Chase Avenue

What a difference. All the way through our outward journey the mists endured, though as we reached Berwick Down and the beginning of our return leg the mists slowly evaporated to the point that our walk along the Chase Avenue was bathed in radiant sunlight. What a day.

Beech avenue

 Beech avenue, Wilverely.

Chase Woods

Chase Avenue; the great beech avenue running through Chase Woods.

 

Cranborne Chase and Winkelbury

The wrinkled landscape of Cranborne Chase is never boring, so wide ranging and varied as it is. It's a country landscape, of fields and hedgerows, scrubby woodland and coppice sheltering in its combes, rising above them exposed chalk grasslands reach for the skies, little changed in centuries, I'd imagine. Today was a good day for a walk in the chase, clear skies, an unseasonally warm feel, walking with an old friend who I don't see enough off (in fact the last time I saw him was last year, when we wandered the Chase). Our route was an undulating one, up through Garston Wood, with it's well managed Hazel coppice, down through Mistleberry Wood, up into Chase Woods following the Shire Rack, past Cuttice Lodge and up on to the Ox Drove, with it's fantastic views over four counties and on a good day as far the Isle of Wight. Man, it's always amazing to be up here, but on a clear day like today, it's something else.  We took a slight detour to wander about Winklebury, an Iron Age Hillfort positioned on a promontory overlooking the Berwick St John at the head of the Ebble Valley. It was excavated by Pitt-Rivers at the end of the 19th century who found evidence of Iron Age occupation, though I question whether it was a finished hillfort, it's defensive ramparts and ditches lack uniformity in nature and appear incomplete. The most striking features are the two linear outer ramparts and ditch defences some way from the main enclosure, which cut off the promontory.  The Chase is jam packed with archaeological features, it's always been a popular landscape. We made our way back down through Chase Wood, this time following the ups and downs of Chase Avenue, a neglected veteran Beech avenue, back through Mistleberry Wood with another Iron Age 'fort' which appears either incomplete or simply not a fort (I do wonder about some of the old Ministry of Works definitions of archaeological sites, several in the area appear suspect), before finally returning to Garston. Fantastic walk, longest I've done in a while too (12 miles of walking and talking), I've been slacking of late, must try harder. 

Posh pads

Something you notice whilst rambling about is, how many posh gaffs there are dotted around the place. The country 'piles' and mansioned estates of those to whom the exploitation of the colonies had brought substantial wealth are hidden in every nook and cranny. And, I remember seeing a program some years ago about how many of these 'piles' where abandoned or left to fall into decay through the 60's and 70's, as a result of changing financial circumstance and the loss of heirs through the two wars. That got me thinking today, did the wars have a disproportional effect on the landed demographic? Proportionally, did more toffs die than regular folk? I don't know. Anyway, what we're seeing are only the remnants of what was a far greater phenomena, one which helped shape today’s countryside. The majority of the big houses which endure have often seen a massive change in use, many may have remained in the hands of a landed family, many are now corporately owned, though nearly all have been forced to diversify in to events, holiday lets or some such. This Beech avenue belongs to West Lodge built in 1753, the last surviving royal hunting lodge in the Chase.

Roma Alan

There's always a story in graffiti, too often it's hidden from us, although sometimes we can gleam something. I'm going to assume that Alan was of the travelling community. Was Alan using the prefix 'Roma' so the local community knew it was him, he wouldn't have known himself as Roma Alan, surely he was just Alan. The prefix serves an identifying purpose, they always do. I think that's a reasonable assumption. The travelling community, contrary to suggestion, mixed, traded and worked with the settled population.  Clearly Alan travelled this way in 1948, '49 and '50, and would have been travelling through the twilight of a traditional lifestyle, as modernity increasingly demanded uniformity and under a variety of pressures that traditional way of life became marginalised made increasingly inaccessible to the point of untenable. Sad. The period saw travellers move from Vardo to motor drawn caravan, and saw the community buy their own land in the face of reduced stopping sites. I wonder what happened to Roma Alan, what was his story? Did he travel through this way at other times not recorded? Was he forced off the road into settled life by imposed restrictions? I'll never know.

Beech Avenue

Originally there were over 730 beech trees in the Avenue created to flank the new toll road built in 1835 and leading towards Kingston Lacy House. Time and disease may have done for over a quarter of the trees, single missing trees or spaces created by two or more trees succumbing have left noticeable gaps, although the Avenue's remains an impressive feature in the landscape, a straight feature extending over two miles. I've mentioned before the layers of history in  Dorset's landscape cover most of human history, and today’s walk took in many of them. As I walked along the 19th century Beech Avenue I passed Bronze Age burials, Badbury Rings Iron Age hillfort, I crossed Roman Roads, and a forgotten Roman town I had the opportunity to dig on some years back, on past medieval farming landscapes and over Tarrant Rushton's taxiways which saw the Horsa Gliders take for the assault on Pegasus Bridge on the dawn of DDay.  I recommend Dorset if you want to walk through time.