Dorest Walks: the Great Dorset Ridge Walk

My old friend, the poet James Crowden phoned me this morning to talk about a hike we once did with a friend in West Dorset. And his call reminded of an earlier walk the two of us did together crossing the amazing series of ridges that run down through the same area from Beaminster to Lyme Regis with poetess Catherine Simmonds. I even made a video of the walk all those years ago which you can see here, although you must please forgive the quality - digital cameras weren’t what they are today….

It was one of the best walks I did in 20 long years of walks writing for the newspaper. A journey that took me out of myself - out of my journalistic world. A golden journey that, for the best part of a day had me walking alongside poets living and dead and sharing the heady, pungent, stimulating, inspiring and energising world in which such people live. 

For that is exactly what the best kind of journeys should do: remove you, albeit fleetingly, from your own sphere and introduce you to another so that you can return refreshed, if not a little dazed, by the shock of the new.

Grand view of Dorset’s Marshwood Vale along the route

This journey included wild-eyed pictures created by the likes of Mervyn Peake and Gustav Dore, charming men in charming cottages adorned by 12 foot hollyhocks, the worried daughter of a 105 year old, huge hills, sweeping vales, the worried eloquence of a highly intelligent farmer, a pub where they eat raw nettles, a poetry reading in an altitudinous meadow, jungle-like woodlands, a fisherman who lives in a Le Corbusier house, a poetess having her fingers sucked by 25 rabid mullet, and four freshly caught mackerel for me to take home and eat, along with a Bath-chap. 

Not that I had much appetite for anything after consuming that lot. I went home stuffed to the brim thinking my 18-mile sojourn could fill a book rather than a page or two of a newspaper.

It was all the doing of James Crowden who this website has mentioned before. Historian and writer, and one of the finest poets to presently haunt this peninsula. For some time this denizen of the Somerset-Dorset border had been sending emails inviting me to walk the beautiful ridge-ways that strut across the roof of West Dorset. 

James Crowden and me in Dorset several years after the Great Ridge Walk

I had the feeling there was something militarily efficient in the way the poet was preparing for the day (“My father will convey us to Beaminster in time for the museum to open and then be in position to collect us at Lyme”) and so looked him up on Google only to find he had indeed been in the army. I can’t help but suspect the Forces have rarely spawned such an unusual and brilliant product. 

Here’s how James’ website sums up his extraordinary career: “Born in Plymouth in 1954, he was raised on the western edge of Dartmoor. In 1972 he joined the army and served in Cyprus travelling widely in Eastern Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and north west India. In 1976-77 he spent a winter on the northern side of the Himalaya, in the remote Zangskar Valley in Ladakh. 

“It was from this experience that he developed a lifelong interest in agriculture and Buddhism…”

Hollow lanes are a feature of the long walk

After describing his various degrees and academic accolades, the site then goes on: “For the last 20 years James has worked in North Dorset and South Somerset as a shepherd, sheep shearer, cider maker and forester. The choice of manual work was deliberate and gave him a deeper understanding of the landscape.”

You get the feeling that an 18 mile walk with such a person is guaranteed to be far more than a journey from a-to-b. James may now have given up working on the land, but he certainly knows a lot about it - and like anyone who has travailed in such a way he has an understanding of the countryside which is both universal and exacting. Both minutiae and sweeping panoramas are his canvases, and as for the human content of a landscape you get the feeling there is no person high-born or low, bright or dull, quick or slow, who can avoid - or wish to avoid - his friendliness and interest. 

And so it was with this polymath that I entered the picture perfect English town of Beaminster while having an in-depth conversation with his fascinating father Guy (who sadly passed away some years ago) about that little known cut of meat, the Bath-chap.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but this is a Bath chap

The plan was to take a turn around Beaminster Museum’s new summer exhibition in order to get us in the mood for what was going to be a long walk on the hottest day of the year. It’s called “The Ancient Mariner Coleridge Exhibition and the Beaminster Connection” - entry £1 - worth every penny because there’s a room full of fine prints by the likes of the artists mentioned above who, over the years, have provided extraordinary illustrations for that extraordinary poem.

After the viewing it was upwards and onwards along the Wessex Ridgeway (after we’d met the man who grows giant hollyhocks) in the intense heat of one of the hottest days this summer. The temperature made climbing the near vertical sides of Gerrard’s Hill an act of mad- dogs-and-Englishman proportions, but the one thing about this long hike to Lyme Regis is that once you are up, you tend to stay pretty much up. It’s not called a ridgeway for nothing.

Lewesdon Hill is one of the ridges we crossed

High above the attractive village of Stoke Abbott we traversed – a village to which James had earlier diverted his father’s car in order to show me the porch of an ancient church where once a vicar called William Crowe had written a few remarkable some lines that were later to influence William Wordsworth. It was here, by the way, that he spoke to the daughter of a local 105-year-old retired farm worker who was feeling poorly. 

