What’s so special about Dorset?

What does the word ‘Dorset’ conjure up to you? Cream teas and rolling hills? Thomas Hardy (especially with the new film adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd storming cinemas at the moment) and Broadchurch? Fossils and geology?

Perhaps less well known is the fact that Dorset is a bit of a hotspot for big cats, with 223 first-hand accounts described in Roaring Dorset! At any time of the year, our book A Dorset Country Calendar describes what to look for, with lovely pen and ink drawings by the author to help you spot things.

Have you heard of the Dorset Knob (which has a whole festival dedicated to it in May in Cattistock)? Or the CerneGiant, a sight to see  in his magnificent  manly glory, adorning a hillside above the ancient village of Cerne Abbas (not sure what the monks would have made of that!). There are plenty of other odd goings-on in the Isle of Purbeck according to David Leadbetter’s book Paranormal Purbeck.

Whilst visiting  Thomas Hardy’s Cottage in Bockhampton near Dorchester and Max Gate, the home he built for himself and his first wife Emma (both run by the National Trust)  you can gain an insight into their lives with She Opened the Door: The Wife and Women who Haunted Thomas Hardy. 

Other more contemporary writers are featured in DorsetVoices, a great holiday read  of short stories and poetry, with photographs – an all Dorset production.

Lawrence of Arabia’s unusual home at Cloud’s Hill near Bovington (also run by the NT) is worth a visit, with beautiful window engravings by Laurence Whistler in nearby St Nicholas Church, Moreton.

You might explore Europe’s largest hill-fort, Maiden Castle, with views of the Prince of Wales’ model town of Poundbury. Afterwards visit the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester to see some of the finds from here, as woven into Defenders of Mai-dun: A Story of the Roman Assault on Maiden Castle, which brings this period in history to life.

If you want to get behind the scenes and see what most visitors miss, then our Lesser Known guidebooks to Swanage, Weymouth, Lyme Regis and Christchurch may be just the job. Get away from the crowds and explore the back-streets and local haunts. 

The Magic of Purbeck also has some great walks and photos of the stunning Jurassic Coast, ancient chalk downs and National Heaths around Studland, to inspire more exploring.

The Isle of Portland is definitely worth a visit, with its sacred geology and geometry, Masonic influences and history of ley lines, holy wells and Druids, revealed in The Spirit of Portland.

Step back in time and Discover Old Swanage. Swanage is so much more than just a traditional seaside resort, with loads of music festivals and even a dedicated Walking Festival in September.

If staying in Weymouth, be sure to check out neighbouring Preston, Bowleaze and Overcombe (and the book of that name). Jordan Hill has remains of a Roman temple and is a great viewpoint, overlooked by King George III (a frequent visitor to Weymouth) on his grey stead cut into the hills above Preston. John Constable loved the area so much he honeymooned here, painting several local scenes.

Finally, if you still need a reason to come to Dorset, then Secret Places of West Dorset will be sure to inspire you. Follow secluded lanes and ancient tracks, prehistoric sites, nature reserves and timeless villages, mingling with ghosts and other folklore. Through it, discover the ‘genius loci’ or spirit of the place that is Dorset, and gain a richer insight and deeper understanding of why Dorset is such a special place.

                If looking for a place to stay, Dorset Cottage Holidays offer hand-picked self-catering cottages that offer something special (http://www.dhcottages.co.uk/, tel 01929 481547).

                

All our Roving Press books are available at www.rovingpress.co.uk, 

tel 01300 321531, with free p&p.

‘Writing Places’ – celebrating the literary heritage of the South West

Workshops and events...writers-in-residence...literary gossip...creative writing masterclasses...competitions...storytelling...trails...author talks. 

What’s this, you say?

It’s all part of a new project set up by three charities – Literature Works, the Poetry Archive, and the National Trust – funded by the ArtsCouncil. 

Five National Trust houses in the South West – Hardy’s Cottage and MaxGate (Dorchester), A la Ronde (Exmouth), Greenway (nr Brixham) and ColeridgeCottage (nr Bridgwater) – will be hosting a programme of literary events over the next 2 years.

Last night I went to the launch at Max Gate, with guest speaker Sir Andrew Motion (what a treat!). We heard how this exciting project is designed to:

• provide experiences that connect people today to these special places;
• show the intimate every-day life of the authors who lived and worked there;
• highlight the strong spirit of the places, telling their stories in new ways.

Why are these places still so impactful today? What is their contemporary relevance? It’s all about widening and diversifying the audience, to enthuse the next generation.

