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 Lymiad will come out looking finer than this. At least, it'd better do!

 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

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…

Sir Thomas Wyatt

In 1533, Henry VIII secretly married Anne Boleyn.

Three years later, Wyatt was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Soon after, Anne Boleyn was executed, probably within sight of Wyatt’s cell.

In July 1540, Wyatt witnessed – with tears in his eyes – the execution of his friend and patron Thomas Cromwell (the central character of Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall.)

In January 1541, Wyatt himself was accused of treasonable behaviour as an ambassador, and was again taken to the Tower, bound and handcuffed. Historians suspect the real issue may actually have been Wyatt’s relationship with his mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, a Catholic and Maid to Honour to Katharine of Aragon. Wyatt was pardoned by the King – but also told that unless he gave up Darrell, and went back to his estranged wife, he would lose everything he possessed and be killed.

Let’s pause a moment here. It is clear that Wyatt knew intimately how slippery life could be at the court of Henry VIII (“the slipper toppe / of courtes estates”) and people he loved had died “dazed with dredfull face.”

Shortly before Wyatt wrote the poem from which these words are quoted, called ‘Stond who so list’, it was said of him: “Mr Wyatt… doth often call to his remembrance his emprisonment in the Tower, which seemeth so to stick in his stomacke that he cannot forget it…”

The big question is – did Wyatt himself so wish to escape from this terrifying milieu that, in Dorset, he faked his own death so as to go back to living secretly with his mistress?

This extraordinary idea is put forward by the poet Alice Oswald, in the introduction to a new selection of Wyatt’s poems (in Faber’s Poet-to-Poet series).

In October 1542, Wyatt was told by the King to go to Falmouth, to meet an envoy sent by emperor Charles V. The story then is that Wyatt rode too fast, got overheated, caught a chill or a fever, and, stopping in West Dorset at Clifton Maybank, at the home of his friend Sir John Horsey, he died and was quickly buried.

Clifton Maybank. (Photograph by Nigel Mykura, reused under Creative Commons Licence.)

Oswald writes: “Strangely, for a man of his status, he was buried not in his own grave, but in his host’s family tomb [in Sherborne Abbey]. His mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, whom he’d been forced to leave two years before, was living in Exeter, and I can’t help wondering whether, on his way to the West Country, he decided to fake his own death to rejoin her. The beauty of that idea is that it changes the poem ‘Stond who so list’ from a wish into a whispered decision:

in hidden place, so let my dayes forth passe,

that when my yeares be done, withouten noyse,

I maye die aged after the common trace…”

If this idea is true, then this plaque set in the floor of Sherborne Abbey is wrong. Wyatt is not buried here, there is a body missing from the Horsey family tomb, and for nearly 500 years Wyatt’s daring plot has been a secret never even guessed at – until now.

Note: Wyatt wrote some of the greatest and most haunting poems in the English language. The best ways in to his work are probably Oswald’s selection (which has a brilliantly intelligent introduction) and the revolutionary essay ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ by Ted Hughes in Winter Pollen (Faber, 1994). Hughes praises Wyatt’s irregularity, spontaneity, nakedness of feeling: “No poet ever cut so deep into the nerve…”

Here? Where is here, I thought? There’s only her and me in this bookshop that I can see. Does she mean something in here has been picking up conversations and now their terrible residues are coming out of the walls like wavy stains or stainy waves? Words as waste matter – except, of course, when you hear just the detritus of speech you do start to wonder what you’re missing out on and listen more closely for clues in what you’re left with about register and emotion / “It’s coming from here on the wall,” she said, and pointed to some sort of transmitting device near the window. “I think it’s rather funny,” she went on. “There’s more out in the back. You have to go and see that.” So I went into the back room and found there was indeed a kind of encrusted tongue sticking out of the wall… A horrid letter opener

“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie”

Nigel Slight at his desk in the air. Photograph by George Wright

Outside Bridport Old Books, and in front of Bridport Arts Centre, artist Nigel Slight began his first book, Writing The Unfinished Story Of War, at a desk on a pallet six feet up in the air dangling from a crane.

