Walking in Dorset
Walking in Dorset
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3) Bokerley Ditch and Martin Down
Distance: 10 miles
Start: Garston Wood, Sixpenny Handley
Map: sheet 184, GR 003195
This is a walk across the largely uninhabited downland landscape on the boundary of three counties - Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. The one village it passes through is somnolent in the extreme; in all this walk there is little to distract you from your contemplation of the great wealth of history that is around you, most especially, of course, at Bokerley Ditch.
The walk starts at the car park for Garston Wood nature reserve, a mile and a half north of Sixpenny Handley on the road to Bowerchalke.
The wood belongs to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and was established as a nature reserve in 1985. Its importance is due to the fact that the majority of its area is coppiced. Coppicing is, or rather was, the cutting of trees at their base to encourage them to grow a number of trunks from the same rootstock. Thus cut repeatedly a wood became a very productive source of hurdle fences, fence poles and thatching spars. There can be no finer description of such woodland economy than that in the pages of Hardy’s The Woodlanders; Marty South’s cutting of thatching spars assumes heroic status. Among the coppiced trees some mature oak and ash trees were grown to provide more substantial timber for building and fuel. In my childhood hurdle fences could still be seen in use on sheep farms on the downs, their place now taken by electric fences. Curiously, the coppiced species in this wood, as in other coppices, are around three centuries older than the mature trees (oak) that stand above the short and slender coppices. The species coppiced in Garston are maple, ash and hazel. Coppicing produced a habitat which a number of species of plants, birds and animals adapted to; the loss of this habitat was catastrophic to the population of, amongst other species, the dormouse.
Although the wood is an RSPB reserve, it is, of course, not just bird species that benefit. On the woodland floor grow bluebells, primroses, early purple and bird’s nest orchids, toothwort, Solomon’s seal and butcher’s broom. A number of butterfly species can be found, including pearl-bordered and silver-washed fritillary, white admiral, grizzled skipper and purple hairstreak. Notable among the bird species is the nightingale, which likes to sing from the cover close to the ground that coppiced woodland provides. Garston Wood is an island of this richness surrounded on all sides by arable. And yet nearby are great areas of former coppice; the Forest and Downs of Cranborne Chase walk explores them in detail.
From the car park turn left along the road and then right at the end of the wood to head east, with a hedge on your left, up the hill to a copse. Follow its southern edge along to reach a farm lane (GR 009196) and follow this east, across the arable fields to West Woodyates Farm. Keep the farm on your right - notice a sign, partly hidden in a laurel hedge, pointing the way to “Cobley ¾”. This seems a very generous estimation of the distance. Make your way north-east along the good farm lane to a wood on your right. At the end of the wood the track turns left; turn right here and follow the hedge on your left along to the road just south of Cobley (GR 022003).
Cross the road at Cobley and go through a metal hunting gate to head north, keeping the beech copse on your left; bear right at the end of the trees to follow a hedged in track north-east, across the dry valley to a water tank on the site of an old barn (GR 025209). Turn left here and follow the hedge on your right to reach the wood - Chettle Mead Copse. Go into the wood at a stile and head north to the far side, where you turn right to head south-east along a lane, downhill to Kitty’s Grave and into the woods of Vernditch Chase. A badge nailed to the walker’s signpost informs you that you are on the boundary with Hampshire. Follow the line of the old oak trees through the wood of younger trees along the edge of the Forestry Commission (now renamed Forest Enterprise) land. As you exit from the woods into an area of gorse and bramble you should follow the most prominent of a number of tracks; this brings you after two thirds of a mile to a memorial plaque at the edge of the wood on the old Roman road (GR 035203). Turn right here to head south to cross the A354, main Salisbury-Blandford road into a car park.
Leave the car park heading south on a well used vehicle track heading towards a prominent level-topped bank. This has nothing to do with Bokerley Ditch but is a backstop from an old military rifle range. The track takes you past the end of the bank; turn right and make your way to the top to enjoy a magnificent view across Martin Down and a large swathe of three counties - Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. Walk to the far end of the bank and descend it to find yourself on a grassy path following the eastern side of Bokerley Ditch.
