Armour & Embarkation – The Essential Info

The event will take place over 3 days from 22-24th June. On display will be up to twenty tanks and over fifty original vehicles from the war, with all drivers and crew dressed in authentic WWII uniforms.

Friday 22nd will be Education Day. This has organised with local schools to give pupils the chance to see firsthand vehicles from the war, and learn about how they were used. WW2 historians and the some of the vehicles’ owners themselves we be on hand to answer questions and offer insights into these incredible machines. Event time–11:00–14:00.

Saturday 23rd will be the main Armour & Embarkation day, with the convoy of vehicles heading from Maiden Newton into Dorchester via Martinstown. You will have a chance to see the whole convoy together parked up in Charles Street in the afternoon, and can join a ceremony laying wreaths at the Cenotaph in South Street at 4pm. After 5pm, the convoy will set off on its route around the centre of Dorchester, with up to 10,000 spectators expected to line the streets to witness the spectacle.

On Sunday 24th the convoy will head down to Weymouth for 9am to join the annual Veterans Day Parade along the seafront, before returning to Maiden Newton at the end of the day.

Why Is It Significant?

This event will see the largest collection of WWII tanks together in Dorset since the end of the war. The chance to not only see but also hear these amazing machines in action is incredibly rare, and has an added significance here in Dorchester as it will recreate the convoy which drove into our town almost 70 years ago in the build-up to the D-Day landings.

What Can You Do To Help?

This is a major event attracting thousands of visitors to Dorchester, and will be covered by the likes of The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Daily Express. The organisers are asking for sponsorship from local businesses to help with the cost of putting on the event, and have a number of suggested packages available for sponsors, depending on how much they wish to give. For more information on sponsorship click here.

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Museums Night is now in its third year, and it’s become a firm favourite event among locals and visitors alike. The 2012 evening (held on May 19th) will involve each of the town’s six museums as well as the Roman Town House, with advance tickets just £8.

So what should you look out for this year?

Terracotta Warriors Exhibition

The Terracotta Warriors Exhibition is a fascinating celebration of the weird and wonderful world of China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang di, who is credited with unifying the nation and in whose honour the famous carved warriors were created as part of an elaborate tomb.

It is the only dedicated Terracotta Warriors museum outside of China, and it features full size replicas of the terracotta figures themselves, which have been carefully recreated in incredible details by expert craftspeople. The story of Ancient China and the Warriors is told in the museum through a dramatic mix of audio and multimedia, creating a memorable experience for all ages.

Dorset County Museum

While it no longer houses the stunning Ancient Egypt exhibition that attracted record numbers of visitors at the end of last year, there is still plenty to discover at the County Museum. Among the most popular items are the thousands of artefacts relating to the social history of Dorset, including everything from simple agricultural tools to a complete steam traction engine.

Elsewhere in the museum, the iconic and beautiful Victorian Hall offers the rare opportunity to actually walk on genuine Roman mosaic, an almost perfectly preserved relic of Dorchester’s time as a thriving Roman town known as Durnovia.

Roman Town House

If the County Museum whets your appetite for Roman history, you simply have to go and visit the Dorchester Roman town house at Colliton Park. It’s the only example of a fully exposed Roman house in the UK, and one of the best preserved of all the Roman sites in the country.

The house was built for a wealthy Durnovian family in the fourth century AD, and it was only re-discovered in the 1930s during an archaeological dig. It’s a great example of real-life history, and definitely worth a look on Museum night

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The Queen’s Jubilee is fast approaching, and like last year’s royal wedding, we hope to celebrate the occasion in style here in Dorchester!

So it’s great news that St Peter’s Church in High West Street will be putting on a special Jubilee fayre on June 2nd, with lots of fun activities, games and entertainments for the whole family.

Among the themed activities will be hands-on crown and flag making, and a silver Jubilee jigsaw to get young visitors into the Jubilee spirit. There will also be a big memory board divided into three sections – Coronation, Silver Jubilee and Golden Jubilee, and visitors with memories of these events will be invited to add them to the board on post-it-notes.

The fayre will be held from 11am to 4pm, with a grand Jubilee parade planned for 2.30pm, which is not to be missed! Town crier Alistair Chisholm will abe on hand to open the event at 11 and perform his inimitable cry outside St Peter’s.

The event is free to enter, and any proceeds raised from the day will go to the church.