Through contemporary writers and poets, you will come to see how the authors who lived there were inspired, and how this inspiration is still evident today, working its magic on future writers. Writers-in-residence will let the essence of the place soak into them, to inspire and encourage new writing.

Discover the conditions under which famous writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Parminter sisters, wrote – how their houses and environment reflected them and inspired their work.

The ‘Writing Places’ project is being trialled in the South West, and, if successful, may be rolled out across the whole of the National Trust’s properties with a literary connection. These are not dry, dusty, historic buildings, but living, inspiring places, capable of moving people today.

Details of events can be found at nationaltrust.org.uk/writingplaces. 

For more about Thomas Hardy, see Dorset County Museum, 

Hardy Country, New Hardy Players, Thomas Hardy Explorer.

See also She Opened the Door: The Wife and Women Who Haunted Thomas Hardy 

by Peter John Cooper published by Roving Press. This book was inspired by Max Gate and Peter's feeling for the place and its former inhabitants.

Literary connections with the British Council

Jim Potts recently gave a talk (courtesy of the William Barnes Society) about his 35-year-long career in the British Council. It was a fascinating insight into what the British Council does.

    

   Jim worked closely with the Literature department, just one small area of the Council’s work, which involves:

• building bridges between countries
• establishing friendly relations and fostering exchanges and mutual appreciation
• promoting a wider knowledge of the UK and the English language
• creating international opportunities for writers
• contributing to the UK’s international standing.

The Council was founded in 1934 and many well-known writers have worked for the organisation, including Julian Barnes and Prof David Lodge. Jim explained how his job entailed hosting writer’s tours and readings; organising book fairs and exhibitions; publishing pamphlets focusing on particular poets and authors; editing anthologies; bringing writers into schools; getting them on TV and radio; among other things.

    Jim retired from the British Council in 2004 with an OBE for his services. He and his wife Maria Strani-Potts, herself a published author, now live in Poundbury, Dorchester. 

   

   In fact, Dorset was their inspiration for the Dorset Voices project, with a book of that name published with Roving Press in 2012 and supported by Creative Dorset. Jim, Maria and Louisa Adjoa Parker were the three editors tasked with compiling the book from the best submissions from local Dorset people.

    

   HRH The Prince of Wales wrote in the Foreword: ‘... such a splendid anthology. I pray it will give pleasure and inspiration to others.’ 

   Photographs illustrate the text – a mixture of prose and poetry, all the work of local people with a passion for what they are writing about or depicting.

Dorset Voices features over 40 different writers and 24 photographers in its 128 pages. 

It is available from Roving Press at the special price of just £4.99. 

An extract from the book:

On a Dorset cliff-top – Frances Colville

He stood – as he stood every day – closer to the cliff edge than he should have done. Dressed in his old gardening clothes he looked like a man who cared for nothing – which indeed was the truth, since the sudden death of his wife six months earlier. He toyed, as he always did, with the idea of jumping, of ending his misery with a silent whoop of satisfaction as he crashed on to the rocks below

It took seconds, minutes perhaps, for him to realise that the screaming he could hear wasn’t inside his head. Roused from his misery he turned and saw a lone woman, a hundred yards or so further inland, shrieking with terror. For the first time in six months he found himself aware of another human being.

He hurried to her side, soothing and questioning, and learned that she had seen a grass snake – two, three feet long – next to her shoe. To reassure her, he hunted for it, but it had vanished into the undergrowth. Unable to think of any other means of calming her, and loathe to leave her alone in such a state, he offered her tea at the beach café.

She accepted, and as they descended the hill together, she, having watched for such a chance for many weeks, wondered if he would ever realise that even on such a lovely spring day it was far too early in the year for grass snakes.

Pirates' graveyard and Rufus Castle, Portland – Scott Irvine

Challenging our concept of time

Guest blog by author DavidLeadbetter, 

Paranormal Purbeck: A Study of the Unexplained

Following publication of my book by Roving Press, a number of people have written to me, giving details of experiences that occurred to themselves or members of their family. One of the most bizarre accounts was sent by Barry Goldsmith from Southampton, who described what happened in his parents' house one summer day in 1961. 