Why? Mr Slight said: “I wanted to do something about war, especially as it was taking place in November, the month of Remembrance Day.

“When the First World War ended the soldiers who fought in it were told the lie that it was the War to end all Wars.

“But here we are, three, four generations on, and it is clear that wars are never going to go away, indeed we seem further away from peace then ever before.  And at the moment we are engaged in not one but two unjust wars that the governments of the UK and USA have got us involved in.

“Neither of these conflicts has a clear mandate and all they have done is caused death and ruin to both military personnel and an untold number of civilians.”

All this is part of Countertext09, exhibiting at Bridport Arts Centre and the Electric Palace Café until November 28. Works by nearly two dozen artists are also on display at shops and business premises around Bridport.

Find out more by clicking on this link – or just explore.

ON EVERY page of the new Drimpton Village Voices book Who Were We? there’s something that catches the eye. The question that’s asked about cider comes on a page that (I swear) I opened at random.

Page 303 – which records the life of a woman called Susan Jeffery who actually leaves Drimpton in the early 1860s to  live on Ham Hill in Somerset, where Ham Stone comes from. Susan sets herself up as a laundress. “But of more interest is her growing family,” writer Andrew Pastor notes. By 1880 she has nine sons, but there’s no sign of any husband or live-in partner.

“What should we think? What can we say? Should it matter? It is just that we wonder who the fathers are, for surely there has to be more than one. Were the neighbouring women of Ham Hill at ease with Susan in their midst? Most of them were living conventional lives. They had acquired husbands and most managed to keep them. Among her neighbours in 1871 there had been no single men. Among them in 1881, there were none either.

“Surely, some of the wives must have looked at their husbands and wondered at the very least. These men, stonecutters and masons, were doing heavy, physical work which no doubt helped them work up a thirst. Who knows what a man who has drunk a lot of cider might get up to? Susan, now aged 40, was still attractive – or was she simply welcoming?”

This short section reveals a lot about Who Were We? It is, for a start, a brilliant book – the best local history book I’ve seen for many years. It’s been written by Andrew Pastor, but his use of the first-person plural (What can we say?… we wonder…) isn’t just a stylistic affectation. It reflects the enormous team effort that’s gone into researching this book, and the way that team members have thought about the people whose lives they have been investigating. Census returns (1871, 1881, etc) have provided basic details, supplemented wherever possible by other sources of information (eg, local newspapers, court records, museums…) Where need be, researchers have gone beyond county boundaries (and national borders).

But the key thing about this book is this: researchers have also used their imaginations, to interpret and to speculate and to try to bring people back to life: to reintroduce them to us in a humane and fascinating way. That’s one reason for the book’s subtitle: “Connecting the lives of a 19th century Dorset community”.  That means connecting those lives to us – posing questions to us (What should we think?). It also means seeking to recreate how people’s lives then were connected, even if it’s sometimes difficult or even impossible to work out exactly how they were, as with the puzzles over the identities of Susan Jeffery’s paramours.

Dorset in the 19th century was different. In the video clip coming up, Andrew Pastor pulls out of the quiet surrounding his Drimpton home some of the noise and grind of the past: you can watch the video by clicking on the link in the next line.

Andrew Pastor on YouTube

One of the things Mr Pastor refers to is that Drimpton - which now has just one farm – once had several. The photograph below shows, on the far right, what’s reckoned to be farmer Alfred Ben, dressed up for a wedding in 1902.

It’s a very striking picture, for all sorts of reasons: the whiskers, the top hats, the watch chains, the stillness and self-possession of the two old men, the stiff black shine of the women’s dresses, the almost military assurance of the woman on the left… But they all seem, behind the fence, to know that there’s a barrier between them and the future, whereas the girl in white, not so much in focus in front of the fence, seems ready to step up towards the camera, into the 20th century, towards us. She will grow into better definition; she knows what things were like, and she will seek to make them different again.