Past Chart Knolle and Waddon Hill we reached wooded Lewesdon Hill and Burstock Down and this in turn took us around Cockpit Hill to the Pilsdon Pen. At 277 metres this is believed to be the highest place in the county – though James tells me there are debates over the claim. It’ll do me though – the strange flat-topped eminence offers views over half of southern England. 

It was on the steep slopes of this mountain that we came across a beautiful field gate – and I mean beautiful – it was created by a talented carpenter called Karen Hansen, of Evershot, and is one of a collection of works of art commissioned to adorn various bits of the ridgeway.

James always reads poetry on his hikes

It is known as the “Wordsworth Gate” because William and Dorothy Wordsworth first set up house together as brother and sister just a mile away in a big old pile called Racedown Lodge – a fact that is central to the story of this journey. 

When James was writer in residence for the ridgeway he was commissioned to write a number of poems which he later collated into a book called Dorset Footsteps, and it was from this that he read the following words as we stood at the gate.  

“She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, And delicate fears

Maintained a saving intercourse

With my true self, preserved me still. A poet.”

Walking west down the hill James explained that while the Quantocks and the Lake District get all the glory when it comes to being the locations where the Romantic Poets were… well, romantic – it was West Dorset that saw the very first glimmerings of the ethos and resultant work that was to come. 

“It was here that Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge dallied in the month of June 1797,” writes James in the introduction to his book. “A truly historic and exciting meeting of minds and words… It was here in West Dorset that they first struck up their real friendship and kindled their lifelong obsession with the countryside. An obsession which altered the course of poetry and in many ways influenced the way in which we view the landscape today. The landscape around Pilsdon Pen has much to answer for.”

Dorset’s ridges stretch east across Marshwood Vale

We walked on down the hill to meet a fascinating local farmer called Ross Dickinson who’s given up dairy cows to pursue his interest in archaeology - and grab a lift the two miles to the Bottle Inn (“home of the World Nettle Eating Championships” - I kid you not).

A walker’s lunch in Dorset

It was here that I was to hear more of this link with the Romantic Poets. It was told me by a tall and elegant poetess called Catherine Simmonds who was to join us on the rest of the walk and who has done a great deal of work and research regarding the Wordsworths’ two year stay in Dorset.

Lambert’s Castle Hill

Her book We Have Heard Ravens is a collection of thought-provoking poems drawn from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals - and this is what Catherine told me as we resumed our big walk across the hills to the sea. “Despite her great attachment to her native Cumbria, where she lived the greater part of her life - 'Racedown', Dorothy once wrote, 'is the place dearest to any recollections upon the whole surface of the island; it was the first home I had.' 

“They didn't have a great deal of money at the time,” Catherine added. “They grew vegetables for themselves in the kitchen garden - William wrote to a friend: 'I have been lately living upon the air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips and other esculent vegetables not excluding parsley’.”

By now we had reached the ramparts of Lambert’s Castle Hill, yet another high point of the walk offering fabulous views of glorious tree studded Marshwood Vale and the distant sea. For me, the journey had by this point become a kind of dreamy reverie the likes of which Dorothy and William Wordsworth probably enjoyed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he joined them at Racedown for brief holiday and first discovered the huge delights of walking in the countryside.

Lambert’s Castle Hill

There was nothing for it high on Lambert’s Castle Hill but that my two poet pals should read the whole of the Scribes Meet poem from James’ collection (a performance you can hear on the WMN’s website).

I was glad the friendly ex-farmer archaeologist arrived in the hot altitudinous meadow to hear it because he seemed most moved – moved enough, indeed, to offer us a lift to the nearest cider-house.

This establishment was closed, which was probably a good thing. Set deep in a secret valley somewhere near Monkton Wyld, the cider press seemed to offer the promise of some long lost rural idyll – it was all so beautiful that I do believe I’d still be there had the golden juice been available. Instead we looked around the Marie Celeste-ish farm buildings and orchard where working clothes like overalls were drying in the hot breeze – then persuaded the ex-farmer archaeologist to drive us a mile or so to yet another ridge.

This time it was a watershed that introduced us to an almost ludicrously lush and verdant that led south and seawards on Shank’s Pony all the way to Lyme. 

Looking back at the Dorset ridges from Lambert’s Castle

Which is where my old friend Richard Austin was waiting to photograph us having purloined four fresh mackerel for me from Harry May, a friendly fisherman who pointed to a remarkable Le Corbusier style house by the harbour-side which, he said, had eventually become his home long after half the hill had slipped and moved towards the sea.

Max Gollop, owner of the Cobb’s aquarium, introduced Catherine to his mad finger-sucking mullet, we licked ice-creams, took photos, ate cockles - and last of all those two poets couldn’t resist one last reading of one of James’s double-handed works, delivered under the screech of gulls…

“Tea shops and ice cream - crab sandwiches and crazy golf

The French Lieutenant’s Woman - running her own Patisserie

Marine defences, imported sand - crumpet, fish and chip wrappers

Dust jackets, waves of tourists - lapping the curved shore…”

Upon which word James’ father Guy arrived and handed me that rarest cut of meat of them all – the aforementioned Bath-chap.