Netmaking in Uploders near Bridport, 1948. The woman with the silvery hair is Mrs Crabb. One of the photos in the "copiously illustrated" Rope, Net and Twine: The Bridport Textile Industry by Richard Sims. Picture reused courtesy of Bridport Museum.

DORSET historian Richard Sims’ book on Bridport’s rope and net industry is praised in the latest volume of the Industrial Archaeology Review.

The scholarly journal acclaims Rope, Net & Twine: The Bridport Textile Industry (Dovecote Press, £25) as “copiously illustrated… authoritative and attractive.”

Reviewer Mike Bone, who used to live in Dorset, and these days belongs to the Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society, says the book is “an invaluable guide to visitors and those researching particular sites or businesses.”     

There are few, if any, other places in Britain that have been shaped for so long by one industry as Bridport has been by rope, net and twine. The trade probably dates back to the ninth century. Read Mr Sims detailed book and you’ll never look at Bridport and its surrounding villages in quite the same way ever again.

Dottery, for example, owes the existence of its corrugated iron chapel – its tin tabernacle – to the presence of Pymore Mill. The Gundry family donated the land on which the chapel still stands, partly to save workers from having to trek over to Bradpole to worship.

Pymore Inn was built in the 1850s to serve thirsty millworkers. Photograph by Richard Sims.

Likewise, when Pymore Inn was built in the 1850s, it had a shop, so there was no need to go into Bridport.

But some workers did walk formidable distances and work extraordinarily hard.

The Industrial Archaeology Review remarks on the “massive effort” that Mr Sims and Dovecote Press put into his book; “massive effort” is a hallmark of the Bridport textile industry.

Hard life of Mrs Hughes, 75

By chance, I was recently browsing through old copies of the magazine Picture Post, which published a feature about Bridport net-making on 21 July, 1951.

The journalist Juliana Crow tells the story of a Mrs Hughes, a 75-year-old outworker living in Bridport, who cannot remember the time when she could not braid. (‘Outworker’ means that she worked from home).

“As a young married woman she lived near Crewkerne, 11 miles away. Her husband’s wages were only 11s a week, but she could average £2.

“The money was hard earned.

“She had five children under six, but every Friday she sent her husband off to work, settled the elder children with neighbours, loaded the pram with the baby and the completed nets and walked to Bridport to collect her earnings and do her shopping.

“Then she walked back in time to get the tea for the children and to cook her husband’s supper.

“Often she had had no sleep the night before.”

It’s a shame there is no photograph of Mrs Hughes.

Mr Sims notes in his book that, after World War Two, Pymore Mill found it hard to recruit new workers.

He writes: “In 1955 only 50% of the available posts were filled. It would seem that the school leavers of post-war Bridport had no wish to follow their parents into the town’s staple industry.

“The mill was closed in June 1955…”

Pymore’s predicament is fleshed out by Picture Post.

“Girls, nowadays, don’t want to learn anything more after they have left school and a unskilled job in shop or office is good enough to fill up the time between school leaving and marriage.

“Net making is an art that must be learned and it keeps them in the factory and, they believe, out of the world. Those girls who are drawn to the industry are too few to supply all the nets that are needed.”

This was written, remember, in 1951, so it was prescient, if rather harsh and haughty. I don’t get the feeling that Juliana Crow would have much fancied doing a four-year apprenticeship herself.

But then, would anyone reading this now want to walk 11 miles with a pramful of nets and a baby?

The Spirit of Bridport

The Spirit of Bridport painted by Fra Newbery in Bridport Town Hall (1924-27).

You could argue that Fra Newbery made a mistake when he sought – in his murals in Bridport Town Hall – to represent the Spirit of Bridport as a beautiful flaxen-haired young woman, working with twine.

Why not an older woman like Mrs Crabb (pictured below)?

