Hambledon Hill

Although the sun had shone during the initial part of out journey, as we drove farther west into Dorset so mist shrouded the landscape, filling the hollows and dulling the hills.  And, so it was when we arrived at Hambledon Hill, that ancient hill rising proudly from Blackmore Vale. Though that mattered not one wit. As we climbed up the Hill, so the years peeled away and it was as if we were walking back through time. You have to let your imagination go if you really want to experience the land, to visualize the past and have it brought to life in your minds eye. Your imagination is a wonderful gift, but like your muscles it has to be exercised if it is to work at its best, though sadly many don't bother and so only experience a tiny percentage of what a walk has to offer.

Hambledon Hill is steeped in history, in the activities of mankind. Open your minds eyes and you can glimpse possible pasts. They say that the grand old Duke of Yorks' men toiled up and down these steep hillsides as part of their preparations for storming Quebec (or so the story goes). Imagine that, it wouldn't take long before you were spent, so steep are the slopes.  Travel back further, delve deeper and it's that Civil War and the Dorset 'Clubmen', aligned with neither side, battle to protect their lands from pillage in the Battle of Hambledon Hill. A battle which sees them defeated by the New Model Army, though spared and returned home by Cromwell. Further back still, the mists of time thicken, though use your imagine and the Iron Age Folk living within the giant ramparts come to life. They raise the ramparts and settle in. Though it would appear after a few hundred years of occupation, they gather their belongings and leave for the adjacent earthen fortress of Hod Hill, their new home until the Romans arrive 300 years later. The mists of time which swirl around your mind thicken more, you're really travelling back now to the earliest of settled times, though with focus they clear to reveal the Neolithic occupants of the hill.  These Neolithic first farmers perform their rituals and communal feasts within their causewayed enclosures, they gather up the cleaned bones of their dead and deposit them in the two hilltop Long Barrows, staking their claim to the surrounding land through their ancestors remains. No doubt the hill saw activity before the Neolithic, although no trace of those nomadic hunter gathers remain. We return down the muddy chalk tracks, back to our own time and modernity. What a terrific walk. 

And that's how the landscape unfolds for me as I walk.  That said, there's a fair possibility I'm mentalist, and not in the demonstrating extraordinary mental powers sense, more the British 'informal' dictionary definition 'an eccentric or mad person'.