I am very grateful to Drimpton Village Voices for permission to reproduce a selection of photographs from Who Were We? Others include an extraordinary picture of 

Netherhay’s oldest resident round about 1908, Ann Hallson, who was then 95. Counting backwards, that means she would have been born during the Napoleonic Wars, in about 1813, before the Battle of Waterloo.

Ann was – it’s thought – a domestic servant, then a flax spooler  at Yarn Barton in Broadwindsor, then a flax winder and a handloom weaver, and then, finally, a pauper. She is listed in the 1881 census as “kept by parish”. Her fortunes fell as those of her neighbours rose. Andrew Pastor notes that her neighbours in Broadwindsor High Street now included “agricultural labourers, of course, but also factory workers, a dairyman, a thatcher, a master baker, a dressmaker, a stonemason, a cordwainer and his shoemaking  apprentice, as well as Police Constable Custard and his family.

“Did Ann smile at the sound of his name?”

Perhaps, in the 1880s, she did, but this picture, remember, was taken circa 1908, by which time Ann had moved to Netherhay, and you wonder – looking at this – what it would take to make her smile now. Her hands seem to retain the memory of decades of hard work – look at her index finger edging forwards – but her face seems closed-up and impassive and her clothes seem to enshroud her.

She had a child, back in the 1830s, but never seems to have married.

Andrew Pastor devotes three pages to her. He writes, finally: “She has made her way through life in a family where the women have looked out for and cared for each other as best they were able to…

“Deprivation and poverty cannot weaken family solidarity. In fact, they may have strengthened it.”

THERE are two chapters in this book on Dorset and they get off to a cracking start: “Dorset has a northern fringe that scarcely seems to belong to it at all, a chalky, dusty hinterland that gathers itself suddenly in a wild surge up to the heights of Shaftesbury” –  yes, that’s so true. You may disagree, but places like Gillingham and Bourton always seem to me to belong more to the A303 than they do to Dorset. The real interest of the county lies elsewhere:

In the memorable lines of the Cerne Abbas giant, for example, before which Payne comments: “Dorset tries hard to be respectable… but the county never quite manages to be respectable.”

Or the lines engraved outside Blandford Town Hall (Blandford was rebuilt in the 18th century after being almost completely destroyed by fire. Chief re-builders were John and William Bastard):

Recipe for regeneration;

take one careless

tallow chandler and

two ingenious Bastards.

(Regeneration has always been controversial.) 

Or the lines of religious dissenters who spraggled across Dorset and beyond to their lowly, and often deliberately obscure, chapels. Dorset, writes Payne, “and indeed the whole West Country, is a hot-bed of non-conformity”. He’s good throughout this whole book on unfashionable but fascinating sects – Congregational, Unitarian, Methodist, Baptist, Moravian – and as part of this theme he deals, rather unexpectedly, in his Traditional Dorset chapter, with the Loughwood Meeting House in Devon, west of Axminster. Nowadays it’s not far from the A35, but when built by Baptists in the 17th century it was much more remote. Its “isolated spot reflects the social and religious isolation felt by the 219 members of the congregation who sought refuge there in 1653… Eventually Loughwood was to become the mother church for Baptists meeting at Chard in Somerset, Lyme Regis in Dorset and Honiton in Devon… The National Trust booklet available at the chapel notes that persecution was especially harsh in the years 1684-88, when ‘men and women were ostracised, ridiculed, imprisoned, transported and sometimes killed’… Not until 1688, when William of Orange was invited to take over from James II in the so-called Glorious (and bloodless) Revolution, were acts passed by parliament granting freedom of worship to non-conformists.” It’s a weirdly persistent myth that the Glorious Revolution was bloodless; Payne himself, remember, has just been talking about Baptists sometimes being killed. To quote a piece by Bernard Bailyn in the current New York Review of Books, “Death and devastation were everywhere, not only in the cities but in the countryside as well.”

