Location, location, location.

The air is clean and clear over Martin Down, chilled so you feel it breathing in. It feels great. Centrally heated houses are good, but the air they create isn't so and to be out here is refreshing. The Chase is bathed in sunshine, not yet strong but enough to counter the chill. It's a wonderful landscape. We rise to highest point of Bokerley Dyke, from where we can see it's bank and ditch snaking off through the down. We follow it.  Up and down it crosses the land, past barrows, banks and ditches, past the giant abandoned range butt, and on towards Verditch Chase. Here where the prehistoric dyke crosses the Roman Ackling Dyke, which is not a dyke at all, but the old road from Badbury to Sarum, we leave Bokerley and vanish into woodland.  At first it's thicket, then shrub woodland of the type common on chalkland, then into the woodland proper with its older trees and the, relatively, modern mosaic plantation of Verditch Chase. As we've walked we've collected the natural material to start a fire, now seems like a good time and place for a bit of fire starting practice.  The material are prepared and the trusty sparker deployed; the Travellers Joy employed to take the spark was too damp in parts, but the reliable Birch bark ensures success and with the addition of the other tinder we have a fire going in 3 minutes. Not bad at all. The fire smokes at first and carried by the breeze it fills that stands, though soon clears to a clean flame. It's good to practice your skills, and easy to become complacent. Wandering deeper into Verditch Chase we spied a ramshackle shack in a open area set in overgrown woodland. No track led to the shack, no paths, it is just there. Nice location though. It looks like nobody has used it for some years and it's beginning its decent into ruination, the timbers are rotten and the whole structure leans. Inside it's dry and mostly bare but for the usual mix of oddities you find in such places. Old bit of this and that, old pots, containers, old wire spools and stuff.  We leave Verditch crossing Ackling Dyke again. We're now in open grassland. In the distance we can see Bokerley Dyke and the route we had taken out. The days walk was nearly complete.