Cranborne Circles

The Cranborne Chase Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty includes parts of Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Somerset, with the location identified on the map shown here. The Cranborne Chase AONB website describes it as "a diverse landscape offering areas of rolling chalk grassland, ancient woodlands, chalk escarpments, downland hillsides and chalk river valleys". We've visited mostly in the spring, when the woodlands are carpeted with bluebells, while the hillsides are sometimes a mass of cowslips. I also love the pretty villages, with ancient churches and plenty of thatch.

The routes described here started as a  variant of walk that our daughter Helen and her husband Tom created, from their home in the village of Downton in Wiltshire, across Cranborne Chase to Tollard Royal and beyond, then back to Downton. We'd "discovered" Cranborne Chase in the Tollard Royal area before Helen and Tom, when on the Wessex Ridgeway in October 2013, and we all love the area. It's remarkably close to the New Forest, but much less well known, and Helen and Tom are fortunate to live close to both. They had only the final leg of their "Cranborne Canter", from Broad Chalke back to Downton, left to walk when we joined them for a leg in August 2019. 

We returned for a circuit from Broad Chalke on our own version of the Cranborne Canter in March 2022, and then continued when we were staying in a holiday cottage near East Knoyle at the end of April. We have progressed mostly by way of a series of circuits, so I have renamed our route "Cranborne Circles"; cantering implies a certain speed that we don't have! Also, although we have now completed a route between Downton to Tollard Royal, there are many more "circles" to add in the future; Cranborne Chase is such a lovely place that this is no hardship whatsoever.

We have linked  up to various long-distance paths which cross the Chase, including  the Wessex Ridgeway (which we walked in 2013), the Jubilee Trail (which we walked this section of between 2020 and 2023, itself in a series of circular walks) and the Hardy Way The map shows our "Cranborne Circles" in red, while the blue line indicates our route across the area on the Wessex Ridgeway and the purple lines show circuits including the Jubilee Trail.

First leg (To Downton from Broad Chalke)