Old Sarum is the site of the earliest settlement of Salisbury in England. Located on a hill about 2 miles (3 km) north of modern Salisbury near the A345 road, the settlement appears in some of the earliest records in the country. It is an English Heritage property and is open to the public. Although the settlement was effectively uninhabited, its landowners continued to have parliamentary representation into the 19th century, making it the most notorious of the rotten boroughs that existed before the Reform Act of 1832. Most famously, Old Sarum served as a pocket borough of the Pitt family.