Mrs Crabb, braiding, at her home in Uploders in 1948. This photograph was taken by the Central Office of Information in 1948 to help publicise the Bridport net industry. It's reused here courtesy of Bridport Museum.

CAMRA hopes its West Dorset pub guide will encourage people to visit more pubs and help keep them in business. The cover shows The Boot in Weymouth, The Anchor at Seatown, The Anchor in Burton Bradstock, The Rose & Crown in Longburton, The Royal Oak in Dorchester, Shave Cross Inn in the Marshwood Vale, and The Three Horseshoes in Burton Bradstock.

YOU KNOW the scenario – you’ve arrived in a place you don’t know well and you need to find a fine pint of real ale – and a good lunch.

Here to help you around West Dorset is the new Campaign for Real Ale guide, listing all 273 pubs in the area roughly bounded by Lyme Regis, Sherborne and Lulworth.

Within the packed 64 pages are descriptions of all the pubs, their location, telephone numbers, facilities, opening hours and – most importantly- the real ales they serve.

The centre pages open out to a map of the west of the county, showing towns and villages where real ales are served, while other pages display maps of the principal towns. You won’t get lost with this guide!

One of my favourite West Dorset pubs is the very popular and traditional George Hotel in Bridport’s South Street, described in the guide as an “unspoiled oak-panelled pub at the centre of the town, attracting a mixed clientele. Can get very busy at weekends. Less than a mile from the brewery.” It serves all of Palmers’ outstanding real ales.

In Lyme Regis, the Royal Standard has a good atmosphere, another Palmers house. “Comfortable low-ceilinged 400 year old pub with beachside garden. The interior incorporates stained glass panels, depicting historic events in Lyme. Popular pub meals.”

Country pubs feature throughout, such as the wonderful Shave Cross Inn, described as a “rural thatched pub with small flagstone bar, separate restaurant and second bar in the skittle alley/function room. Caribbean flavoured food. Thatchers cider in summer.” One real ale is from the Dorset Brewing Co. [DBC] at its new Crossways home.

Near the Somerset frontier is the Squirrel Inn at Laymore, on the Beaminster to Chard road, one of those isolated pubs you would never know about, but for guides like this. “Unexpected red brick single bar pub in the middle of nowhere, with good local trade.  Reincarnation of an earlier stone-built pub. Well prepared pub food – popular steak night on Wednesdays.  August beer festival and ‘Ashen Faggot’ festival in January. Garden has play area.” Those like me who like Otter Bitter should find it at The Squirrel and also a Branscombe Vale beer, with occasional guests from Yeovil and Cottage Breweries.

In many cases, pubs will serve a predictable range of real ales- often from local breweries- but sometimes from faraway places. The new updated guide gives an indication of what brands are served at which pubs- although of course that is always likely to change. You will need the West Dorset CAMRA Pub Guide as an essential companion to any future pub outings.

Buy Pub Guide by post

Buy the updated 2011 West Dorset Pub Guide by post from West Dorset CAMRA at 32 Mellstock Avenue, Dorchester DT1 2BQ.

Send a cheque for £5 [including post and packing] made payable to West Dorset CAMRA.

CAMRA members pay only £4; quote your CAMRA membership number to qualify.

Dorset stockists

Alternatively, buy a copy over the bar for only £3.99 from the following outlets:

Bridport – Palmers Wine Store and selected pubs;

Dorchester – The Blue Raddle, 9 Church Street;

Lyme Regis – Tourist Information Centre, Town Mill Brewery and selected pubs;

Portland – Royal Portland Arms, Fortuneswell;

Weymouth – Bradburys, St Edmund Street; Londis, Westham Road and the Railway Station news kiosk.

Michel Hooper-Immins belongs to the British Guild of Beer Writers, whose members share “a love of beer and a desire to see its virtues communicated more effectively.” He is a leading member of CAMRA’s Wessex Region, and his name can often be found in The Good Pub Guide.

