THIS photograph was sent to me in an email catchlined 2p or not 2p, with the message: “Came across this at Friar Waddon today while on a walk – thought you might appreciate it! Trevor [Bevins]”
The terrible thing is, he’s right: I do appreciate it. I mean, you can’t look at this picture and not be curious, can you? Who owns it? Who uses it? Is there a door?
THREE DAYS before Beaminster Tunnel first opened to the world in June 1832, one of the men working on it died.
William Aplin, a labourer, was killed by “a quantity of earth falling on him in widening the road under Hornhill, this side of the tunnel” [that is, the Beaminster side].
The fatal spot was marked by a stone with a white cross painted on it, about fifty yards up from the entrance to Horn Park House.
For years it’s been difficult to see this memorial, such is the muck and debris that these days accumulates at the side of busy roads, and so fast do vehicles now travel.
But as part of the work to repair the Tunnel, which comes to an end this weekend, Dorset County Council has cleaned up the stone and the surrounding verge.
These days roadside memorials to people who have lost their lives along them are quite common. Is this simple tribute to William Aplin the first of its kind in Dorset?
When it was built in 1831-32, there was a lot of unemployment in Dorset. According to the 1831 census, Beaminster Tunnel provided jobs for 50 out of the 70 non-agricultural labourers in Beaminster. When they were taken on, The Western Flying Post noted at the time, their faces “seemed to brighten at the prospect of earning their own bread instead of being degraded paupers.” Poor William Aplin must have been so looking forward to celebrating the completion of the tunnel.
Because it was a tremendous occasion, the day it opened. A flag bearer and two bands led the way, and a procession nearly half a mile long marched up from Beaminster to Horn Hill, where a 21-gun salute was fired. Spectators numbered about 9,000. There was a fair on Horn Hill, and a hot air balloon ascended from a field near Beaminster.
Labourers were paid a bonus of two shillings and sixpence, much of which was spent in the town’s 16 pubs. The day ended with fireworks let off from the church tower.
Nothing so spectacular is planned for this weekend, when the Tunnel is due to reopen after five weeks of repair work and improvements. Beaminster town councillors are going for a look round on Saturday morning, and a few final jobs and checks need to be done. The picture below shows surveyors taking measurements of how high the tunnel now is internally, with new tarmac laid and a new lighting-rig up along the roof. Nobody wants to see any lorries crashing into the sides or the ceiling.
Hand-blocked print of King George III riding away from Weymouth, by Liz Somerville
ARTIST Liz Somerville is opening up her studio in Cattistock this weekend for a Christmas Sale.
There’s something about her technique, and her sense of colour, which both captures and recasts the Dorset landscape, its atmosphere, its boundaries, its contours, its delights… I could write whole alphabets of praise; I really rate her work.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen it, or you want to see it again, she’s open from 11am to 4pm this Saturday and Sunday, November 28 and 29. The studio itself is an attractive kind of shack, if you like corrugated iron, and there is also something irresistibly, improbably appealing about going into a village lean-to numbered 763 (The Square). Did Cattistock really once have nearly 800 houses? Does it now? I don’t know.
Both Liz Somerville and the potter Emily Myers are selling their work at 20 per cent off normal prices.
For more details, see www.lizsomerville.co.uk
The branch line became a well-loved part of the local landscape. Poet and author Sylvia Townsend Warner, who lived in Frome Vauchurch just outside Maiden Newton, described the locomotive as trotting obediently under the shadow of Eggardon Hill like a little horse. She also wrote of the train’s “marmalade” light.
“PEOPLE really do enjoy coming to Beaminster and I’m constantly hearing feedback that suggests that Beaminster is the buzz town of West Dorset and certainly this region. It’s good. It’s exciting.”
So says Deborah (‘Debs’) Moxhay, owner of Strummer Pink. For anyone who’s known Beaminster for a while, the idea of it being “the buzz town” of anywhere seems incredible, so incredible that actually it might just be true.
After all, this “classic Wessex market town” was recently picked out in The Sunday Times as somewhere that was “fast becoming a food hotspot”, partly because of Masterchef winner Mat Follas and his restaurant The Wild Garlic. Now, just five doors down from there, comes Strummer Pink.
Colour? Shop? Business? Brand? Homage to Clash singer Joe Strummer? Mini arts-centre? Lurcher?
All these and more, just about. Joe Strummer died the day before Debs picked up her dog as a puppy, and the breeder, a Clash fan, was in tears. So, Debs’ dog is called Strummer… and Strummer Pink is the name that is going to be painted outside Debs’ new venture, one day.
“The weather’s been so horrible recently that the thought of sending somebody up a ladder and painting a sign outside has been not a very nice idea, so that it’s just a slab of pink right now.”
The shop is West Country Interiors as was, where Debs worked before for about five years.
“I’m quite a people person, I get attracted by people and so I tend to think ‘Oh, I like that, what are they doing over there, how can I get involved in that?’ and then it just happens… Nothing particularly has ever been planned – so here we are!
