Home Farm (Tarrant Gunville) to Stourpaine on circuit from Shroton

When we’re staying in a holiday cottage, it is always a particular pleasure to be able to complete a serious walk straight from the door without needing to drive anywhere first. It is also a pleasure to link up named paths. Today we did both of those things, leaving our car at The Malthouse on a route which made use of the Wessex Ridgeway, the Jubilee Trail  and the White Hart Link. For two brief sections we were also on the Stour Valley Way, a path that is definitely on our "bucket list" of walks we want to complete. 

The Malthouse is a holiday cottage on Frog Lane in a village sometimes  known as Shroton and sometimes as Iwerne Courtney. Apparently locals favour the former, though I think the latter name is prettier. The Wessex Ridgeway goes right past the cottage and we must have walked past on a very wet afternoon in October 2013 before sitting dripping at The Cricketers.  Thankfully, this morning was dry, though it was misty which limited the opportunities for photography; the first two photos on this page (both from close to the cottage in Shroton, with the second showing the view from Frog Lane across the main road and up the hill on today's route) were taken on other days. 

We soon left the misty views down to the village behind and continued to climb up Preston Hill, and through Preston Wood. After crossing a minor road, we continued with wood just on one side of us. Strangely I remember this part from that wet afternoon nearly 10 years ago. Then we had sat on a fallen tree branch for a snack; today we said "hello" to a dog walker. At the point where we'd emerged from the wood last time, we turned right today, leaving the Wessex Ridgeway*. A helpful signpost informed us that we'd come 2.25 miles from Iwerne Courtney and it was 2.75 miles to Pimperne (had we stayed on that path all the way, which of course we didn't).

One of the joys of finding routes for ourselves between named paths is that - remarkably frequently - you find a hidden gem of a route, and the next little section was one of those, along the bottom of a valley, labelled as Handcock's Bottom. It's also labelled as Dark Dale in the fancy font used for labelling ancient monuments etc., so presumably this is an ancient route. Today it was a clear but delightful peaceful path, with bluebells to admire and a woodpecker to listen to.  We reached a road and turned left onto it**. About half a mile further along our path we'd have reached the Jubilee Trail, but that would have left us with a gap of something over a mile from Home Farm, which is where we'd turned off the Jubilee Trail last time we were here. We could of course have continued straight ahead to the Jubilee trail then done a "there and back" walk to Home Farm, but we'd decided instead to walk down the road to the outskirts of Tarrant Gunville, then join the Jubilee Trail there and so approach Home Farm from the opposite direction (thus forming a loop). This was probably a mistake. The road wasn't too busy, but it was rather boring.

Last time we were here, Home Farm (where there is a farm shop and cafe) were doing a roaring trade, but it was at the height of the Pandemic and we didn't all have masks with us - and Helen was heavily pregnant. So we couldn't really stop then, but we were looking forward to stopping for coffee and cake today. We could make out the board at the end of the boring road, advertising the farm. As we got closer, we could even make out the word "Open". Hmmm, that's open Wednesday to Sunday, and today was a Tuesday. What a disappointment. However, after retracing our steps along the approach road to farm, we were soon on a nice quiet track past it. 

The track climbed steadily to the delightful Pimperne Wood, with a good display of bluebells, then descended again. At the bottom of the descent, now back in woodland, we turned left, back on the route that were could have followed all the way from where we'd left the Wessex Ridgeway at *, and not turned onto the road at **.  We stopped for a drink of water to celebrate and became aware that a couple were following some distance behind us, and they commented that they were relying on our map-reading (mistake!!). We stopped for a chat and discovered that they now live locally, in Pimperne, but moved here only recently, after 20 years in France. They go out for an hour's walk each day, but had gone rather further than planned today, and lost their bearings. 

We let the couple get ahead then followed on behind them, past Keeper's Lodge and onto the road that leads down to Pimperne to the south. However we weren't going all the way, instead turning back up another lane, now heading north-west. We were looking for a route over Pimperne Down that is indicated by diamonds not attached to a footpath, and I'd thought that perhaps this would have been one of those lovely sections over open downland. Instead we found ourselves on a track that had  been cut through oil-seed rape, very neatly turning to follow the path of the diamonds (but of the dotted  green line of the footpath shown on the map, there was no sign).

 It was something of a relief to reach the far side of the oil-seed rape, and by now we had also transferred from the north sheet of Ordnance Survey Explorer map 118 (Shaftesbury & Cranborne Chase) to east sheet of map 117 (Cerne Abbas & Bere Regis). After a short section along a hedgerow we turned right along a road, crossed the rather busier Higher Shaftesbury Road, then continued to the west. We were able to leave the road on a track through France Firs, now looking for somewhere to stop for lunch. Despite the fact we were in a wood, there was something of a shortage of logs etc. on which to sit, but eventually we found a root which was adequate for the purpose, even if it did take some effort to stop ourselves from slipping off it!

After continuing through the wood and then alongside it for a further distance, we reaching a corner with good views down to the Stour Valley below, with Bryanston School (and then, out of sight, Blandford Forum) to the left, but we turned right, consistent with our aim of descending to Stourpaine.  First we climbed to and crossed Bushes Road, then a left hand turn brought us to "Bottom Road", which descended steadily, first on a green lane and then through the houses on the outskirts of Stourpaine. We were soon at the main A350, just opposite the White Horse Inn. In terms of stopping for refreshments, this was our second disappointment of the day because back in 2011 (when visited by the then Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall) there was a village shop at the pub, but I don't think this is still open. To be fair, it may be, and we could in any case have stopped for a drink in the pub, but that wasn't what we felt like.

We took the minor road down the side of the pub and were soon in the middle of the village, which is a pretty place with plenty of thatch. We hadn't so far found anywhere to park in Stourpaine to use on our next leg of the Jubilee Trail, but we had seen a large layby near Durweston, the village about half a mile to the south-west of Stourpaine on the opposite side of the river. For that reason we had decided to walk a little further today, towards Durweston, with the aim of at least reaching the river, halfway between the two villages. However, as we'd walked into Stourpaine we'd seen a signpost to parking by the village hall, and this looked more suitable, so there was no longer any need to reach the river.

We set off in the direction of Durweston, passing Stourpaine's impressive Church but  now just aiming to reach the old railway, expecting that we'd then be able to walk back along the North Dorset Trailway, thus completing a circuit around Stourpaine before heading north to Shroton.  We'd actually been here before, when walking from Blandford Forum to Shillingstone to rejoin the Wessex Ridgeway there, in April 2014, so we should have remembered that the North Dorset Trailway does not use the old railway past Stourpaine but rather uses a route through the village. So we simply got to the point where the onward route of the Jubilee Trail goes under the old railway bridge , then we turned around and retraced our steps past the church and on through the village.

We'd left the Jubilee Trail at the old railway bridge while the north-west bound route of the North Dorset Trailway had turned left to return to the old railway, but as we continued through Stourpaine we were now following the route of both the Stour Valley Way and the White Hart Link.  The Stour Valley Way turned left to head over Hod Hill, but we stayed close to the River Iwerne on the White Hart Link.  After about a kilometre of delightful low-level walking, we approached the main A350 as it twists its way around Stepleton House. We'd thought we might need to walk on the road for a while, so we were delighted to find a permissive path which skirted around the field we were in then climbed through woodland adjacent to the route, to join the section of the White Hart Link that we'd walked a few days ago. We climbed a little more before rejoining the Wessex Ridgeway on its descent from Hambleton Hill. We were soon back at our cottage after a most enjoyable circumnavigation of some of North Dorset's glorious variety of named and unnamed paths. 

Following leg