Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

Studland village is a pretty little place scattered among trees, with a Norman church and some fine views over the bay. I followed the path round the edge of the village and up the hill towards Handfast Point. Halfway along, I met a couple out walking two large black dogs of uncertain genetic background. The dogs were romping playfully in the tall grass, but, as always happens, at the first sight of me their muscles tautened, their eyes turned a glowing red, their incisors grew a sudden inch and they were transformed into beasts of prey. In a trice they were at me, barking savagely and squabbling over sinew and nipping at my dancing ankles with horrible yellowy teeth.

'Would you please get your fucking animals off me!' I cried in a voice that sounded uncannily like that of Minnie Mouse.

The owner loped up and began attaching leads. He had on some stupidly jaunty flat cap like Abbott and Costello would wear in a golfing sketch. 'It's your stick,' he said accusingly. 'They don't like sticks.'

'What, they only attack cripples?'f

'They just don't like sticks.'

'Well, then maybe your stupid wife should walk ahead with a sign saying: "Look Out! StickCrazy Dogs Coming."' I was, you may gather, a trifle upset.

'Look here, sunshine, there's no need to get personal.'

'Your dogs attacked me for no reason. You shouldn't have dogs if you can't control them. And don't you call me sunshine, bub."

We stood glowering at each other. For one moment, it looked as if we might actually grapple and end up rolling around in the mud in an unseemly fashion. I restrained a wild impulse to reach out and flip his cap from his head. But then one of the dogs went for my ankles again and I retreated a few steps up the hill. I stood on the hillside, shaking my stick at them like some wildhaired lunatic. 'And your hat's stupid, too!' I shouted as they huffed off down the hill. That done, I smoothed down my jacket, composed my features and proceeded on my way. Well, honestly.

Handfast Point is a grassy cliff that ends in a sudden drop of perhaps 200 feet to seriously frothy seas. It takes a special blend of nerve and foolishness to creep up to the edge and have a look. Just beyond it stand two stranded pinnacles of limestone known as Old Harry and Old Harry's Wife, all that remains of a land bridge that once connected Dorset to the Isle of Wight, eighteen miles away across the bay and just visible through a cloak of salty mists.

Beyond the headland, the path climbed steeply to Ballard Down, a taxing slog for an old puffedout flubbawubba like me, but worth it for the view, which was sensational like being on top of the world. For miles around, the Dorset hills rolled and billowed, like a shakenout blanket settling on to a bed. Country lanes wandered among plump hedgerows and the hillsides were prettily dotted with woodlands, farmsteads and creamy flecks of sheep. In the distance the sea, bright and vast and silvery blue, stretched away to a mountain of tumbling cumulus. At my feet far below, Swanage huddled against a rocky headland on the edge of a horseshoe bay, and behind me lay Studland, the marshy flats of Poole Harbour and Brownsea Island, and beyond that a hazy infinity of meticulously worked farmland. It was beautiful beyond words, one of those rare moments when life seems perfect. As I stood there, spellbound and quite alone, a bank of cloud drifted in front of the sun, and through it there poured magnificent spears of shimmery light, like escalators to heaven. One of them fell at my feet and for one moment I would almost swear I heard celestial music, an arpeggio of harps, and a voice speak to me: 'I've just sent those dogs into a nest of adders. Have a nice day.'

I went over to a stone bench that had been thoughtfully conveyed to this lofty summit for the benefit of weary chaps like me it really is extraordinary how often you encounter some little kindly gesture like this in Britain and took out my Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map of Purbeck. As a rule, I am not terribly comfortable with any map that doesn't have a YouAreHere arrow on it somewhere, but the Ordnance Survey maps are in a league of their own. Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike's Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the OS 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot on the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed.

In my idle perusal, I noticed that a mile or so to the west there stood a historic obelisk. Wondering why anyone would erect a monument in such a remote and challenging spot, I struck off along the crest of the hill to have a look. It was the longest mile I can remember walking. I passed through grassy fields, through flocks of skittish sheep, over stiles and through gates, without any sign of my goal drawing nearer, but I doggedly pressed on because well, because if you are stupid you do. Eventually, I arrived at a modest, wholly unremarkable granite obelisk. The weathered inscription revealed that in 1887 the Dorset Water Board had run a pipe past this point. Well, yippee, I thought. Pursing my lips and referring once more to my map, I noticed that just a bit further on was something called the Giant's Grave, and I thought: Well, that sounds interesting.

So I plodded off to see it. That's the trouble, you see. There's always some intriguing landmark just over the next contour line. You could spend your life moving from stone circle to Roman settlement (remains of) to ruined abbey and never see but a fraction of them even in a small area, particularly if, like me, you seldom actually find them. I never found the Giant's Grave. I think I was close, but I can't be sure. The one notable drawback of these OS maps is that sometimes perhaps they give you too much detail.With so many possible landscape features to choose among, it's easy to convince yourself that you are pretty much wherever you want to be. You see a grove of trees and you stroke your chin and think, Well, now, let's see, that must be Hanging Snot Wood, which means that that oddlooking hillock is almost certainly Jumping Dwarf Long Barrow, in which case that place on the far hill must be Desperation Farm. And so you strike off confidently until you come up against some obviously unexpected landscape feature like Portsmouth and realize that you have gone somewhat astray.

Thus it was that I spent a quiet, sweatily perplexed afternoon tramping through a large, forgotten, but very green and pretty corner of Dorset, looking for an inland route to Swanage. The more I plunged on, the less defined did the footpaths become. By midafternoon, I found myself increasingly crawling under barbed wire, fording streams with my pack on my head, wrenching my leg from bear traps, falling down, and longing to be elsewhere. Occasionally, I would pause to rest and try to identify some small point of congruence between my map and the surrounding landscape. Eventually I would rise, peel a cowpat from my seat, purse my lips and strike off in an entirely new direction. By such means did I find myself, late in the afternoon and somewhat to my surprise, arriving footsore, travelsoiled and decorated about the extremities with interesting rivulets of dried blood, in Corfe Castle.

To celebrate my good fortune at finding myself anywhere at all, I went to the best hotel in town, an Elizabethan manor on the main street called Mortons House. It looked a thoroughly agreeable place and my spirits swelled. Moreover, they could accommodate me.

'Come far?' asked the girl at the desk as I filled in the registration card. The first rule of walking is, of course, to lie through your teeth.