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Artists Rob Pountney, David Inshaw and Dave Gunning have all chosen a small number of specific pieces from their bodies of work which reflect a range of ideas and emotional reponses to their natural surroundings. These artworks include charcoal drawings, prints, steel etchings, and oil paintings.

What ties these artists together is the influence Hardy’s work has had on the way they look at Dorset. Thomas Hardy was a leading figure in the naturalism movement, which emphasized the important role that environment plays in shaping an individual’s character. Thus in his novels, the setting of Wessex functioned almost as a character in of itself, crucial to the human stories he sought to explore.

If you have an interest in Thomas Hardy’s work or just in the landscapes of natural Dorset generally, you would be well advised to visit this exhibition. It runs until June 16th, and entry is free.

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William Barnes Statue

When people think of Dorchester’s literary heritage they automatically think of Thomas Hardy, the great novelist who defined an era with his bucolic tales of rural life inspired by 19th century Dorset. But Dorchester can also lay claim to another tremendously influencial figure in English literature – the poet William Barnes. You will probably have seen his statue outside St Peter’s Church on Dorchester’s High Street, but who was this man, and what was his legacy to the literary world?

Life

William Barnes was a farmer’s son, born in 1801 in Bagber, Dorset. He was a gifted child, and in his early teens he learned several musical instruments and studied a wide range of subjects including philosophy, history and languages. Language was of particular fascination to Barnes, and he was soon writing poetry in both standard English and in the Dorset dialect familiar to him from his upbringing.

In his twenties he ran several schools, including one in Durngate Street in Dorchester. But he never lost interest in his poetry, and Barnes’ first collection was published in 1844 under the title Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect.

He published several more works in subsequent years, and in later life became a friend and mentor to Thomas Hardy, who said of Barnes’ work “his reach in his highest moments, as exampled by such a poignant lyric as The Wife a-lost, or by the emotional music of Woak Hill, or The Wind at the Door, has been matched by few singers below the best”

Poetry

Barnes sought to capture the essence of traditional Dorset life in his poetry, and central to this was his use of Dorset dialect – the particular way of speaking that had developed in the county’s rural communities over hundreds of years of relative insularity and isolation. Here is the opening stanza from his poem The Love Child:

Where the bridge out at Woodley did stride,
Wi’ his wide arches’ cool sheäded bow,
Up above the clear brook that did slide
By the poppies, befoam’d white as snow;
As the gilcups did quiver among
The white deäsies, a-spread in a sheet.
There a quick-trippèn maïd come along,-
Aye, a girl wi’ her light-steppèn veet.

Many people found Barnes’ predilection for this dialect baffling, as Thomas Hardy explained “It often seemed strange to lovers of Barnes that he, a man of insight and reading, should have persisted year after year to sing in a tongue which, though a regular growth and not a provincial corruption, is indubitably fast perishing”. But perhaps that was the point – Barnes saw value in preserving and celebrating the unique and endangered culture of old Dorset, which he knew was slowly vanishing as the traditional way of life slowly gave way to the modern age.

On the 23rd May, Dorset County Museum will be hosting a talk by author Peter Chedzoy entitled William Barnes: The People’s Poet. If you would like to learn more about this fascinating figure and his poetry, this is a great opportunity to do so. The talk begins at 7pm, and tickets can be reserved by emailing shop@dorsetcountymuseum.org

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The first thing that makes it unusual is its size  – the bench is 10 metres long, and will comfortably seat at least 20 people. But what really makes it special is that it has been created in the shape of a question mark, which involved steam-bending the wood and pressing it into shape.

Want to see how they did it? Check out the video below.

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The impending astronomic rise in the cost of postage may well cause a slowdown in the growth of Internet shopping, but at the same time it could provide a well-timed boost to a the high street!

Some shops have suffered greatly over the last few years at the hands of the internet due to being undercut on low and medium priced items, especially the ‘regular essentials’ but an interesting side effect of this otherwise unwelcome postal price hike is that some of these items will no longer be cheaper online due to the effect of adding the postage! In some cases the postage will now actually be twice the cost of the item purchased!

So, maybe we have an opportunity as businesses in town, to regain the initiative and increase sales of some items that had become the domain of the on-line shop? Lets shout about it and spread the word when we hear of a great deal in town – After all, there will always be more pleasure in physically ‘going shopping’ browsing the high street and in the process, discovering how much Dorchester has to offer from our fabulous range of independent shops as well as the more common high street brands. Happy Shopping!