The editor of this website also works for Watershed PR, one of whose clients is Palmers Brewery. Please note, however, that Michel Hooper-Immins is an experienced journalist who writes about all pubs and brewers in Dorset as he sees fit.

The CAMRA guide is noticed here because it is a very useful book, worth knowing about and buying. And pubs across West Dorset always do need customers!

Just this month The Bottle Inn  at Marshwood closed, though it may reopen near Easter.          

"The heavy waves sigh and crash": Eype Beach near Bridport, on Dorset's Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. Photo by Maurice Budden, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

ON the way to the beach it starts to rain.

A soft, pearl-grey winter’s day, the mist forever coalescing into light rain, and dissolving back into mist. The narrow road cuts and twists between yellow sandstone banks; down, down to a tatty turning circle and the dip in the cliffs worn by the little stream’s slow seep into the beach: Eype’s Mouth.

Ignore the battlement of static caravans looming on the headland and plunge, not too literally, down shallow concrete steps, past signs which warn: “Rock falls: Cut off by tides: Mud flows” and: “These cliffs are dangerous and liable to fall at any time”.

Sea surges in, grey and foam-laced white. The heavy waves sigh and crash, turning and tumbling with deliberate, muscular strength. Their edges bubble and cream: wet whipped egg-white sizzling on shingle. Here, near the shore, the water is the colour of putty, but far out the bowed horizon is pure celadon.

Let’s walk. Underfoot the scrunchy pea gravel scrapes and squeaks. Sudden patches of sand give relief to legs already wearied by trudging on banked and sliding stones. Look closer underfoot – individual pebbles lucent with seawater; yellow rock turns to amber, red rock – carnelian, black rock – obsidian.

Saturn-ringed and Jupiter-blotched they lie like drifts of miniature planets, or glossy, marbled eggs; easy now to believe that they, like us, are made from the dust of stars.

Raise your eyes and the beach as a whole is patched red-roan with sand, boulders and stones.

As this is a Sunday, there are other walkers out in search of solitude, exercise and a breath of Nature. Two teenage girls with cameras seek to record the atmospherics via techniques of mechanical reproduction. You can gaze along the beach at the spumy, breaking waves and the top of Thorncombe Beacon disappearing into the sea-har and see the moody, picture-postcardish image they may have captured.

Single photographs, however good, will be unable to convey all of this; the sense of the damp wind blowing in your face, the sea noise, that kestrel who was suspended over the cliff edge, the sludgy heaps of carunculated, elephant-grey mud subsiding at the foot of the cliffs, the sharp, paper edges of the cliffs receding to Seatown, and the waves’ endless lift and tumble.

Extracted from Switch Off The Light And Let Me Try On Your Dress by Sara Hudston and John Skinner, published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Agre Books (2002).

“There’s a great deal here that wd delight you: the statue of George III, glaring heavily along the front, is coloured; and everywhere in the town one has only to lift one’s gaze from the garish fronts of Saxone, Melias & so on to see the pretty round shallow bow windows & the colour-washed plaster. The harbour & old town is delicious.”

Ever since it was announced back in 2001 that a huge cache of Larkin’s letters, postcards, and telegrams to Monica Jones had been found, I’ve been waiting for the chance to read some of them in book form, and now here they are.

Do they disappoint? No. There’s something fascinating or funny on every page.

After Larkin’s return from Weymouth to Belfast, he wrote again to Monica about how he and his mother had walked to Thomas Hardy’s ‘Mellstock’.

“Hardy played a part in my parents’ courtship, & it astonishes me to hear her repeat snatches of his poems she learnt simply to please my father – We kissed at the barrier, for instance (as apparently they always did). Of course my father was grabbing the books as they came from the press, in the nineteen-hundreds.

“O frigid inarticulate man!”

