Walking ancient Dorset paths to megaliths – and a village pub

26.02.2024 - 12:06 / theguardian.com

With Stonehenge, Avebury and Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire is the English county most associated with Neolithic stone circles and barrows. Dorset, its southerly neighbour, has nothing on this scale, but there is an ancient quarry – the Valley of the Stones – and a number of smaller, but equally atmospheric archaeological sites surrounding it and snaking footpaths connecting them.

Our day out has maximum atmosphere. We park in the village of Portesham, a former quarrying community where boulders can still be seen along the main street: the land above us is shrouded in mist, which blurs the lines of the winter scene.

We head north-east from the village, up a stony path towards the Hardy Monument, named not for the Dorset writer and poet but for Thomas Masterton Hardy, Nelson’s deathbed companion. The tower was designed to resemble a naval spyglass and rather glowers over the land, its Victorian brutalism visible for miles.

To the south, views of the coast are wide, from the 14th-century St Catherine’s chapel at Abbotsbury standing sentinel above Chesil Beach. Then comes the brackish Fleet lagoon, hemmed in by the ridge of sparkling stones, and across the sweep of the bay is Portland, still a centre for quarrying. Rather than climb Black Down towards the Hardy Monument, we skirt past a roofless stone barn and take the footpath leading to an exposed plateau where buzzards mewl above. There we find a stone inscribed with the words: “To the Hell Stone”.

The Hell Stone is a neat burial chamber consisting of a few grey sarsen stones and a capstone above. It is perfect, with a little chamber to clamber into. Actually it’s a little too perfect: around the same time as the Hardy Monument was completed, the Victorians decided to “improve” the Hell Stone, and the capstone was  replaced on its open chamber.

I’m a little queasy about these interventions, but musician and author Julian Cope, writing in his magisterial book The Modern Antiquarian, describes the effect as beautiful. In any case, this has always been a profoundly human landscape, where people have lived, worked and made alterations. The south of England was settled early, and these higher lands with thinner soil were the easiest to farm and more forgiving to crops, especially in winter. We meet few people on our long walk, but this was once a busy place.

Finding the lane leading north, we come to the Valley of the Stones, the centre of this ancient landscape, a huge dry bowl of land formed by retreating ice ages, dotted with boulders like static sheep. This was the natural quarry from which stone circles and dolmens in the area were made. Much of this nature reserve is open access so we are free to explore the stones.

Last year a Neolithic polishing stone,