Featured Campsites

Fantastic Sea Views

Family Tenting Park

Year Round Touring Park

Another web site from 2nd Pillar Projects

© 2007

All images and text

© 2nd Pillar Projects

unless otherwise stated

Advertise Here

RSS Feed

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

2012 Events

Diary

“Maiden Newton at War” is a spectacular re-enactment with a difference. Based in and around the small Dorset village of Maiden Newton, just eight miles North West of Dorchester, this two-day event recreates 1940s wartime Britain with a bang!

Global conflicts, by definition, leave few people or communities untouched in some way, and Maiden Newton was no different. This otherwise tranquil Dorset rural community wasn’t blitzed or invaded, but it was an important cog in the allied war machine.

Maiden Newton then, as now, sat on the main rail line from Bristol to Weymouth. At that time it also was the junction of a line that ran to Bridport and West Bay.

For Hitler’s invading armies this would have made Maiden Newton an attractive strategic objective, prompting its encirclement with tank defences and pill boxes, which still exist today.

Once Hitler’s advance had stalled at the Channel Coast after the Battle of Britain, the rail network into Dorset and its important harbours became a vital supply route for the allied forces massed all along the South Coast, preparing for the invasion of Normandy on D-day.

Hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers and their tanks and equipment were based in temporary camps in the woodlands and fields of Dorset and the rest of South West England. Railheads like those at Maiden Newton were vital communications and supply junctions en-route to Weymouth and Portland less than 20 miles away. In the run up to D-day and Operation Overlord, troops, tanks and trucks streamed out of rural Dorset to the coast and from there to the Battle of Normandy, many never to return.

“Maiden Newton at War” remembers and commemorates this vitally important time in the World’s history and Dorset’s part in it.

First held in 2008, this now biennial event (next one 2012) brings together re-enactors, historians and local people to put on a display that really brings history and the 1940s to life.

From the realities of life on the “Home Front” with rationing and gas-masks for all, to “living camps” of British and American troops as they might have been in Dorset in 1944.

There are also living camps of enemy forces as, thankfully, they wouldn’t have been in Dorset, but may well have been in other parts of Europe.

As you’d expect there are enough replica weapons, preserved military vehicles and uniformed men on show to start a battle - and they do!

Highlight of the event for many visitors and re-enactors alike is the staged assault by allied forces on a dug-in enemy position.

With more gunfire, explosions and smoke than a sergeant major could shake his stick at, troops, tanks, half-tracks, jeeps and even some close-air-support are all deployed to recreate the sort of skirmishes that happened throughout Normandy and beyond.

Stripped of the true realities of war, it is all hugely entertaining, for young, old and the something in betweens. And it is interesting to see how visitors to the event of any age get something from it, whether rekindling old memories or developing new understanding of what it might have been like to have lived in Dorset when it was at war.

It also provides that most valuable of opportunities for those who didn’t experience the “War Years” to ask those who did what it was like. As their number grows smaller by the years, the importance and value of events like “Maiden Newton at War” is likely to grow. After all, is it possible to overstate the importance of any person’s or community’s involvement in a collective international endeavour that changed the course of history?

As the old adage goes, “for the want of a nail...a kingdom was lost” and Dorset provided or serviced many of the key components that helped to make D-day a success. What “Maiden Newton at War” does so well is pull that all together and give it a name, a face and a sense of time and place.

With the next event planned for 23rd and 24th June 2012, it is definitely a weekend for your diary.

But if you’re unlucky enough to have other plans that weekend, but still want to see lots of tanks and armoured vehicles when you come to Dorset, there’s always the Tank Museum at Bovington. Of course there’s nothing to stop you doing both!

Maiden Newton At War...