Hardy is discussed again and again. In 1955, now in Hull, Larkin meets a “Botany prof. … called Good” – described as “not very bright”. The notes don’t say, but I’m sure this must be Ronald Good, who published a book on Dorset flora, now revered for its thoroughness by modern environmentalists. Anyway, Larkin is not put off by his dimness because it turns out that Good was born and brought up in Dorchester and “HE OFTEN SAW HARDY WALKING ABOUT”. And Good told Larkin a “striking” story about Dorchester:

 “…after Dunkirk, Dorchester was full of soldiers, lying about exhausted all about the grass verges of the streets, sleeping it off. During these two days, a meeting was held at the Hardy statue to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth (2 June 1840) – with the soldiers lying around snoring. He saw it as ‘This England’ – NS & N [New Statesman & Nation, as it then was] – but I see it as pure Hardy.

“How he’d have felt it!”

Letters to Monica is not officially published until October 20 but you can buy it now for nearly half-price on Amazon and I can’t recommend more strongly that you do.

There’s masses of detail, including this, in passing, about West Dorset.

“When one of the Greenes (Hugh) was involved in interviewing captured Luftwaffe pilots during the war, we are told: ‘His life was made easier by the fact that Luftwaffe crews often carried diaries and letters in their pockets, and he made use of his fluent German and his knowledge of their country: a dead Luftwaffe officer on Chesil Beach was found to be wearing pink silk women’s underclothes and carrying lipstick and a powder puff.’

It’s a good thing, notes Collini drily, that “Hugh was on hand to bring his knowledge of the country to bear.”

Has this episode ever been reported before? I suspect probably not, because it’s the kind of story that sticks in the mind and gets repeated (as now).

Mull it over and it raises many questions.

I wonder where the officer’s grave is?

THE LYME REGIS fossil hunter Mary Anning has been named by the Royal Society as the third most influential female scientist in British history.

The move comes as yet another book is published about Anning, once an almost entirely forgotten figure.

The Canadian novelist Joan Thomas has written a novel – out next week – called Curiosity.

“The material was so rich,” Thomas is quoted as saying in The Winnipeg Free Press. “I knew hers was a story that would resonate today on many levels.”

It seems indeed that Anning’s time has come.

The Royal Society’s list of the top ten women in British history who have had the most influence on science has just been compiled to celebrate the Society’s 350th anniversary  and its commitment to the advancement of women in science.

Anning’s name is potent in this respect because, as the Society’s citation reads in part, “Anning’s gender and social class prevented her from fully participating in the scientific community of early 19th century Britain, and she did not always receive full credit for her contributions.

“Despite this she became well known in geological circles in Britain and beyond, although she struggled financially for much of her life.

The Royal Society’s judging panel consisted of Professors Lorna Casselton, Athene Donald, Uta Frith and Julia Higgins, all Fellows of the Royal Society, and Dr Patricia Fara, an eminent historian of science.

Anning’s finds included the skeleton of the first ichthyosaur to be recognised, the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton found outside of Germany, and some important fossil fish.

Her observations – as the Royal Society notes – also played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilized faeces.

The implications of all these discoveries are among the aspects of Anning’s life that fascinated the novelist Joan Thomas. Put simply, fossils made people question the Christian story of creation. How could it be true if fossils showed there had been on life on earth before the Bible said there had been?

Thomas thinks Anning’s modern-day fame stems from the international symposium, organised by John Fowles, that was held in Lyme Regis in 1999. This was attended by such influential figures as Sir David Attenborough, who described Anning at the time as “a very remarkable woman”.

While Fowles himself, Thomas says, described Anning as the “secret inspiration for the char­acter of Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”

The front cover of Joan Thomas's book is from a watercolour, imagining what Dorset might once have been like, by the geologist Henry De la Beche

Thomas’s book is subtitled “A Love Story“. It imagines another Lyme Regis fossil collector Henry De la Beche as the object of Anning’s affections. De la Beche also features in The Lymiad, an anonymous poem from 1818 soon due to be published by the Trustees of Lyme Regis museum – which is sited, in a final twist, exactly where Anning used to live.

