Dorset Dalliance

Taking a break from decorating (dining room done, living room scheduled in for Easter weekend) we spent last weekend in Dorset. We were booked in to look around some archaeological stuff with Devizes Museum on Saturday and, as we didn’t want to get up at the crack of crow-sh!t on a Saturday morning we thought we’d use the trip as an excuse to make a weekend of it (you may remember that we went to Wroughton with them in 2011).

The weather was due to be awful but it really brightened up on Friday and by the time we left work it was actually sunny. First stop was the Sixpenny Brewery at Manor Farm in Sixpenny Handley. Their ‘pub’ which doubles as the off-sales office has very restricted opening hours – closing at 6.30 on a Friday evening – would we be able to find it? Would it really be open? As we couldn’t imagine much passing trade in this area of the country so we thought the opening hours might be more erratic than those published. But we arrived in good time just before 6 and was it ever open; the farmyard was packed with cars and people coming and going all the time. I managed to squeeze into a gap next to a barn and we grabbed gloves and mufflers before tottering off to the ‘nano-bar’ - their very accurate description not ours – I think they must have used a fisheye lens for the photo on the website ‘cos it looks 3 times the size of the actual bar!

After fighting our way through the crowded bar we stood outside with our beers. It was the most gorgeous crisp and clear (and freezing) March evening – we could have done with grabbing our coats as well as the gloves and mufflers. We could hardly wipe the grins off our faces as it really was an idyllic setting (well, as idyllic as any working farmyard can be on a lovely evening with a pint in your hand). We’d come well prepared so Jon filled up our bottle basket with take-outs for sampling next weekend at home (luckily they do 6 brews and our bottle basket has six spaces) and we returned to the car (with envious men making sotto voce comments as we passed like ‘That’s what I call a shopping trip!’).

Then off down the road to our hotel, the Castleman at Chettle. A lovely country house hotel with rooms that only cost the same as the ones in the pubs in the surrounding villages. In fact our room was so big – even with the sofa at the end of the bed in front of the fireplace the room didn’t look cramped or over-stuffed - that we thought we’d been put in one of the large doubles by mistake but no, they were all like that.

The lovely panelled bar and the lounge did have cosy fires burning all the time, but it’s definitely a real country house (still owned and run by the family) rather than a sanitized corporate makeover so putting an extra layer on before going downstairs was a good idea. I do hope we find the opportunity to go back sometime because the food was great and the hospitality unfaultable.

The core of the building is possibly Tudor but most of the bits you see now were built in the 1700s or later. The staircase was great and one of the overmantels was very good. I don’t want to get too feudal or deferential about this but it is a bit amazing for us lower middle class types who were brought up, and still live, in modern boxes to have the chance to stay fleetingly in the type of houses that we usually pay the National Trust to be able to wander around for an hour on a Sunday afternoon. To be able to spend as much time as I wanted in front of the Jacobean fireplace (not as much time as I should have spent) or sitting in the Georgian lounge with plasterwork so delicate it might have been on a Wedgewood vase is very special. Someone has a good eye for 20th century art because, whilst most of the paintings looked like old family pieces, the Jessica Brown still lifes in the dining room and the small (alabaster? marble? I’m not very good on stones!) horse in the lounge were lovely (I really should have asked who’d done it).

Anyway, Saturday was a trip back to Sixpenny Handley to see farmer/archaeologist Martin Green’s museum and some of the excavations he’d undertaken on his land. The weather was beautiful when we went into the museum but, sadly, grey and blustery when we came out to start our walk around Martin’s reconstructed excavations – and there’s not much to stop the wind whipping across the Cranborne Chase! If anyone is interested there are details of a couple of things we saw, the pond barrow and the shaft at http://digitaldigging.net/cranborne-chase-archaeology/. The shaft is amazing – Martin got 13 metres down it before being stopped by the water table, but it’s been augured to be twice as deep. It can now be viewed from a bridge above and we can confirm that it’s definitely a bloody big hole…

Lunch at the Inn at Cranborne then off to the Ancient Technology Centre. We’d been to a lecture at Devizes Museum by Luke Winter just before Christmas that was brill and he was just as informative and funny showing us around the reconstructions on site. It’s an experimental archaeology centre where they try to recreate ancient buildings using ancient techniques and materials but using children to do the work. It’s fascinating; with a reconstructed Viking longhouse, Isle of Man earthhouse, Iron Age roundhouse, Roman forge and more, recreated from the archaeological evidence. Most children come to visit on a regular basis to help with the builds, but when groups of children come to stay overnight in the longhouse they have to butcher their own meat, make bread, chop vegetables and cook on the open firepit – they claim never to have lost a child, or a bit of a child, yet (but many parents must still send theirs’ along in hope…)!

If you like Time Team you may remember the Special in which they recreated a Roman water wheel based on pieces that had been excavated in London at the start of the millennium. The Museum of London donated it to the ACT so many of our group had fun trying it out!

Then back to the hotel for a beer and a soak in the bath to get the smell of wood smoke out before dinner. All-in-all a brilliant way to spend a weekend.

Devizes Museum put on a great range of lectures and events throughout the year, details of which can be found here.