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 [...]
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
IN JULY 1953 Philip Larkin stayed at the Royal Hotel on Weymouth seafront. He came on holiday with his mother Eva and was often mistaken for her brother or husband. He didn’t seem to mind this. He enjoyed holidays, despite claiming not to, and he liked Weymouth. This is how he described the resort to his [...]
In the latest issue of the London Review of Books, the essayist Stefan Collini reviews a new book by Jeremy Lewis, Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family (Cape, £25). It’s mostly about the novelist Graham Greene and his numerous brothers, sisters and cousins. There’s masses of detail, including this, in passing, about West [...]
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 [...]
THERE’S a superb photograph of the Bettiscombe potter Tim Hurn in a new book coming out next month. It shows Tim carefully reaching out from the mouth of his kiln for a plankful of pots. 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 [...]
LYME REGIS Philpot Museum’s Trustees have issued an unusual invitation: to subscribe to the first publication of The Lymiad, or Letters from Lyme to A Friend at Bath, written during the Autumn of 1818. There’s a most interesting story behind it. In 1978 the artist Laurence Whistler gave this bound manuscript of a poem, some 80 [...]
Review of Wytherston: A History of a Dorset Settlement, by T.P. Connor (£10, from www.wytherston.com) 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 [...]
SIR THOMAS WYATT competed with Henry VIII for the affections of Anne Boleyn. Even if you have never heard of Wyatt, a diplomat and a brilliant poet, you can probably guess what happened next… In 1533, Henry VIII secretly married Anne Boleyn. Three years later, Wyatt was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. [...]
I POPPED in to Bridport Old Books and Caroline said to me: “Here, try this.” So I put some headphones on and listened to what sounded like a conversation with all the interesting bits taken out. Er – pause – like – pause – ah – pause… “You can walk around,” said Caroline. “It’s all [...]
