We are more than half way through our holiday, and we have not heard from Mr Smith. That's good. If he rings on the first day it might be because he can't get the telly to work properly, but after that it means there's been a catastrophe with the house or another cat has died. We have been extraordinarily lucky with the weather, given that on Sunday night the forecast seemed to be for rain for the rest of the week, and I am equipped with a shiny new computer that doesn't take so long to download a page that I've got time to go and make a cup of tea before it's finished.
On the way down to Dorset we stopped at The Hillier Gardens. I've wanted to see them for ages. Sir Harold Hillier was one of the great UK nurserymen, and the Hillier manual of trees and shrubs is still a bookshelf staple for gardeners with any serious interest in woody plants. His one hundred and eighty acre garden near Winchester was gifted to Hampshire County Council and is still run by them. We duly admired the recently revamped gigantic double herbaceous border, but my favourite bit was the trees, including a small pinetum. Conifers have been out of fashion ever since being done to death in the 1960s and 70s, but I like them. I was also greatly taken by the rock garden near the house, which is a real period piece of mid twentieth century design. If I lived locally I'd get a season ticket and call in every couple of weeks.
We spent a happy morning trundling up and down the Swanage Railway. This is a preserved line running between Swanage and just north of Corfe. It very sensibly runs a pretty regular service all week, so that visitors to the area can use it as a method of transport to get around, instead of all trying to park in Swanage, and the Systems Administrator was pleased and surprised that on the Saturday we went they had three different steam engines in service, as well as a vintage diesel. You can break the journey as many times as you like if you buy the right sort of ticket, and so we combined the railway homage with a visit to Corfe Castle, which was picturesquely ruined in the course of the Engish civil war, and is now in the keeping of the National Trust, plus a ball clay museum. You don't know what ball clay is? No, neither did we, which is why we needed to go to the Purbeck Mining and Mineral Museum. It is an extremely malleable type of clay that was used in all sorts of industrial processes, from fine china manufacture to cleaning piano hammers. Transporting it involved an industrial light railway, so the SA was doubly happy. Swanage town museum is really just an extended display area at the back of the tourist information office, but it brings it home how important the quarrying industry was to Swanage, with great piles of stone awaiting transport by sea piled along the water front into the nineteenth century.
We happened to visit on the weekend of the folk festival, so there were rather a lot of people dressed like gigantic walking rag rugs, and folk costumes of dubious historical accuracy. No wonder English folk still struggles to be taken serious as a musical form. Would Tilda Swinton or Dame Judi Dench parade in public in a home made tabard with the contents of the local remnant shop hanging from it in strips? I think not.
At the point when it looked as though the only dry spell in the rest of the week was going to be Sunday morning we parked at Lulworth Cove, so that we could have a gawp at the cove and then walk along the cliffs for a view of Durdle Door, a natural arch at the next headland. The Jurassic coast is very beautiful, and the bent and undulating rock strata are amazing when you stop to think about them. The car park at Lulworth is enormous, and I was grateful to be were visiting early on a Sunday morning in September and not in the height of the holiday season. Rather bizarrely, the green at Lulworth was forbidden to visitors for the weekend while it was used for some kind of Indian photographic shoot, and we set out on the first stretch of our walk to the accompaniment of loud Bangla music. There was a dais, flowers, and a lot of chairs, all colour themed in a shade of pinkish brown that put me in mind of a surgical stocking, and the SA thought it must be a wedding, only there was no provision for what to do if it rained, as far as we could see. Ernest Indian minders chivvied walkers away who strayed from the path and made darts at anyone who seemed to be taking photos.
Then we went to see the remains of the village of Tyneham, a casualty of the last war. The MoD requisitioned the valley in which it sat for military training, and in 1943 the village was evacuated. The inhabitants were never allowed back. On weekdays the area is still used for tank training: you can see the target numbers on the hillside above Tyneham, but nowadays the MoD allows access at weekends, and volunteers have got the roof back on the church and the school, and cleared the trees that were growing inside the buildings. Each cottage has a display about the family that lived there, and there is an exhibition in the church, though I found the combination of black text on a dark wooden ground with a heavy grain, read inside a church without the benefit of any artificial lighting, pretty much unreadable. On a Sunday afternoon the place was positively bustling with visitors. I was rather surprised, but there's no reason why we should be the only people to be interested.
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After that we went to the Tank Museum at Bovington. It has a lot of tanks. Fortunately it has a big introductory section putting the development of the tank into context against other military and political developments, which I found genuinely interesting. Faced with nothing but a gigantic hanger full of tanks I might have struggled to sustain the requisite degree of interest in horsepower and gun calibres until the SA had seen as much as the SA desired to see, but as it is you don't have to have a boys' toys level of enthusiasm for tanks per se to enjoy your visit. I was worried as we passed from the first room, which had a lot of tanks, to the gigantic hall further on where it had considerably more, that the SA might not have seen enough of them, but the SA assured me that many were duplicates of the collection at Duxford.
Then came some gardens, but more of them anon.
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