A Victorian view of four of the Tolpuddle Martyrs

Payne’s word “transported” is also resonant. Later he writes about the six Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported to Australia in 1834 for setting up the Tolpuddle Grand Lodge of the Agricultural Labourers Friendly Society and for swearing an oath of loyalty to each other. Five of the Martyrs were Methodists, two of them lay-preachers. Payne thinks it’s “sad that the names of the twelve labourers transported to Australia after the Swing Riots in Dorset [1830 agricultural riots] have not been kept in the general memory, while those of the men of Tolpuddle have been kept in the public consciousness ever since.”   

So, all in all, this is a thought-provoking book, well-written and sturdily produced. It has errors – Mary Anning was not born in 1811, but 1799 - and it has faults – the photographs are disappointing. One picture of the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs festival shows what could be David Partridge, check-shirted stalwart of the Bridport Peace and Justice Group and the Saturday morning queue for the Bridport Country (WI) Market, but the reproduction is so bad it’s impossible to be sure. But still, this book is well worth reading, for it does have some very unusual elements, such as an account of a trip to Netherhay Chapel near Drimpton (north of Broadwindsor, north-west of Beaminster). Hardly anybody ever writes about Drimpton, yet Payne goes there to hear the Purbeck Quire and modern-day Methodists happily singing old hymns:

I have fought my way through

I have finished the work

Thou didst give me to do

Note: John Payne visited The Book Shop in South Street, Bridport, in September, and more about his visit and about his book can be read by clicking on this link. In his book, Payne refers to Bridport, “with its Arts Centre and its Local Food Centre,” as  “a phoenix rising from centuries of decline.”

“The British passport, designed by Stone in 1955, bears his engraving of the royal coat of arms and his elegant lettering.”

There’s a centenary exhibition of Stone’s work coming up in London. Reynolds Stone: Lettering, Logos and Landscapes, runs from Nov 6-21, Tues-Fri, 11am-4pm, Sat 10.30am-6pm, at Schneideman Gallery, 331 Portobello Rd, London W10 (0208 354 7365).

You can read the piece in The Times by clicking on this link, or there’s a website run by Stone’s estate at www.reynoldsstone.co.uk 

Various Dorset connections continue: Stone’s son Humphrey, for example, designed the excellent Dovecote Press series Discover Dorset; while one of his disciples, the Bridport graphic designer and carver Michael Harvey, now publishes entertainingly unusual photographic books about subjects such as bicycles and fire hydrants…

THERE ARE many things to stop and wonder at in The Great Trees of Dorset, including the fact that the huge yew tree in Broadwindsor churchyard may be more than 2,000 years old… Which would take us back to the Roman invasions of Dorset. Start thinking about that, and it’s impossible not also to start thinking about the yew as some kind of historic personage. The oldest living thing in Dorset, perhaps? If only it could speak! What changes it must have seen and felt! What stories it could tell!

The authors of this book definitely think in this way. Their words drift off towards personification, as if trees really were people. Discussing the changes wrought in the wake of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s and the Civil War a century later, Pollard and Brawn (what a great muscular pair of names!) note: “There were certainly winners and losers for Dorset’s trees throughout this period…” and you think, what a genuinely charming idea it is, to tell the story of Dorset from the point of view of its trees, and, what a pity it is there aren’t more old trees left. Really old oaks, say, with large girths and mossy serpentine branches. Pollard and Brawn write: “We… probably have about 1000 veteran oaks, of whom [note that whom!] fewer than 200 are truly ancient. Even this may well be a hopeful estimate. This is an extremely low number and we should ask ourselves: how worried would we be if there were less than 200 individuals left of an orchid species?” One of the greatest individuals left is Billy Wilkins, who (they’ve got me at it now) lives in Melbury Park near Evershot, not far from the A37. His girth is 11.6 metres.

It’s to celebrate trees like Billy, and to stimulate interest in the welfare of Dorset’s veteran trees, that The Great Trees has been published. Pollard and Brawn both work for the Dorset Wildlife Trust, and their book grows out of the extensive research they’ve done in recent years for the county’s Greenwood Trees Project. The aim of this project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, is to understand, celebrate and conserve Dorset’s great trees (past, present and future). Poems, songs, and pictures by schoolchildren feature throughout the book and reflect public involvement in the Greenwood scheme. Hundreds of fibrous roots have fed the authors and it shows. Leaf through their book and memorable details abound.

