puddleshark

7am on Bryant's Puddle Heath, thin mist lingering over the marshes.

Parked the car in the Culpepper's Dish car park again. On my last visit to this ridge of heathland, I walked northwards, descending to the Piddle Valley. This time, I walked southwards, across the heath towards to the valley of the Frome.

For the first hour of the walk, chill enough in the air that I was glad of my coat, glad of those stretches where the path left the shade of the woods for the open sunlit heath, and I could feel the warmth of the sun on my back.

Early morning peace. The only souls encountered: Sika deer - two stags, a doe and her child. Wrens trilling in the gorse. Robins looking for breakfast along the edges of the path.

From the heath into Oakers Wood. In the centre of the wood, a paddock, and in the paddock a sunlit ~~unicorn~~ grey horse. (Or maybe it really was a unicorn - it didn't come out on my photo).

Smoke rising from the chimneys of houses hidden in the woods.

Across a busy road: once you leave the heath behind and enter the river valley of the Frome, this southwards direction is less peaceful. There are fast noisy roads in this valley, rather than the quiet lanes to nowhere you get to the north in the Piddle valley.

Onto the Jubilee Way, a well waymarked long distance trail. Then a right turn onto the footpath through Moreton plantation - the old park of Moreton House, and a quarter of the woods where the rhododendron and the laurel have taken over. Along dark winding ways and across duckboards.

Leaving behind the heath, you're suddenly in the flat fertile river valley fields - walking through cattle pasture, maize stubble.

Boring walking - few birds other than the rooks. Footpaths between strands of electric fencing. The River Frome somewhere nearby, but you never get to see it from the footpath.

Footpath south to Waddock Dairy.

The sun now dispersing the early chill. My coat tied around my waist.

Two Gates dairy farm, slurry pit - picturesque Dorset! - and steampunkery happening from pipes of the milking parlour.

(Milking parlour - do farmers use this phrase any more? Visions of the cows taking tea, and all the equipment covered in lace doilies...)

Onwards onto a ceremonial way, marked by evenly spaced silage bales:

Waddock Farm, a truly impressive thatched house, though impossible to photograph unless you are willing to risk your life on the bend of a road with no verge, where the traffic comes flying blind over the brow of the hill at sixty miles an hour. (Sorry. Not that committed a photographer of vernacular architecture).

Watercolour by Thomas Hennell, 'Waddock Farm, Clyffe, Nr. Dorchester', from the Recording Britain Collection (Dorsetshire); signed; England, ca.1940. In the V&A collection.

Niftily across the dangerous road at Waddock Cross, onto a quiet side lane, then northwards onto the bridleway across Pallington Heath, mostly planted with conifers. A peaceful climb along soft tracks through the woods. On the tracks, the wide-spaced hoofprints of a horse at full gallop.

And on the highest point, where the trees have been cleared, and there are views over the Frome valley, a half-collapsed person, crouching on a half-collapsed seat, eating chocolate and thinking of hoofprints.

Hoofprints still stab me in the heart sometimes. Once, I galloped ponies along twisty paths through the woods, cackling like a witch...

But that was another life.

Then up again, on again, back onto the gravel byway that runs along the ridge top. A long, long, straight track, through dark woods, past swallow holes, through areas where the trees have been cleared along one side to restore the heath, but the birch saplings are taking it back to woodland as fast as they can.

A battle is being fought here against the four-wheel-drive fraternity, who have the legal right to drive along the gravel track, but who do not stay upon that track. Banks and ditches are being dug beside the track to keep vehicles from leaving the byway and trashing the woods: a kind of long, univallate hillfort on each side of the track, all through the woods. But still the vehicles find a way through and leave deep ruts everywhere. And all along the side of the byway, a tide of beer cans, cans of Red Bull, plastic bottles.