A spread from the bound manuscript of The Lymiad: One of the treasures of Lyme Regis Museum

HERE are some short extracts from The Lymiad, a series of eight verse letters written from Lyme Regis in 1818, never before published in their entirety, but now due to be issued by the Trustees of Lyme Regis Museum, if enough subscribers come forward to help pay for the book.

To find out more about that, you can click on this link to see another story on this site, by Margaret Rose.

But for now, with some brief notes based on ones supplied by the museum, here are some brief excerpts.     

Say, is there not the motley group among,

One generous bard, one gentle “child of song”

To celebrate thy wonders, matchless Lyme!,

In all the wild luxuriance of rhyme? …

Inspired by the genius loci – the spirit of the place – the anonymous author takes it upon himself – or herself? – to celebrate Lyme Regis. The Lymiad’s eight letters consider in turn the streets and lodgings of the resort; the sea and beach; the civil war siege, and the landing in Lyme by the rebellious Duke of Monmouth; the assembly rooms; the Mayor and worthies; scenery and bad weather; and departure. Margaret Rose tells me, incidentally, that people involved in the publication of The Lymiad are trying to work out who the author might have been.

That “Blood-red flag” which gaily floats

On the full-swelling breeze, denotes

The Conrad, Sir Fopling Fossil’s pride;…

He is the most accomplished youth,

That is, if Madame Fame speaks truth;

And more than this I cannot tell,

But some who know Sir Fopling well,

Inform me he’s a F.G.S.

Sir Fopling Fossil – isn’t that a wondeful name? – is probably Henry de la Beche (born 1796), who grew up in Lyme Regis, and aged 21, became a Fellow of the Geological Society of London. So The Lymiad, written in 1818, is pretty up-to-date. Henry de la Beche knew and supported the great Lyme Regis collector Mary Anning and in 1830 painted this tremendous fantasia of Dorset in ancient times when dinosaurs swarmed open-mouthed through the elements.

A more ancient Dorset: Watercolour by Henry de la Beche

In 1835 de la Beche became the first director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and in 1848 he was properly knighted.

Pencilled notes on in The Lymiad’s Dramatis Personae suggest de la Beche’s earlier poetic identity as Sir Fopling Fossil.

Finally, for now, there is a passage about elections.

Know then my friend, since last I wrote,

Here hath been pass’d a day of note,

When ‘tis the fashion to declare,

Who next shall be our worthy Mayor.

This day is honoured every year

By presence of a noble peer, …

The town of voters hath but few;

So few, that at th’Election last…

Th’Electors, and elected too,

In one horse chaise appear’d to view:

Lyme was a rotten borough in the control of the Fane family, whose head was the Earl of Westmoreland. There is a poetic link here. If memory serves, William Wordsworth was appointed in 1813 as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, a sinecure then worth about £400 a year (£250,000 today).  

The kiln itself is surrounded by gigantic quantities of wood. Different sorts and different sizes burn in different ways, and at different rates, and this helps to produce the variety of finishes that you see on Tim’s pots. I keep one of his weighty bowls on the windowsill right by me where I type and I love its starry black-brown finish, its randomly pitted caramelisation.

Anyway, I’m not going to reproduce the photograph here because the book it’s in costs £50 and I haven’t got permission to use it BUT there are exclusive extracts from Jasper Conran’s Country, with pictures by Andrew Montomery, on The Daily Telegraph’s website and you can see Mr Hurn by clicking on this link. 

“I’m keeping to a tradition of English pottery that’s been going on for generations,” Tim says. “I think there’s a certain romance in the process.”

If you want to see what he means, you could also watch this fiery film, made in the 21st century but suffused with history.

There’s a most interesting story behind it.

