A354 near Milborne St Andrew to Culpepper's Dish car park

This was an enjoyable walk, but we did have to contend with some rain and avoid a flooded section, and it didn't start well when we arrived at the Culpepper's Dish car park (at SY815925) to find it closed because they were cutting the grass surrounding the parking areas. I tried to persuade the workmen to let us in, but they had  a distinctly unhelpful "jobsworth" attitude and told us they'd be there for several hours. Really? OK, they told there was another car park about a kilometre down the road, which we knew, but we also knew that rain was forecast and that would be a kilometre in entirely the wrong direction. OK, they were probably just doing what they'd been told to do, following health and safety guidelines, and maybe I was in a bad mood. We just parked on the verge, and drove back to the layby on the A354 near Milborne St Andrew (SY816984). 

We retraced our steps across the fields to rejoin the Jubilee Trail at Longmead Community Farm, saying hello to a man with a dog who was presumably going to tend some of the animals.  We turned right onto the trail, now an attractive grassy track between hedges (shown above), but after a while, we found ourselves in a more open, undulating landscape, also very pleasant. We were following around existing or previous field boundaries, so there were a number of noticeable turns as  we went from following one field boundary to following another.  From near Bere Down Farm we turned onto a farm track, over Bere Down, and indeed the landscape was now what we'd describe as downland. There were good views of sheep fields and, to the south, down towards the village of Bere Regis.

Both Richard and I had assumed that we'd be assisted by an underpass or a bridge to cross the A35, but in fact we just had a wait for an appropriate gap in the traffic; it took some time! We couldn't initially make sense of the route through Bere Regis; after turning left onto an unassuming street we cut down to the even more ordinary Elder Street to the south,  going closer to the Church than the official route seems to, just to add some interest. From Elder Street things improved; we took a meandering path alongside and then across the pretty little Bere Stream and out into an open area.

I thought that we'd finished with Bere Regis, and we headed off across the open area, but Richard realised that we had to return to  the hamlet of Shitterton, just to the north-west of the rest of Bere Regis and spotted the path. What a name! ... but Shitterton is a really pretty little place, with lots of  thatch. Wikipedia tells me that many of the old buildings in the rest of Bere Regis were destroyed by several fires, but the Bere Stream prevented the fires from spreading to Shitterton. 

After walking a short distance through Shitterton, we took another path and this time we did leave Bere Regis and its satellites behind. We climbed along a bluebell-lined path, eventually reaching the scrubby open access area of Black Hill. Here the route-finding was somewhat challenging , and we wandered through the shrubbery for a while until we found the track we needed. But the views were spectacular.  The track swept around to the left and slowly descended towards Turners Puddle. We passed a lovely old thatched barn, with black and white sheep nearby.

The settlements of Turners Puddle, Briantspuddle,  Affpuddle and Piddletrenthide, along  with Tolpuddle, a name forever associated with its Martyrs, and the town of Puddletown, have their delightful names because they're in the valley of the River Piddle, which is sometimes called the River Trent (so "Piddletrenthide" names the river twice!). We'd visited the delightful Athelhampton House (also close to the River, between Puddletown and Tolpuddle and one of our favourite "Historic Houses") with our grandson and his parents earlier in the week, and we visited the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Museum later in our holiday.

Today, we'd spotted a church on the map in the tiny hamlet of Turners Puddle, and hoped that there might be a bench nearby on which we could stop to eat our lunch. The church turned out to be very pretty, but it is now a private house, so unsurprisingly there was no bench - and shortly afterwards, it started to rain. We continued along the track, and were very grateful to the dogwalker who asked about our route and warned us that we wouldn't be able to get over the water meadows on the direct route to Briantspuddle because of flooding.  So while the official Jubilee Trail route turned left, we continued straight on to the north-south road through Briantspuddle and followed this over the river and into the village. In a moment of inspiration, I suggested we might try walking back into the centre of the village. This led us past lots of thatch and there, just outside the village hall, was a bench in a sheltered spot,  so we got our lunch now! The same dogwalker passed us again.

The rain eased and we headed back to the road by which we'd approached Briantspuddle, but this time we turned towards the south and climbed, passing some roadworks . We turned right onto a track past some cottages, still climbing and being passed by a horse (plus rider) coming the other way. We reached the lovely wooded Bryants Puddle Heath and continued through the trees. Culpeppers Dish is a large sink hole.  To be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether we passed it, but there were certainly sink holes within the wood; it's a fascinating landscape. We emerged onto the road near the car park.

Following leg