Did you know, for example, that the first recorded reference to children playing conkers isn’t until 1848? Did children really not play conkers before then? (Maybe so, because the horse chestnut is not a native tree; it dates back in Dorset about 220 years…) Or that cider in Dorset is first mentioned as “cisera” at Shaftesbury Abbey in 1291? Or that Stag beetle larvae feed inside deadwood for up to seven years before emerging as adults? Or that the Scot’s pines atop Colmers Hill near Bridport were planted during the First World War? Or that – best of all – one oak tree (pictured below) was once a beershop?

Blandford Forum’s Damory Oak was “used as an alehouse during the Civil War and up until the Restoration in 1660. It had a main apartment of 4.9 metres (16 foot) in length with a small bar in an alcove. In 1731 a fire destroyed Blandford and as a consequence two homeless families found themselves taking up residency within the tree. Sadly, the tree came to an unsympathetic end in 1755 when it was felled and sold for fuel wood, fetching £14. It is thought at the time it was sold it was a colossal 20.7 metres (68 foot) in circumference.”

These days, Brawn and Pollard report, many of Dorset’s veteran trees are looked after extremely well, particularly on the county’s big estates. But “a good number of important trees” are also said to be suffering through “a whole host of threats ranging from disease and pollution to inappropriate tree surgery, premature felling, a tendency to unnecessarily remove deadwood, and compaction around the roots from grazing animals”. And who knows what might happen as the climate changes in the future? It’s a big question, because ancient trees are fantastic habitats for wildlife, for bats, birds, fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns and invertebrates. Cob web beetle larvae, for example, are found only on ancient trees. They feed on left over meals of spiders that live on ancient trees. Brawn and Pollard pin their hopes on better understanding: “If these trees are better understood by all concerned, nurtured and celebrated they will stand a far better chance of surviving for future generations to enjoy.” They also hope that people will be inspired to nurture future generations of veteran and ancient trees.

The Great Trees of Dorset has very few weak areas. The section on birds has some lovely shots of woodpeckers but the text is rather uninspired; it’s not exactly a secret, is it, that “Many birds are commonly known to use trees…” And I would have liked to see a bit more about the old forests of Dorset, picking up perhaps on the fascinating investigative chapter about Blackmoor forest, between Cerne Abbas and Sherborne, in Oliver Rackham’s volume on Woodlands in Collins’ New Naturalists series. Academics – led by the recently-retired Professor John (Jack) Langton of St John’s College, Oxford, who used to have a house in Burton Bradstock – are also looking afresh at the legal history of forests and chases and the activities of their inhabitants. These days, we tend to think: Robin Hood, outlaws, merry men… There’s much, much more to forests than that kind of Saturday-night TV fantasy, and reflecting that would have given this book an extra dimension. But you can’t have everything. The Great Trees of Dorset has lots of excellent illustrations, including atmospheric photographs by Colin Varndell that make you wish you could go to Lewesdon Hill and Powerstock Common right now. So, if you’re interested in the trees, wildlife, or history of Dorset, this is a book you should buy, and at £9.95 for a full-colour paperback, it’s cheap. The hardback is also very competitively priced, oh,  and all royalties go to Dorset Wildlife Trust.

* The images accompanying this review are reproduced by kind permission of the Dovecote Press, who remain the copyright holders.

I suppose Chevalier was always going to be popular; her new novel Remarkable Creatures is about the great Lyme Regis fossil hunter Mary Anning.

But Clare’s a surprise, with his book A Single Swallow. He’s supposed to be appearing in front of 30 people at Wild and Homeless Books in South Street, Bridport. Could he now be moved over the road to face a bigger crowd at Bridport Arts Centre?

There’s something heartening about people’s apparent hunger to hear more about swallows. There’s two very appealing lines – written by a child – quoted in Tom Paulin’s Faber Book of Vernacular Verse:

“The swallow is a migratory bird. He have a roundy head”.

I’m quoting from memory. I love that word “roundy”.