SO, WEST DORSET has a new artistic venue: Axen Farm outside Symondsbury. Probably just two miles from Bridport town centre, but it feels startlingly like another world, as you suddenly rock up towards the end of a narrow track and find yourself faced with the northern side of Colmers Hill, with just a fleck of Bridport visible eastwards. Dragonflies dart around the improvised car park and the [...]

NEARLY £45,000 is being offered to a student able and willing to spend three years studying carnivals along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset and East Devon. “Studying” here means both taking part and observing, so a bonny mix of skills is potentially called for. If you’re tempted to apply – and the studentship is still being advertised – [...]

THE THINGS I do for others! Now, just to help those not in a position to judge for themselves, I have been drinking beer. Yes, I know, but that’s me – never a thought of self. Anyway, did you know that there is a new local brewery? Nothing like on the scale of the mob [...]

BRIDPORT’S first gig Bucky-Doo has been launched at West Bay. The weather was drizzly, and the sky was overcast, but the chairman of Bridport Gig Rowing Club Mike Carter was thrilled – even if he didn’t get to go out on the water himself. “It’s been a fantastic event,” he said, “a year’s achievement has [...]

VILLAGERS near Bridport are looking out for vandals who have churned up a cricket pitch used by schoolchildren. Eight times over the last 18 months, at irregular intervals but always on a Tuesday night, one or more cars has been driven over the cricket and football ground at The Weir in Nettlecombe. Steve Hibbs, chairman of [...]

A £20 MILLION scheme to protect the eastern side of Lyme Regis from landslides and the sea has been approved by West Dorset District Council. Work is needed to save nearly 150 homes from destruction, as well as the Charmouth Road car park, the parish church and major underground pipes and cables. West Dorset District [...]

PROPERTIES on the eastern side of Lyme Regis will be destroyed by landslides and erosion within five years unless a £20 million coastal protection scheme is carried out. Since the earliest time any major scheme could start is in Spring 2012, and since work is likely to take two years, engineers are now racing against the clock and the [...]

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 – [...]

THE WESTERN Gazette has merged its West Dorset edition with its Sherborne edition. The move has been badly received by readers such as Bill Gray, 60, of Bridport, who said: “It’s rubbish, that paper.” In the 1990s, the Gazette was one of the biggest weekly newspapers in the country, with a dozen or so different editions. [...]

GETTING boats in and out of Lyme Regis harbour will be easier after silt is scooped away from the entrance later this month. Over the winter, masses of fine sand and stone particles have been blown by easterly winds along the shoreline, picked up by sea currents, and deposited in the harbour mouth. To reverse [...]