After Malta, home. Back from the heat, the towers and the switchbacks, and out of the front door into a Dorset Sunday afternoon with a blue sky that looked like it had been borrowed from somewhere further south.
I wanted hills, trails and old roads, and I got all three. I also got something I hadn’t planned for: a run straight back into my own childhood.
Up through the reserve
The first climb goes out of Bothenhampton and up into the Bothenhampton Nature Reserve. It’s a small place, just over four hectares, but it’s older than it looks. This was a stone quarry for centuries. Building stone was cut here from at least the 13th or 14th century, a local limestone called Forest Marble that was prized for foundations. The quarrying finally stopped in the 1920s. After that the land was grazed and then slowly left to itself, and the scrub and ash woodland moved back in. It became a Local Nature Reserve in 1994, and the old Wanderwell Quarry face is now a Local Geological Site. There’s even a restored lime kiln tucked away in there.
What you notice on the way up isn’t any of that. It’s the view opening behind you, every time you turn round.
From the reserve. The sun high, the sky enormous, and West Bay sitting at the end of the valley.
Looking west along the coast. Golden Cap on the skyline, as it always seems to be.
The Bench
At the top there’s a bench on the bridleway, placed exactly where you’d want it, looking out over West Bay. I didn’t sit on it. I wanted to. I’ve made a note.
And then, a little further on, something that stopped me properly. Somebody had left many sheep’s entire fleeces in the middle of the field. Not a few tufts on a fence. The whole thing. I stood there longer than I should have, trying to work it out, then decided some questions are best left on the hill.
Many fleeces, lying in the grass with the sea behind it. No sheep. No explanation.
The old road to Burton
From the high ground the route drops onto an old road that runs east over the hills towards Burton Bradstock. These old routes across west Dorset are worn deep into the land, sunken between banks and hedges by centuries of feet, hooves and cartwheels. The lidar surveys of this area have mapped historic hollow ways all around Bothenhampton. Strava gave me my second-best time on Bredy Lane, which I’m taking as the hills going easy on me.
Then the land tilts down towards the sea, and Burton Bradstock appears below.
Burton Bradstock
The name tells you exactly where you are. Burton comes from the Old English for the settlement on the River Bride. Domesday recorded it as Bridetone, with 28 households. Bradstock was added later, after Bradenstoke Abbey in Wiltshire, which held the manor from the 13th century.
The village has stories enough for a much bigger place. In the late 18th century, flax and hemp were its living, and Richard Roberts built at least three mills along the river. The smuggler Isaac Gulliver is said to have landed his cargoes on the beach here, and to have planted conifers as a landmark to guide his boats in. And in 1757, a mermaid was supposedly brought ashore. It was most likely a lost dugong, which is somehow even stranger.
At the centre is St Mary the Virgin, mostly 15th century, with a font older still. Its clock came from the old Christ’s Hospital school in London. The village school sits right next to it, which is why there’s a basketball hoop in front of a medieval church tower.
29 Shadrack
Then I turned into Shadrach, and I slowed right down.
Number 29 is where my grandparents lived. I came here as a boy, many years ago, and I hadn’t been past the house in a long time. The street is one of the oldest parts of the village. Several of its stone cottages are listed, with rubble walls and thatched roofs going back to the 18th century, and on the older records it’s spelt the way I always knew it: Shadrack.
I didn’t stop. I didn’t take a picture of the house. I just ran past it a little slower than everything else.
The bridge
And just round the corner, the river. The Bride runs right through the village, clear and shallow between stone walls and cottage gardens. It’s barely more than a stream here, a mile or so from the sea at the end of its short journey down the valley.
Then the bridge. The little stone bridge with the green railings under the willow.
When I was nine or ten, this was the whole world. Fishing for sticklebacks and whatever else we could get into a jam jar. Hours of it, lying on the stones, peering into the water. I’d completely forgotten it until I was standing on it, and then I remembered all of it at once.
Shipton Gorge.
From Burton the route heads inland and uphill towards Shipton Gorge, through some of the loveliest farmland in the Bride Valley. Strava gave me a third-best effort on this stretch, which I didn’t feel at the time.
Shipton Gorge takes its name from the de Gorges family, who held the land in the Middle Ages, and Domesday recorded it as Sepetone. Its church, St Martin’s, was once a chapel of Burton Bradstock. It was rebuilt in 1862, but its west tower is about 1400. Above the village rises Shipton Hill, which from some angles looks like an unfinished Iron Age hillfort. The archaeologists now think the banks are mostly prehistoric landslips, though trial digs found signs of people living there in the Iron Age and Romano-British period. The village has one more claim: Squadron Leader Ted Flavell, who flew the first British air drop of an atomic bomb in 1956, retired here. It’s a very quiet place for that particular story to end.
Long Lane
The way home is Long Lane, and the name is not ironic. It’s a sunken track between high banks, roofed with branches, with the light coming through in patches. It goes on, and on, and then it goes on a bit more. Every bend you think is the last one isn’t.
Eventually it gives up and drops you back towards Bothenhampton, and home.
Back for good
Nine and a half miles, a thousand feet of climbing, and two Strava medals I wasn’t trying for. That’s the numbers.
The rest of it is that I’ve lived round here most of my life and still found a run that took me somewhere I hadn’t been for forty years. The bench, the bridge and the Long Lane are all going on the list for Thinking Out Loud. Some of the group will remember Burton the way I do. Some will be seeing it for the first time. Either way, the river’s still there, and so are the sticklebacks.
Bothenhampton, Burton Bradstock & Shipton Gorge, Dorset – 9.52 miles – 1hr 35m 20s – 1,001ft
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