Barry's father had been working in the garden and his mother was out shopping. At about 11 am his father came indoors to prepare the vegetables for their midday meal, removing his gardening boots before going into the kitchen in his stockinged feet. He had just finished peeling the last potato and stepped back to pick up the saucepan lid when he trod on something sharp, which really hurt his foot. When he looked down, he saw it was a wedge-shaped piece of a china plate with a scalloped edge about the size of a cheese triangle. He realised it had come from one of their dinner plates and that his wife must have broken it. Thinking no more about it, he threw the broken piece in the pile of vegetable refuse and wrapped it all up before putting it in the dustbin.      Later, when Barry's parents were having dinner, his father casually mentioned the broken plate. Barry's mother immediately said she had not broken any plate and pointed out that they were actually using both their plates at that moment for their meal. It was thought that the broken piece must somehow have come in from the garden on his father's clothes.     Later that evening, they were both in the lounge watching television when they were startled by a loud crash from the kitchen. They went to see what had happened and found to their amazement that one of their two dinner plates had leapt from the rack above the cooker and now lay in three pieces about 6 ft away near the kitchen sink. Barry's mother picked up the pieces and placed them together. They fitted perfectly, with the exception of one small triangular piece which they could not find. Barry's father said he knew where it would be and went out to the dustbin and retrieved the parcel of peelings. There amongst the rubbish was the piece he had put there that morning. It fitted the plate perfectly!

In writing to me, Barry emphasised that he and other people have found it very hard to take in this experience, but that it happened exactly as he told it. What happened to Barry's parents challenges our whole concept of linear time and cannot be explained rationally. There are well-documented cases of objects mysteriously materialising and dematerialising, but it must be very unusual for a piece of a broken object to appear some hours before the object itself broke!

 There are examples of where people seem to have been transported backwards or forwards in time: Paranormal Purbeck has a story about how a family appeared to be taken back in time in a garden, and there is the famous example of a time-slip where two ladies who visited Versailles in 1901 saw people dressed in 18th-century costume and both experienced a dreamlike sensation. 

In the case of Barry's parents, though, it would seem that the piece of china plate was somehow transported into the future: in other words, part of the event happened in the wrong sequence. This tells us that there is something fundamentally wrong with our 'normal' understanding of time.

Those who undergo mystical experiences or practise deep meditation describe how time becomes meaningless and there is no sense of past, present or future: time is seen as an unbroken whole, not divided into parts. In the physical world and our everyday lives, time is conceived as moving in a certain direction, but is it 'time' that moves, or ourselves? If the latter, which part of us 'moves'? Clearly, the physical body, ages with time, but consciousness does not, though it can undergo growth and evolution. It seems that it is consciousness that is timeless, resulting in our concept of linear time being inadequate at a deeper level.

    The present is constantly moving away from us (becoming past) and at the same time we may be anticipating the future; the present is therefore actually very difficult to conceive and may not really exist. In higher consciousness states such as meditation and mysticism, where there is a great sense of being and oneness, time becomes an illusion for the person having the experience and there is no sense of awareness of the present. This also seems to be the case in the dream state: consciousness (or the subconscious mind) creates a blend of images from the past and, on occasions, the future in a mix of time where there is clearly no present for the dreamer.

   The conclusion must be that time has a certain validity for our normal waking consciousness, but only in the sense that out physical bodies are constantly experiencing change and therefore movement through what we term 'time'. The linear concept is only valid in a limited sense, and unusual experiences, such as the one that occurred to Barry's parents, point towards a higher, transcendent, perhaps multidimensional form of time, almost beyond normal human perception. The question of why the piece of broken china appeared when it did on that particular day and whether there were unseen forces behind it will probably go unanswered, but it does have profound implications for our understanding of time. Physicist David Bohm argued that total order is contained in some implicit sense in each region of space and time: in the case of a hologram, for instance, each part of it contains the image of the whole, so perhaps each moment in (linear) time holds information about all of time.

 

Paranormal Purbeck: A Study of the Unexplained is published by Roving Press, priced £9.99.

David is part of the line-up for the Purbeck Literary Festival. Explore Wareham with his walk and talk on 1 March.