By Phil Gordon, Project Director DBID

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The Neolithic Henge’s original function, like so many other structures from the same time, remains enigmatic though scholars have proposed it could have been a place of ritual or astronomical observation, as excavations in the early 20th century revealed the shafts used in its foundation contained fragments of tools made from deer bone, flint, and even fragments of human skull!

Roman re-enactments at Maumbury Rings

The reason Maumbury Rings still stands while so many henges have disappeared over time is that it has been adapted to suit various purposes since its creation. The Roman Town of Durnovaria (Dorchester) modified the rings in roughly 100 AD to make it a place of entertainment – an amphitheatre. Throughout this period the rings would be host to gladiatorial fights and executions.

There’s no record of the rings use in Saxon times though it likely stayed as a place of meeting and by the middle ages it was again host to violent spectator sports, this time jousting tournaments.

In 1642 the earthwork was again remodelled and saw yet another function, this time one of war. The Parliamentarians turned it into an artillery fort guarding the southern flank along Weymouth Road where the Royalists were thought to be advancing.

After the civil war Maumbury rings gained a macabre status as its role as a place of public execution was revived, most notably by the infamous Judge Jeffreys who condemned eighty rebels to death in Maumbury Rings. However, perhaps the most famous execution to take place here was that of Mary Channing sentenced to be burnt at the stake for poisoning her husband. The bloody tale was immortalised by the great Dorset poet Thomas Hardy in the poem ‘The Mock Wife’.

Happily no such events take place in Maumbury Rings any more yet it is still a cultural hub of the Town. In the summer it is host to many free music events such as the Dorchester Arts Festival, Battle enactments and even open air performances of the works of Shakespeare. It was also the screening location of the Royal Wedding last year.

So whether you want to soak up its bloody past, catch some live music, watch a play or just fancy catching some sun in a tranquil location, Maumbury Rings is well worth a visit.

By Jed Nommick-Smith

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The idea is to help increase footfall to this area and the lower part of South Street plus to make it much easier for people to get around from one end of town to another, as well as allowing visitors to get their bearings very quickly. This ‘shopper’s shuttle will be a free service running from 9.30-4.00pm.

We are aiming to have a pilot running for 4 days during ½ term week in early June. The Mini bus will be equipped with a data point which will display information about things to do, places to go and special offers from businesses in town

Drivers needed -  we are looking for a few part-time drivers so if you know anyone that may be interested in helping us with the pilot please put them in touch. They will need to have the appropriate classification on their licence (D1, tests taken before 1996 should have) and will undergo a brief council approved minibus training course.

Maumbury Rings gets QR Codes

We’ve just put up a new page on the BID website on Maumbury Rings. It tells you a little about the site and its history, and why it’s such a great place to visit in the summer months.

The plan is to put QR codes alongside the maps we are publishing every week in the ViewFrom paper. Visitors can then input these QR codes into their smart phone and it will take them through to the page on the website to learn a little more about the Rings.

It’s all part of our efforts to find innovative and exciting ways to promote Dorchester as a first class destination for tourists. Keep an eye out for the QR codes in upcoming editions of ViewFrom!

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Borough Gardens

When the sun comes out in Dorchester, the Borough Gardens are the first port of call for many of us. As well as the colourful and iconic clock tower, there are tennis courts, a bowling green, a children’s play area, and many beautiful flower beds. It’s indisputably one of the best spots in Dorchester for picnics, sports or just quiet, relaxing afternoons in the sun.

River Frome

One of the best things about Dorchester is that it’s so easy to escape the busy town centre and within minutes be in the countryside, surrounded by nature. The River Frome forms a kind of natural border around part of the town, and is always a great place for walks. It’s also a fantastic place for wildlife, including several types of fish and birds and the elusive water vole, so keep your eyes peeled when you’re out walking by the river!

Athelhampton House

If you fancy some Downton Abbey style luxury, Athelhampton House, just a short drive from Dorchester, allows you to live out your grand aristocratic fantasies in one of the best preserved and most opulent stately homes in Britain.

The house employs over 40 people, many of whom work on creating and maintaining the wonderful gardens, which feature everything from eye-catching pyramid-shaped yew trees to fragrant rows of colourful roses. It’s a magical place to go for a leisurely stroll on a sunny day, as you take in the scenery and allow yourself to be transported back in history to the golden age of lords, ladies and old world splendour.

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