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Camping, caravans, motorhomes and getting out and about in Dorset

2012 Events

Diary

Guided Walks...

Guided walks are a great way to take in the scenery and learn about its wildlife and history at the same time.

Dorset and especially its Jurassic Coast are blessed with amazing landscapes and rich in both natural and human history. Many of the County’s museums and visitor centres offer programmes of walks and talks of some sort throughout the year so visitors and locals have opportunities aplenty to take part in organised rambles, led by experts in their respective fields. And lets face it, a guided walk is only going to be as interesting as the person who’s leading it.

As you’d expect, dinosaur and fossil walks abound along the Dorset Coast, from Swanage, Durlston and Ringstead, right through to Charmouth and Lyme Regis. Budding ornithologists and naturalists will also find RSPB reserves like those at  Radipole Lake and Arne offer guided walks, as does the Dorset Wildlife Trust from its base at Kingcombe and elsewhere.

The Chesil Beach Centre provides an impressive range of walks covering specific features of the the Chesil, the Fleet Lagoon and their collective geology and animal and plant life.

The Fleet and its hinterland are also now the focus of a new venture for 2012. Visitors will have the chance to learn about the exciting history of smuggling in the area and how real events inspired the novel “Moonfleet”.

Smugglers and smuggling were a way of life for many in Dorset in the 18th and 19th Centuries. If you weren’t actively doing it or enjoying its spoils, you were were probably supposed to be stopping it as one of the King’s “Revenue Men”. Although the chances are that many local Revenuers were actually doing all three!

Smuggling for many was a profitable business as taxes on imported goods like tea, brandy, gin and tobacco rose to help finance expensive wars with the French and the Americans - the latter were themselves fighting the British over issues kicked-off by the whole “no taxation without representation” thing and the subsequent “Boston Tea Party”.

But smuggling was a two-way trade, with goods subject to heavy export duties, like wool, also being smuggled out of the country for a better return than they otherwise would have fetched on the legal market at home.

As Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “A Smuggler’s Song” makes clear people from all parts of the community had some interest or other in smuggling. Many of the landed and powerful in 18th Century Dorset became richer and more powerful through their links with or sponsorship of the smuggling trade. All of which may have helped build the often romanticised view we have of 18th Century smugglers today.

Nevertheless, this was the organised crime of its day and relied as much on dark and dastardly deeds and people willing to do them as it did on secluded but readily accessed places to bring contraband ashore or to ship it off for illegal export.

The Dorset Coast, and especially the Fleet Lagoon, were ideal for this nefarious trade. With 18 miles of beach and its close proximity to the harbours at Weymouth and Bridport, as well as what was then the “Portland Roads”, this was a great place for smugglers and a tough patch for the Revenuers to control. Smuggler related crime and retribution for it were rife!

All this skulduggery in such beautiful surroundings means that the whole area has a wealth of stories to tell. All that’s needed is someone to tell them. John Meade Falkner did his bit with his 1898-published novel “Moonfleet” and it’s swashbuckling tale of a young boy’s accidental involvement with smugglers in and around the village of Fleet, once owned by real-life smuggling family - the Mohunes.

Now, Pike and Shot Events (PASTE), aim to take on where Falkner left off. They’ve arranged a series of walks around the Fleet area to make the most of its rich, if at times brutal, history. For a modest fee their costumed and armed (but hopefully not deadly) guides will take you on an informative and fun suite of rambles around the Fleet and Langton Herring. Complete with tricorn hats these “villainous rogues” will show you the old haunts and by-ways that the smugglers used and give you the facts behind the fiction of the Moonfleet tale, along with other snippets of local history more ancient and modern, from wrecks and wreckers on the Chesil to the Fleet’s part in the development of Barnes Wallis’s famous “bouncing bomb”.

The routes PASTE use are mostly over the area’s impressive network of public paths, but some are across private land with the agreement of the landowners at specific times. So make sure you check before trying to retrace your steps without a guide. You’re unlikely to find yourself on the wrong end of a Revenuer’s musket if you wander from the public paths, but you could put yourself and others in danger if you do. There are private horse-rides, race-horse gallops, working farm-machinery, farm livestock and other hazards in the area - including an active army firing range!

So make sure you stick to your smuggler-guide - unless of course you should see a troop of revenue men, in which case you may want to run the other way!

Buy Tickets For Pike & Shot Smuggling Tour

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