the council. For almost every buyer this is irrelevant. For anyone buying land adjoining it, it is the first thing to establish before drawing anything, because the constraint sits on the ground rather than the building.
The planning record shows people are doing exactly what you would expect. Across the window from April 2024 to July 2026, 823 applications were lodged in the wider area, of which 361 came in the most recent twelve months. That is a busy pipeline for a rural stretch of Dorset, and it means the local planning department is not encountering the concept of a rear extension for the first time. What those applications were for and how they landed is a separate question, and no outcome should be read into the volume alone. What the volume tells you is that altering property here is ordinary rather than exceptional.
The real constraint in Alderholt is under the house rather than around it. The geological survey's hazard classification puts shrink-swell clay at class three, its moderate band, across roughly 71 percent of the area. Shrink-swell ground expands when wet and contracts when dry, which is why it shows up as cracking around door frames after a long summer. For an extension it means foundation design matters more here than it would on gravel: deeper footings, attention to nearby trees, and a structural engineer's view before the drawings get expensive. This is a cost and sequencing issue, not a reason to abandon the project. Builders working this ground deal with it routinely.
Practically, most modest work here falls under the national permitted development rules rather than needing a full application, because none of the usual restrictions that strip those rights away are present. Anything larger, anything altering the roof, or anything on a plot that adjoins the monument will need consent from Dorset Council, and the sensible order is a conversation with them and a soil investigation before an architect's invoice. Permitted development is a national framework with local caveats, so confirm rather than assume.
Freedom to alter a house is one of Alderholt's quiet strengths. The heritage constraints that make prettier villages so exhausting to own simply are not here, and the only serious homework is the ground you are building on.