Dorset

We’ve had a short break in Dorset. We came down to see friends. We had a very nice potter round Poole, gawping at the private yachts, built in Poole by Sunseeker. They aren’t quite Roman Abramovich size, but they are enormous by any other standard, and there are lots of them. So much for “We’re all in this together”.

Then we had a smashing walk starting at the Square and Compasses in Worth Matravers. If you know Dorset, it’s the pub with pasties and good cider, and a fossil museum, and a room with such a huge wood burning stove that the room it’s in is at sauna temperatures. I think the landlord reclaimed the boiler of an old steam locomotive.

We walked down to the sea and back, and the waves were breaking over the rocks, so it was all very satisfying.  We like living in Nottingham, but we do miss the sea. 

It’s an interesting stretch of coast, because, as well as caves and fossils,  there are lots of World War Two Radar and Royal Observers Corps installations still visible. Actually, there was what seemed to be an original landing craft in Poole Harbour. I shouldn’t fancy going all the way across the Channel in one.  But probably the journey to Normandy was the least of the soldiers’ worries.

We moved on to Dorchester and have spent the day doing the town trails and the museum, and visiting Maiden Castle.  I had never been and I was staggered. It’s absolutely vast (the signs quoted an area of fifty football pitches for the enclosure) and the earthworks are stupendous and hugely elaborate, especially around the entrances. There are horn works on top of horn works there, but the size of the ditches, and the height of the embankments everywhere, are completely daunting. Archaeologists believe that there were wooden palisades and towers at least at the entrances, too. The whole enterprise must have required enormous labour, and more importantly, sophisticated planning and organisation. The views are wonderful, and although it was cold and not sunny, it wasn’t Novemberish  dark and depressing, either.

If you want to see the whole thing, you need an aerial image so:

http://www.dorchesterdorset.com/maiden-castle.php

There’s a small Romano-British temple in the middle, which may have been built over an earlier sanctuary. At first I thought it was built as a victory roll, but it was much later. Archaeologists did find burials, where many of the dead had died violently. One had a Roman ballista arrow head in his spine.

The whole landscape is just stuffed full of all sorts of forts, barrows and henges, and there’s lots of Roman stuff as well, including a very well preserved Roman house, with mosaic floors.  Then there’s all the Thomas Hardy and Casterbridge stuff, and fossils. They’ve got the skull (with teeth) of the most enormous pliosaur, otherwise known as predator X. It could swallow me at one gulp, I should think.

Pliosaur, or, predator X

We had a look at Prince Charles’ Poundsbury project, and didn’t like it one bit. The buildings are not just influenced by older architectural styles, but are pastiches of them. Just for example, there’s a Butter Cross, modelled on somewhere like Oakham, but it’s fake. There was never a real butter cross there, and no one sells butter there nowadays, and it’s like a Disney castle.

Also, the idea was said to be to make cars less important. So the roads are narrow and choked with parked cars, whereas giving in, and building underground car parking, would have got the cars out of the way. At present, they dominate the view.

We are staying in a different new development based round the old brewery, which is a mixture of the old brewery buildings and unashamedly modern flats and shops, and we like it. It feels real, and it has life.  There’s a small central amphitheatre with a big screen showing old silent films; in the summer there are fountains to play in, and just now it’s being turned into a small ice rink.

The last day of our trip we went to see Chesil Beach, supplier of ammunition to the sling shots of Maiden Castle.  It was well worth it. The day was gorgeous – really warm sun and clear blue skies, and the views along the beach and the lagoon behind it, the Fleet, were fantastic. We went onto the beach at a couple of different points to verify the truth of the statement that you can tell where you are on the beach from the size of the pebbles. They are pea sized at the western end, cherry sized in the middle, and plum sized as you near Portland. The sea was very calm, but even so, the noise of the pebbles as the little waves went out was lovely to listen to.

We also had a look round Abbotsbury. It’s a very long village with lots of lovely thatched cottages. it was the site of a Benedictine abbey, founded by Orc, King Cnut's steward. There are bits of the abbey spread around, the best bit being an enormous stone barn with a thatched roof. Half of it is ruined, so at one point it must have dwarfed the abbey church.

Carving of Christ, supposed to date
from the time of Orc.

The barn

We stopped to see the view from the Hardy Memorial, which is a very plain tower on the top of a hill. It’s not a memorial to Hardy the author, but to Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s flag captain, he of “Kiss me, Hardy”.  He lived round here. It’s obviously a popular local name, because the Dorchester  school is the Thomas Hardye school. This one was apparently a merchant venturer (privateer?) who, in 1579, endowed a school to educate the boys of Dorchester.

We ended the day (after a really good homemade steak and kidney pie with proper vegetables) by visiting Portland. This wasn’t at all what we had expected. It’s heavily populated, sometimes by rows of terrace houses which look a bit like pit villages and were presumably for the quarry men; but new houses are being built and there’s a very modern complex of flats, which may have been for the Olympic sailing.  There are still naval ships at the naval base, and there are two prisons, and I suppose some quarrying still goes on, if only for repairs to buildings like St Paul’s.

We went right out to Portland Bill, to the lighthouse, and it feels much more like land’s end than Landsend in Cornwall.  It’s rather bleak and treeless, I suppose because of the quarrying, but also perhaps because of the winds, which must be pretty powerful, stuck out into the Channel, almost the Atlantic. In fact, it all felt rather remote and insular, although, as I said, it’s heavily populated and has regular buses from Weymouth.  It’s well worth a visit. 

Portland Bill lighthouse

Sunset from Portland Bill

As a little treat before we drove home we went to see the Cerne Abbas giant. In all honesty, it was a bit disappointing. We've seen so many photographs, and it really was a gloomy morning, whereas the photos are always taken in full sunlight. But it is always satisfying to see things in real life, so to speak, and the area around is deepest rural Dorset, so well worth the drive. The leaves are not yet down and there were some glorious scenes with flaming beech trees.

Dorset is one of our favourite places , so we'll definitely be back.