Hi everyone, I'm Rob, The Country Traveller. Today i'm walking with Karen and Edith,
the miniature schnauzer and we're aiming to do a circular walk
from Tyneham to Worbarrow Bay and back to Tyneham -that
was the plan anyway! As you will see ... So where are we? This is a map of
Southern England and as we increase the magnification
this is Dorset and we're in this area
down here
Now this area during the second world war was commandeered by the army
to use as a tank and gunnery training ground -
and that's still what it is today. The village of Tyneham
lies in the middle of all of this so it was evacuated during the war
and the villagers have never been able to come back.
Now, as you can see, the village lies in ruins.
The building works that you can see here are to make the walls safe
rather than to rebuild the cottages.
The church has been kept in good shape but we can't go in today because of
covid 19. The old school room has also been
refurbished as we'll see at the end of the walk.
We'll follow this path that leads up the side of the church
and we'll end up at the open gunnery range
where we'll walk up the hill.
We're heading out of the village and we'll follow the track up to the top of
the hill. The path is marked by two yellow posts
that you could see. We're warned not to stray off of the
path in case of unexploded ordnance which could be lying around.
The tracks here are only open to the general public on certain days
throughout the year.
Nobody seems to have told the cows about the unexploded ordnance though :)
As we walk up the path look at the shape of the trees on our left -
that shows you how strongly the wind blows in the winter!
We're climbing higher now and we can begin to see the valley below.
We've reached the top of the hill now and we can see down over the other side.
We're heading for Flowers Barrow which is about a mile along the top of the
hill with views down either side.
Now we're coming up to Flowers Barrow. This is an Iron Age hill fort
built about two and a half thousand years ago.
There's an information board here to tell you all about it.
We were so busy reading this that we missed our sign for our path to
Worbarrow Bay :(
The view from up here is glorious - that's Portland Bill
and Weymouth Bay that you can see in the distance.
The tracks that you can see now on the right hand side are the tracks used by
the tanks when they're using the firing range.
The path down here is really steep as you can see.
We were very pleased that we were going down and not up!
Here we are at the bottom of the hill and this is when we realized that we'd
gone the wrong way.
So we did have to climb back up that steep hill after all :)
and, yes, we do have to climb up to the top of the hill that you can see in the
distance.
This view gives you a better idea of how steep this is.
So all of you thinking of walking along the South West Coastal Path -
bear in mind that this is part of it!
Even edith was tired by the time we got to the top.
We got back up to the top of Flowers Barrow and found out where we'd taken
the wrong path. We should have been heading down to this
beach. Never mind ... We decided to retrace our footsteps and
made our way back to Tyneham. Our four and a half mile walk turned
into a seven mile walk - much of which was uphill. But look on the
bright side - it's all extra steps :)
And here we are back in the abandoned village of Tyneham.
This is the refurbished school room that I mentioned earlier.
Sadly we can't go in at the moment because of the Covid 19 restrictions,
but here's a picture of the recreated school room as it was in the 1930s.