View this email in your browser

Roving Press – December Newsletter This month’s Newsletter has suggestions for stocking fillers, presents and thank-you gifts (don’t forget the postman!), as well as Literary Snippets and Events. Ho, ho, Happy Christmas! Facebook Twitter Website Email Pinterest Why our books make great presents: all local (Dorset authors, writing about Dorset, published in Dorset) thoughtful and unique for each person delivered free within the UK (no p&p to pay), to any address of your choice longer lasting than wine or chocolates they share a love of reading and knowledge about Dorset affordable! something for everyone – just take a look at our range. The Portland Chronicles series of books is aimed at children 7+, but even adults are fans of author Carol Hunt: ‘Carol has the knack of bringing to life the local myths of the island, in such a way that a girl of 66 can enjoy the fantasy of it all. In this story, Suzie even shares my enthusiasm for cats!’ (Barbara aged 66)     Carol researches Portland’s local history and folklore and uses this as the basis of her stories. For what inspires her to write see interview with Cyderscribes and our latest blog post. Cover designs by local artist Domini Deane. Fancy a rip-roaring sea adventure? Then try Paul Weston’s Weymouth Bound, set in 1800. Paul has been likened to the next Patrick O’Brian, and his first novel is set locally.     He has extensive sailing experience, including a trip from New York to Lymington in a home-designed and built 26-ft boat. His book is inspired by his love of the sea and history.     As a sailor, Paul brings a wealth of sea-faring knowledge and reality to his writing. Or read about the Roman assault on Maiden Castle, then visit the Dorset County Museum to see some of the artefacts that are woven into David Macpherson’s factional storyDefenders of Mai-dun. It makes any visit to Maiden Castle so much more interesting and alive. For a post about Roman Dorset see thisblog spot and for a reminder of just how awesome the place is visit-Dorset-TV.  Dorset Voices: A Collection of New Prose, Poetry and Photography Featuring 37 Dorset writers and over 20 unusual shots of Dorset people, places and things to capture our changing modern county, which is still a traditional rural place beloved by so many. With a Foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales, it brings together diverse voices and different forms of writing – dark, imaginative and socially aware – with something for everyone. This is one of the photos from the book (thanks to Jessica Knight from Thomas Hardye School). Discover the Dorset countryside with Andy Case’s A Dorset Country Calendar. Beautifully illustrated with the author’s own pen-and-ink drawings, farmer and countryman Andy lives near Milton Abbas and describes the countryside month by month. 'That morning there was snow as I went with the milk can to get the milk. The hawthorns lining Birmingham Lane were crowded with 200 fieldfares. They needed their breakfasts and so did I.' His book is reminiscent of a gentler place and time and would appeal to anyone who loves the countryside. Incidentally, the Dorset Wildlife Trust is looking for volunteers to help record wildlife. EVENTS 6 Dec – Kingcombe Centre Xmas Fair, with our books for sale and more! Plan your next literary year with Literary Festivals, including a first for Dorchester. Reading and writing events at Dorset Libraries.  LITERARY SNIPPETS ‘A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’ (Thomas Mann – German novelist and 1929 Nobel laureate)   Want to Write Better? Start Reading, a Lot [Infographic] Don’t ignore reading, because it really makes our lives easier. It helps us understand feelings and events, makes us better, teaches us to respect people, broadens our minds, and opens our hearts to everything new. UK Publishing Pros Ask: “Is Publishing Cool Any More?” : Publishing Perspectives  (precis) ‘We’re not helped by a media that talks the industry down, that is full of stories about the death of the book and fewer stories about how this is an industry full of imaginative people and brilliant ideas that can change the world.     ... But just as important, the panel agreed, is the nose for a good story. The real challenge is the same as it always was: how to communicate the existence of that good story; how to make it discovered. That’s the same as it was in 1970 and 1980, and will be in 2020 and 2030. The difference of course, is that thanks to digitization and the internet, the tools by which that communication can be made are very different, and are constantly evolving.     Perhaps the one constant, the never changing aspect, is the desire for a good story, which has remained the same. It’s the medium and the message cliché again. We’re not gathered around campfires anymore listening to the village griot, our faces bathed in light from the flames. The light now is from the tablet or e-reader (and still the bedside anglepoise!). But we still want to be transported, just as much as we ever did.’ Dorset Reading Partners need volunteers. One-day retreats for writers with The Write Day. Resources to help you write, publish and market your book at The Creative Penn. Learn from other authors – see Dorset Writers’ Network. Creative writing and script writing courses at Arts University Bournemouth. If you've enjoyed this newsletter, please let your friends know, join us on Facebook andTwitter and subscribe to our blog. We’ll do our best to keep posting interesting things about Dorset people, places and literature. And remember to order your books from us before 18 Dec (last posting date for Xmas).             Happy Christmas from Roving Press. Share Tweet Forward +1 © 2014 Roving Press. All rights reserved. 4 Southover Cottages, Frampton, Dorset DT2 9NQ, tel 01300 321531, info@rovingpress.co.uk, www.rovingpress.co.uk   unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences