Lower Kingcombe to Mapperton House and return

This was the final day of our holiday staying at Pound Cottage on the Kingcombe Meadows Nature Reserve, centred on Lower KIngcombe, and we were able to complete today's walk, with a visit to a historic house at the furthest point, without using any means of transport other than our legs. The weather was still somewhat warm for walking, but it was otherwise a glorious spring day, with various wildflowers at their best. We left Pound Cottage by way of what I described as the return leg of the Purple Trail when we walked it earlier in the week. We parted company with the Purple Trail (though we remained on the Nature Reserve for some distance) and continued on a track that, despite the dry weather, was distinctly damp underfoot.  This clearly suits some plants: we spotted what I thought was an orchid, but I am no expert so I needed Google Lens to help me to identify an Early Purple Orchid. The track climbed,  and at the top we were rewarded by a display of bluebells that was as good as any that we've seen this holiday.

Close to the top of the track there's a memorial to Richard Jennings, who was instrumental in securing the acquisition of Lower Kingcombe Farm in 1988 for conservation by Dorset Wildlife Trust. This led to the Kingcombe Meadows Nature Reserve, now part of the Kingcombe National Nature Reserve.  Less happily, the signposting around here was not clear, leading to uncertainty as to which side of a hedge we should be on. Having resolved that one, we headed off through a field with a bull and another cow in it, only to find ourselves at a dead end and thus to realise that we'd still come the wrong way. Back past the bull we went; thankfully, he was more interested in the vegetation close to the hedge than in us.

Route corrected, we continued across more open countryside and out onto the road at Mount Pleasant.  From some distance back , we'd watched a bus and a tractor edge past each other further along the road, but it was very peaceful when we were here and a few yards from the turning to Poorton and West Milton, the path left the road again on a path across a grassy meadow. We took the path that others had clearly walked along, albeit further to the right than shown on the OS mapping and further to the left than the route shown on Open Street Map. We were reassured when a couple of dog walkers came towards us; the dog was somewhat aggressive, but the people were friendly. The field led to attractive woodland, which must have interesting underlying geology, as we descended along a narrow ridge with steep slopes down on either side. We emerged onto a road and waited for a tanker to pass (note that vehicles of any sort are rare along these narrow roads, but you do need to get out of the way when one passes),  and took a left hand fork. The road enabled us to do a dog-leg to the north, then we turned back onto a woodland path, this time through Woodlands Coppice which is partly coniferous. The experience of walking through coniferous woodland, dark, gloomy and quiet, is very different from that of walking through bluebell and wild garlic carpeted deciduous woodland, as previously on this holiday.

Up to now, other than the slight confusion as to route, this had been a relatively straightforward, but now we encountered three obstacles in the next half mile, on the descent to North Poorton. Firstly, we reached a large field in which there were a large number (perhaps around 100) of rather excitable cows. I am not as terrified of cattle as Ruth Livingstone whose blog about her walk around the coast of the UK I follow, but I am nevertheless pretty anxious in circumstances like this.  Richard is calmer around animals of all sorts, but we both know that cows are big, heavy creatures, so need handling with care. We successfully got from one side of the field to the other, but I immediately began to wonder if there were alternative return routes.

Safely over the stile, we were pleased that there were no cattle in the next field, and we could see the white plastic "handle" on the electric fence which stretched across the opening at the far side; we'd got used to negotiating electric fences positioned like this - provided there is a handle, they don't create a problem at all. However, on closer inspection, we spotted the problem on this occasion - it was easy to reach the handle from this side of the electric fence, but when we'd passed through, how were we to return the handle to its hook; there was a  hedge in the way. Richard managed to edge round to the hook, but again we knew we'd need an alternative approach on the return leg. The final obstacle was a complicated stile (actually two stiles with a short gap between), so we had to step from one bar to another, up above the hedge with a distinct lack of things to hold on to.  This brought us to a field with a couple of sheep and thence - at last - to a road on the outskirts of the hamlet of North Poorton. We left the Jubilee Trail to visit the little church of St Mary Magdalane, hoping that there would be a bench that I could sit on in order to change my socks. There was!

I'd been looking at the information on the Mapperton House website the evening before this walk and I had a feeling that one of their "Mapperton Walks" went to North Poorton, so we weren't too surprised to see blue marker arrows as well as the Jubilee Trail signs.  We followed the blue trail along the track past Burcombe (now also on the red trail), and up a grassy slope where we were passed by what I think was a Mapperton Estate vehicle, and so to a track through a steep-sided wooded valley and through a little ford (now just on the yellow trail). For the final section of the walk to Mapperton we followed a grassy track, now shared by the blue, red and yellow trail, but I would still have gone the wrong way if Richard hadn't put me right!  Although we were, we think, walking around the landscaped section of the Mapperton Gardens, there wasn't a huge amount of shade and there were some climbs, so I was pleased when we reached the visitor approach drive to Mapperton House.  We booked tickets (free for us as Historic Houses Association members) for the 1pm tour of the house and bought ice-creams, then we explored the gardens.

We returned to the house for the 1pm tour, given by two guides which was just as well because one of the other people on the guide was taken ill (perhaps because of the heat) so the very-knowledgeable male guide left us in the hands of the also knowledgeable but perhaps less so female guide, while he looked after the woman and her husband, and sought assistance from one of the staff at the reception desk.  Mapperton House is the home of the Earl of Sandwich (who was styled Viscount Hinchingbrooke until his father's death earlier this year) and his American wife and family. The house is quite grand, and we were told lots of history,  but the family have had their struggles and you get the impression they are completely unstuffy. The Earl and his sons are also  characteristically fair-haired and I suspect that the polite young man we said "hello" to on our return walk may have been one of them.  

I'd been dreading parts of the return walk, in particular the field of cows. We could have taken an alternative route, up a road to the south of North Porton, but we'd noticed the road when we were at North Porton Church on the outward leg, and it looked to be a steep hill with no shade. It also looked quite narrow and there was definitely some traffic on it. Altogether, this wasn't an attractive option either, so we decided to stick with the route of the Jubilee Trail. We got lucky! We turned off the road in North Porton into the first of a series of fields separated by the obstacles described above (in the way we were walking now, our way out of this field would be the high  "double stile"). We'd noticed a farmer head off on a quad bike, and speculated that he was going to tend the cows in question, and as I sat on a manhole cover to change my socks (as you do..) we noticed a stream of cows beginning to come through the field next to ours, apparently for milking at the farm on the other side of the road in North Porton. So we stayed where we were for a little while, using the opportunity to eat an apple, and sure enough, all the cows came past, eventually followed by the man on the quad bike and his dog. What a relief! We negotiated the rest of the obstacles without much difficulty (Richard crawled under the electric fence) and enjoyed the rest of the walk back to Pound Cottage. It had been a good day, a fitting end to our 2025 spring holiday in Dorset.