Dorset

Odysseus had to withstand the wrath of Poseidon, avoid the call of the Sirens and vanquish the terrifying Cyclops to get back to Ithaca. But he didn’t have to negotiate the 19.20 train out of Waterloo. It’s worth it though. I am returning home to walk another section of the magnificent Thomas Hardy Way, a trailway around Dorset covering some of the most beautiful landscapes that England has to offer. Hardy himself described the Blackmore Vale in the north of the county as that ‘fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry’. Summer 2026 has rather tested that claim. We stay in a small cabin that a friend has built near a secluded wood, miles away from anywhere.

Sir Tom Stoppard, who died last week, never wrote a memoir, but he did sort of speak one. Just over ten years ago, he told me that he and his new wife, Sabrina Guinness, had become tenants of an old rectory in Dorset. I asked him if he would therefore speak as guest of honour at the AGM of the Rectory Society, a fan club for existing and former clergy houses which I invented in 2005. The AGM always takes place in a central London church, and in 2015, the year I invited Tom, it was held in the Queen’s Chapel beside St James’s Palace. Beyond expressing a tepid wish that speakers make some small reference to the society and its purposes, I never specify their subject.