“I’ve lived in West Dorset for about 12 years, and when I got here I realised that it actually said on my birth certificate that I was born here, which I’d sort of forgotten about. It was quite a surprise…
Debs Moxhay, Strummer Pink, Beaminster
“West Dorset is like coming home, I just love it so much, the landscape and the people, and the fact that you always find interesting things and people down at the end of a track, and nobody really talks about it that much, except, extraordinary things happen…
“I’ve been lucky enough to work with interesting people and I now run my own venture which is really exciting.”
She pinpoints the mix of people in West Dorset as a key economic driver. “I think there’s a lot of really interesting people that have landed in West Dorset and people that have gone away and had a life and done interesting things and they’ve come back here and people are interested and they are looking for things that are a little bit different and why not give it to them? It’s just something’s unusual.
“I’m also in the New Year wanting to start some classes, use it as a venue for meditation, yoga, life drawing, linocuts, things like that, just to get people in, and that will be a really nice base, I hope, for the people of Beaminster to come in and use. It will be more like an arts centre, although not, because of its size, but that’s the idea, to make it more interesting for people.”
Until November 28 Strummer Pink is exhibiting artworks by Aviva Halter-Hurn and her father Roman. Aviva is now best known locally for her pictures of birds and animals but this show also includes some fine earlier work in a different style, such as Insomniac.
NOTE: my own pet theory is that Strummer Pink is a sign of a wider cultural shift in West Dorset. The Times recently described Bridport as “very civilised… intellectual and rather hippyish” but I think the far west of the county is ceasing to be as hippyish as it once undoubtedly was in favour of becoming post-punk. Or is this wishful thinking?
DORSET Wildlife Trust claims that 10 oil tankers sitting in Lyme Bay, waiting for oil prices to rise, are “an accident waiting to happen”.
Tankers parked off the coast near Brixham are thought to be earning oil speculators £1 million per day.
The AA and the RAC claim that motorists will end up paying more for petrol because of hoarding by suppliers.
Conservationists are worried about what might happen to the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site of Dorset and East Devon.
Dorset Wildlife Trust Chief Executive Simon Cripps said: “This is an accident waiting to happen. Even a minor spill or accident would devastate one of the world’s most valuable and sensitive coasts, killing animals and plants and ruining livelihoods for years. This is not a NIMBY approach, this is common-sense risk management. You wouldn’t allow a 1 million tonne oil tank on the banks of the River Frome.”
The Trust says that when the oil tanker Prestige broke up on the north Spanish coast in 2002, it took years for the coast and its communities to recover and to rebuild a reputation for healthy seafood and unpolluted tourism.
Mr Cripps continued: “The shipping companies should take this Sword of Damocles away from our coast and place these tankers more responsibly in safe harbours such as Portland, or better still take them away from sensitive areas. A million pounds profit per day buys you a lot of responsible corporate behaviour. We would like to see regulations to prevent them from threatening such important areas in the future.”
However, a UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency spokesman told Sky News Online the tankers were not a new sight in Lyme Bay and were not a major concern.
“This has been going on for a long time due to the geographical location – it’s like the Clapham Junction of oil storage,” he said.
“It’s a day-to-day business for us and in fact, in some of the daily bulletins sent out by the local coastguard they even list some of the vessels that are staying put.
“We do know that if you add it all up there is millions of pounds worth of oil floating out there,” he added.
THE WRITER Tobias Jones has sold his house in Bristol and bought 10 acres of woodland in Somerset so that he and his family can set up a commune modelled on the Pilsdon Community in the Marshwood Vale.
Pilsdon is a Christian refuge for people with broken lives, set up in 1958 by a clergyman who wanted to reinvent the 17th century community called Little Gidding (the inspiration for one of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.)
Tobias Jones first stayed at Pilsdon a while back and his experiences there are written up in Chapter 5 of his book Utopian Dreams: A Search for a Better Life (Faber, 2007). It’s a book that always struck me as an odd mixture of tortuous and superficial. At one point Jones writes: “It’s mind-blowing the number of communities there are just within a few dozen miles of here [Pilsdon]: Monkton Wilds, Othona, Tinkers Bottom, Gaunts House, Magdalen House, Hillfield”. I remember thinking, ok, but for a start you’ve got the names of Monkton Wyld and Hilfield spelt wrong… and should Magdalen House actually be Magdalen Farm, and Tinkers Bottom Tinkers Bubble? I wasn’t sure.
But clearly Jones wasn’t just a tourist. He ends his chapter on Pilsdon by writing: “It’s a place with a radical simplicity, which comes at a stark price. It costs, as Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘not less than everything’.” Moving with your wife and two small daughters to a wood suggests to me that Jones is putting everything into what he believes. Good luck to him.
You can read a very good piece by Tobias Jones in The Guardian by clicking on this link. And about his move in The Yorkshire Post by clicking here.
While Pilsdon’s website is here.