Bokerley Ditch takes its English name from “Buck Ditch” - its Celtic name is unknown. It was originally built around the year 370 expressly to block the principal line of advance of the English-speaking Saxons into the territory of the remaining Romano-British population. Bearing in mind the heavily wooded lowlands, the open chalk downs offered more or less the only routes (cf the Hare path on Exmoor - see my Two Moors Way). The Saxon invasion of the West Country to create Wessex - the Kingdom of the West Saxons - was from the north and east. The area of what was to become Dorset was well protected by limestone escarpments in the north (a fact which becomes clear by walking the Trent and the Comptons and Corton Ridge walks) and by impenetrable forests in the clay vales. The coast line, with the exception of Poole Harbour with its unattractive hinterland, was too hostile for landings. The Celtic population had therefore correctly identified the Roman road running south-west from Old Sarum as the line of advance they had to block if they were to resist the Saxon incursions. The result was the cutting of the Roman road in the vicinity of the car park you have just left and the building of the 6 mile long Bokerley Ditch, clear across the chalk ridge. All over Dorset you can find “Cross Dykes” earthworks built to block ridges - Bokerley Ditch is the largest and most important of these.
It is still an impressive feature and its design still has military relevance today. It consists of a deep dyke (probably twice as deep as it now is when new) with a high bank made of spoil behind. In the period of military build-up prior to the UN invasion of Iraq and Kuwait in 1991 the “berm” was talked of - a very similar feature built on the Saudi border for exactly the same reason. Bokerley Ditch was, however, rather more successful than its latterday Iraqi counterpart; it lasted for some two centuries, being broken, it is thought, in the second half of the sixth century. The successful resistance of Saxon invasion for so long completely changed the English settlement of the county in comparison to neighbouring Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire, which were in English hands more than two centuries before Dorset.
Follow the Ditch along on its “enemy” side; you cannot help but be impressed by its scale. A mile after the car park a track cuts through the ditch (GR 042193) offering the first of several short cuts before you reach Blagdon Hill (GR 056180). Notice how the ditch keeps to the forward side of the hilltop. Just before you reach the summit of Blagdon Hill turn right, along a well used chalk track past a horse paddock on the left. This brings you after 150 yards to a track junction.
Turn sharp right at the track junction, reaching a wood on your left after a further 100 yards. Now turn left along a well marked (and rather muddy) bridleway along the edge of the small wood. You exit from the trees, heading west, up the hill to pass the southern end of conifer plantation (GR 046179), and follow the grassy track which becomes a farm lane going steeply down to the dairy unit at Whitey Top. Turn left at the bottom of the hill and walk down into Pentridge village to turn right up the lane to the church.
Pentridge is first recorded from a document of 762; at first it seems to be one of those Celtic-English tautologous names which mean the same, such as the numerous Pen Hill. In fact the second element may be derived from tyrch, meaning wild boar, so that the name has a wholly Celtic origin.
With the road south down the valley towards Cranborne now disused, Pentridge has seen few alterations to its buildings since Hardy used it as his “Trantridge” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, perhaps the most geographically wide-ranging of his Wessex novels. In fact, whilst in its other locations Tess is the most findable of his novels, for the area around “Trantridge” his fictional topography is a little vague. Nevertheless a read of Tess prior to doing this walk gives it added pleasure.
Inside the church is a plaque commemorating “Robert Browning of Woodyates... the first known forefather of Robert Browning the poet”. Woodyates is the next settlement reached on the walk. The lane past the church becomes a bridleway leading up the hill across two fields to the road, where you turn left to go down the hill.
Turn right off the road where it turns sharply to the left at an old junction (Peaked Post - GR 031184) and head up a green track to turn left at a track junction among some bushes. This leads you straight across the arable fields, north to Woodyates where you turn left cross back over the A354.
Fleeing from the nocturnal slaughter of Sedgemoor in 1685 the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth abandoned his horse here and headed south on foot in disguise as a shepherd, no doubt making for Poole in the hope of a boat to France. He was captured at Horton, to the north of Wimborne, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. The Bloody Assize which followed was remembered in Dorset for generations.
Leave Woodyates heading north-west along the Bowerchalke road; after 500 yards turn left immediately before a row of houses to follow the path behind the gardens, bringing you to an obvious track which takes you to West Woodyates Manor. Cross over the main drive and head south-west down the tarred private road to the Sixpenny Handley road at a cattle grid (GR 006187) on the eastern corner of Garston Wood. Follow the road along the dry valley to a gate at the end with a sign asking you to park in the car park. Turn right through the gate to follow the track up the western side of the wood for half a mile to a T-junction of paths between two high hurdle fences. Turn right on the path to return to your car.
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