In 1978 the artist Laurence Whistler gave this bound manuscript of a poem, some 80 pages long, to the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, where it is on display. The author John Fowles had at this point just started his ten-year stewardship at the Philpot  as Honorary Curator. From the outset he regarded The Lymiad as one of the museum’s most precious possessions – for its verve, wit, and satirical humour; its vivid evocation of the manners and pastimes of a small Regency resort; and above all for its acute observations of the town, its people, and their preoccupations.

 Sadly, John Fowles died in 2005, so he never saw his dream of The Lymiad’s publication brought to fruition. Now the Museum’s Trustees have re-visited the project, in consultation with Mrs Sarah Fowles, his widow, and plan to launch a new edition of the manuscript; not a facsimile of the original, but designed as it might have appeared had it been published in 1819 – some 200 pages, soft-back, but with stitched pages and card covers marbled in the Regency manner.

 The edition will contain:

• An essay by John Fowles on “Lyme in the early 1800s’, published in 2003 from his original introduction
• A general introduction and textual note by John Constable
• A transcription of the text
• Editorial notes by John Fowles, John Constable and Jo Draper, the former curatorial consultant at the Museum.
• Illustrations from the Museum’s rich collection

The cost of the entire project is estimated at £4000. Some funds have already been raised, and it is hoped to raise the balance by 100 individual subscriptions of £20, the names of all those subscribing to be recorded in the publication.

For further information on this fascinating project contact Mary Godwin, the Museum’s Curator, on 01297-443370, or e-mail curator@lymeregismuseum.co.uk

*In 1997 the manuscript caught the attention of Dr John Constable, then Professor of English Literature at Kyoto University. Over the next few years he checked and studied the transcript and wrote the introduction.

In his words:  “The Lymiad emerges as a highly political and a thoroughly Whig poem, with some leanings towards the left of that party though stopping short of Radicalism itself.”

In view of Lyme’s political history, some may be surprised that “it stopped short of Radicalism itself”!

WYTHERSTON is a hamlet about four miles north-east of Bridport. You can see what it means to most people by looking at this sign just up the road from there:

It means nothing. It’s a small place that has played very little part in the history of anything, and few people have ever lived there.

For Tim Connor, this made it all the more enticing. He wanted to know how much could be discovered about a settlement like this, and he found the answer to be: a surprisingly large amount.

As is nearly always the case in West Dorset, when places and people are properly approached, stories and connections of an unexpected kind appear.

Two record sleeves, two links to Wytherston. The first link is  with Patrick Macnee, best known for playing Steed in The Avengers, hitherto almost entirely unknown for appearing five times in Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew at the Wytherston Barn Theatre during the first week of World War Two. A programme was printed for this production, of which just one copy survives. Its front-cover illustration of Wytherston Barn is reproduced on the cover of Mr Connor’s book:

The second link is with another stage of the barn’s life, this time with its partial use as a recording studio. The folk singer June Tabor used Wytherston to record a demo track which is on the Hokey Pokey charity compilation. Mr Connor also notes that it was at Wytherston that “the composer and guitarist Mike Trim… wrote the music of the feature film ‘Missing Link’ starring [Sir] Michael Gambon.”

I went to the studio myself once and was flabbergasted at the idea of there even being one there: so flabbergasted, unfortunately, that all I can really remember about going there is how flabbergasted I was. And I’m pretty sure I wrote something about going there too…

I mention this to indicate the frailty of human memory, and to suggest why it can be so important for a historian to uncover physical traces (records!) of the past. Like the 1608 Manor of Wytherston Court Roll, in which Mr Connor excitedly spots that the handwriting suddenly changes, “as if to denote something uncommon”. What’s there is a reference to a John Travers, died 1606, as “fil(ius) cytharedi“, the son of a harpist.

