ON CHESIL BEACH..

Did a bit of exploring last week - just a bit; nothing too strenuous - and one of our explorations took us to West Bexington on the Dorset coast.  We had been looking where to book a cottage for our holiday and one of the locations that popped up in our search was West Bexington.   It looked quite inviting - a small village on the Dorset coast with access to the beach, a beguiling name and a feeling of `away from it all.`  In the end, for one reason or another, we decided to look elsewhere and ended up hiring a lovely house in Charmouth.  Just as well.

On the day we visited West Bexington (after failing to locate the beaches at Burton Bradstock and elsewhere along the coast) we found the car park on the beach and it was there that I encountered the most complicated car parking machine I have ever come across.   It advertised a couple of hours stay for 60p which I thought might do us and I noticed that there were various ways of paying the fee - by mobile phone, by card or by cash.  Of course I opted for the cash option only to find that it was the most difficult to understand and, of course, it offered `no change given` so I parted with a pound coin, finally retrieved the ticket but lost  40p in the process.  There should be a law.

I took the above photo of the beach on what was a fairly gloomy day, so I suppose we didn`t see the beach at its best.  It is, however, part of the 18-mile long Chesil beach which runs from West Bay to Portland in the east and it is alleged that you can always tell where you are on the beach by the size of the pebbles - the further east you go, the bigger the pebbles become.   Those at West Bexington were pretty small, so we had to be close to the western end of the beach.

It`s a great place for fishing though - renowned for cod and such like - and it seemed that the only other people attracted to West Bexington that morning were determined fishermen.   Here they are doing their stuff:-

Now a good friend of mine has walked the entire length of the south west coast path - all 630 miles of it from Minehead in Somerset round to Poole in Dorset - and so he must have walked past West Bexington and trudged his way across all those miles of assorted pebbles.  We managed a bit of the path each side of the village but found it hard going but at least I can claim to have walked a bit of the coast path along this famed stretch of beach.  (Over the years I have developed the knack of ticking off stretches of the coast path by the simple process of claiming that seeing round the next corner should be sufficient rather than having to walk it all but in fairness we have actually walked most of the Devon and Cornwall stretches. It`s just the Dorset bit that has largely escaped us.)

Despite its fame through the works of Thomas Hardy. as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Jurassic Coast and its features in film and television productions, I think we must have visited one of Chesil Beach`s least prepossessing locations.   Or maybe it` just me?

ANY HIGHER ?

I`ve long been fascinated by numbers.  Don`t really know why as I was pretty duff at sums when I was at school.  I guess it may be that, as you get older, you become more interested in more things.  Just a quick example.  The number 26.

What is so very special about 26 is this - it is the only number in the whole panoply of numbers from one to infinity and beyond which is sandwiched between a squared number and a cubed number (25 = 5 x 5; 27 = 3 x 3 x 3) and it was our old friend Pierre de Fermat - he of the famous last theorem - who not only discovered this fact but also a proof for it, which turned out to be infinitely more difficult than the fact itself.

I recall too that when our three sons were little and we went on long car journeys to holiday destinations, we played a numbers game to ease the boredom of the journey for them.  This consisted of finding which of the three of them could spot the pub name with the most numbers in it - Three Squirrels, Five Bells and so on - until one of them claimed to have spotted a pub named The Ten Thousand Pilgrims.  He was, of course, banned from the game and made to sit in the middle of the back seat for the rest of the journey.

In more recent years I have become interested in place names in the UK.  My favourite county for names is the county of my birth, Dorset.  Who can fail to be charmed or puzzled by places such as Ryme Intrinseca, Whitchurch Canonicorum, Melbury Osmond and Melbury Bubb, Minterne Magna or Piddletrenthide.   And it was whilst trawling through the place names of Dorset that I came across Sixpenny Handley and it got me wondering how many other place names there might be in this country which have numbers in them....and how long before you run out of numbers.

So:

Onehouse, Suffolk
Two Mills, Cheshire
Three Bridges, Sussex
Four Marks, Hampshire
Five Oak Green, Kent
Sixpenny Handley, Dorset
Sevenoaks, Kent
Eight Ash Green, Essex
Nine Elms, London
Tenterden, Kent
Ruyton - X1- Towns, Shropshire
Twelveheads, Cornwall

..............................................I wonder if anyone can go any higher.

AN UNLIKELY CELEBRITY

One day last week, I was visiting an old friend who told me that he and his wife were due to have a week or so in Dorset. They have been before and they like it. This time they will be staying in the village of Duntishe, far away from the madding crowd.

Now, as you may have spotted, I was born in Dorset and my friend`s mention of Duntishe gave rise to a passing chat about some of the quirky place names for which Dorset is famous. Those shown on the signpost above are good examples, but so too are Plush, Toller Porcorum, Melbury Bubb, Ryme Intrinseca, Hamoon and Whitchurch Canonicorum...to name but a few.

I`ve often thought that Dorset is one of those counties that people pass through on their way to somewhere else and, in doing so, they miss the countless delights the county has to offer. Most of all, perhaps, it offers absolute peace and quiet in its rural hinterland where those magically named hamlets and villages provide the perfect escape from the ramrod, helter-skelter, devil-take-the-hindmost, ultra competitive `real` world.

It was a bit of a surprise also last week to hear reports that the investigations into the death of Bulgarian dissident playwright and novelist Georgi Markov had been reopened by Scotland Yard and the Bulgarian authorities. Almost 30 years ago, you may recall, Markov was stabbed in the leg by someone carrying an umbrella, the tip of which contained the deadly poison ricin. A few days later, Markov was dead.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have abounded for most of those 30 years as to the identity of the perpetrator, so why the intense activity now to try and put the case to bed? Must be something to do with the fact that the Staute of Limitations under Bulgarian law is....30 years; and the 30 years of the Markov case are up on 11th September this year.

Markov

And what has all this to do with the rural tranquility of deepest Dorset? Well, if you are ever that way and you stray into the small churchyard of the church of St. Candida and St. Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum, you might come across Markov`s grave which must surely make him a most unlikely celebrity in that idyllic location. At least, for him, he could not be resting in a more peaceful place, in sharp contrast to his, as yet, unresolved demise.

For more on the Markov case, please see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2158765/Poison-tip-umbrella-assassination-of-Georgi-Markov-reinvestigated.html

For more on Whitchurch Canonicorum, please see http://www.thedorsetpage.com/locations/place/W210.htm