“At Melbury, Sir Giles Strangways often paid for ‘fiddlers’, and at that very moment a ‘musitian’ was apprenticed to learn ‘the art & mistery of musicke’ at Bridport. Whether John Travers’s father was a member of some early Powerstock village band, or whether he was employed to play in the hall at Wolfeton, and perhaps at Hooke Court, Toller Whelme or Mapperton, one can only speculate.”

Talk of a harpist also summons up this:

This carving of a hare playing a harp is now in the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester. It comes, writes Mr Connor, “from a house in Powerstock, but is said, before that, to have been found in the area of the chapel at Wytherston”. No one knows where the chapel at Wytherston was. It seems to have been in ruins by 1550, with the church at Powerstock used for worship instead.

This is the tomb in Powerstock churchyard of ‘William Travis’, who died in 1646 and whom Mr Connor thinks was probably William Travers of Wytherston, a member of the same family as the harpist.  If so, “he is the only pre-twentieth century inhabitant of Wytherston of whom anything permanent remains”.

Come the 20th century and there is clearly a lot more evidence. Owners over the last 100 years have included William Saunders Edwards, JP, five times Mayor of Bridport, and owner of the Bridport net and twine firm Edwards; Major Felix Walter Warre, MC, fifth son of an Eton headmaster and a director of Sotheby’s; Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, a naval commander and modern art collector; his stepdaughter Gemma Nesbitt; and, since 2005, Johnnie Boden, of mail-order clothing fame. The book details Mr Boden’s astoundingly expensive-looking alterations to the properties around Wytherston and his improvements to his 187-acre estate (Dorset gates made by Richard Leaf of Powerstock – who does make very handsome gates, new hedges laid by Nigel Dowding of Corscombe, etc).

Mr Connor writes carefully about all of these people, and misses, I think, some opportunities to paint them more in the round. There are many people who have been involved with Wytherston (Sammy Hurden, Kirsty Fergusson, Miranda Crabb, to name just three) who could have provided more colour and telling detail. Gemma Nesbitt, in particular, is rather passed over.

Still, there are some amazing little vignettes elsewhere. For example, the House family ran an agricultural contracting business from the Dairy House at Wytherstone, sometimes employing more than 30 men. Now read on:

“In a business in which jobs can be distant and widely separated, breakdowns not uncommon and parts difficult to source, the brothers hit on a novel solution to solve their difficulties.

“For several years they used to keep a light aeroplane – a German Bolkow Jnr. – on the level ground of Ramsdon [part of Wytherston], with which they could fly to collect the needed machine part in, say, Norwich, and take it, sometimes dropping it from the air, to a combine broken down in in a field in Devon.”

Isn’t that fantastic? It doesn’t sound very economical, but you can’t dispute that’s a quality service (as long as dropping parts from the air didn’t break them!)

All in all, Mr Connor’s book is impressively thorough, from the discovery near Wytherston of a 60BC bronze coin from the Osismii, a tribe from northern Brittany, one of only a few such coins ever found in England,  up to the creation of a tourist website for Grays Farm B & B (Grays Farm used to be called Wicker; its name was probably changed in the 1830s, to Grey originally, in tribute “to the Prime Minister of the reforming Whig ministry of 1832″).

“The deep country is no longer a secret known only to the immediate locality, even if this part of Dorset has not, even now been ‘discovered’.”

Only two mistakes are worthy of note: on page 40 it says that the net and twine manufacturer Edwards “has become one of the constituents of Bridport Gundry,” which is not entirely true. It was part of Bridport-Gundry, but is not now, partly because Bridport-Gundry itself no longer exists.

Also, Mr Connor has been badly served by his designers and/or printers as regards the covers of his book. The covers have been both laminated on the outside, and coated on the inside, which means they curl when held. Technically, in terms of book production, this is a fault.

But a book with a curling cover can also seem to be opening itself, as if it’s confidently asking to be picked up, leafed through and read. So from that point of view its design may be appropriate, as this is a book that should be read by anyone seriously interested in the history, architecture and culture of West Dorset.

Tim Connor