Chaldon is not 80 miles from Dorchester but just over 8. The Sailor’s Return was a legendary ‘locals’ pub, especially during the 70s (when it was my local) and filled with true Dorset characters and eccentrics. Food was a bag of crisps or a sandwich or, when Dotty opened up her immaculate dining room, full roast dinner and sometimes rook pie. But you had to take your shoes off to keep the carpet clean! You were served from a hole-in-the-wall at the end of a narrow corridor and the flagstoned public bar was on your right-hand side, with scrubbed wooden tables and benches. Both the gents and the ladies were outside and in pitch dark, unfathomably scary – well at least for us ladies.There used to be a plaque in the window seat commemorating Roy, a local farmhand, who sat there every night of his long (adult) life, drinking and carousing. If he came into the pub and there was a ‘foreigner’ sitting in his seat (locals knew better) he or she would be summarily ejected to allow Roy to settle his considerable bulk into ‘his’ seat to commence imbibing. It was a magical place, a tiny thatched cottage/pub perched on top of a hill overlooking the fields, the church and part of the village. When we returned to Dorset in 2011, the Sailors had changed almost beyond recognition. Much extended and enlarged – and with smart, indoor toilets! – it is much more geared to tourists and those who want to eat. It’s still a lovely place to go, with great food, but the spit and sawdust rural charm has gone, along with much of the magic. So has Roy’s plaque, which has been removed from the window seat and replaced by a smart new one, on the outside wall of the pub, commemorating Llewelyn Powys.
What a beautiful story. In my life I have known pubs like that.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
‘The society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell…. swept in from time to time.’
Now there’s a surprise.
robert scheetz
3 years ago
For cultural historians the century between 1860 and 1950 was “the age of cultural despair”, the Somme, The Wasteland, Auschwitz & Hiroshima. God disappeared, until improbably, Heidegger, wandering his forest paths, found him again.
Jeffrey Shaw
3 years ago
“It remains extraordinary that some of the most radical experiments in post-theistic thinking should have been explored not in an ultra-modern metropolis or provincial city, but a village folded in a valley in deepest Dorset.” If you go back through history – not just UK, but anywhere in the Cro-Magnon settled world, you occasionally find that groups of “intellectuals” who have attempted to fashion a utopian social/cultural/economic order of some type. Usually they have to create their own village or assume control over an existing village, in order to make their philosophy manifest. This is usually because the modern metropolis they are fleeing has been operating under the chimerical structure they have just devised, for the past century or two.
To wit, the Plymouth/Boston/New Haven refugee colonies? East Chaldon, by contrast, seems less new paradigm-ish, than effete dolce vita, no?
ishel99
3 years ago
Interesting that the village is described as being 80 miles from Dorchester. A quick look at Google Maps shows it to be a mere 9 to 12 miles (are miles still in use in the UK?) Not really important, but just thought it was worth mentioning. It’s almost a suburb of Dorchester, hehe…
Thanks for this – I’ve been there – to the old pub on a dark Autumn night, long ago. Didn’t know any of this history
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
Infinite space as one plane of existence (godless) or infinite space conceived as multiple planes of existence in the form of holarchical concentric circles (god). I imagine a village is a perfect place to contemplate either and to also contemplate what we are, where we are, when we are, how we are and why we are. ðŸµï¸ðŸ’®ðŸŒº
stephenmoriarty
3 years ago
In Brideshead Revisited, Charles, after having read Sebastian’s correpondence, peruses a copy of Lady Into Fox whilst waiting for Sebastian in his rooms. Sebastian is portrayed almost as a child of nature at that stage, to whom art and literature are superfluous, yet it seems he is reading Kafkaesque literature all the while! Or perhaps it was a fashionable novella of the time, and is supposed to be an indication of frivolity – Sebastian should have been studying texts for his degree! It would have been recently published. One wonders whether he would even have read Lady Into Fox himself, so disdainful of learning is he portrayed! I haven’t read it either! There is a disastrous fox hunt in BR. Sebastian is perhaps Sylvia and Charles Richard?
Robin Haig
3 years ago
‘Wolf Solent’ is a good read, but John Cowper Powys’s greatest novel must surely be ‘A Glastonbury Romance’. I was introduced to it at school and have reread it many times since.
Chaldon is not 80 miles from Dorchester but just over 8. The Sailor’s Return was a legendary ‘locals’ pub, especially during the 70s (when it was my local) and filled with true Dorset characters and eccentrics. Food was a bag of crisps or a sandwich or, when Dotty opened up her immaculate dining room, full roast dinner and sometimes rook pie. But you had to take your shoes off to keep the carpet clean! You were served from a hole-in-the-wall at the end of a narrow corridor and the flagstoned public bar was on your right-hand side, with scrubbed wooden tables and benches. Both the gents and the ladies were outside and in pitch dark, unfathomably scary – well at least for us ladies.There used to be a plaque in the window seat commemorating Roy, a local farmhand, who sat there every night of his long (adult) life, drinking and carousing. If he came into the pub and there was a ‘foreigner’ sitting in his seat (locals knew better) he or she would be summarily ejected to allow Roy to settle his considerable bulk into ‘his’ seat to commence imbibing. It was a magical place, a tiny thatched cottage/pub perched on top of a hill overlooking the fields, the church and part of the village. When we returned to Dorset in 2011, the Sailors had changed almost beyond recognition. Much extended and enlarged – and with smart, indoor toilets! – it is much more geared to tourists and those who want to eat. It’s still a lovely place to go, with great food, but the spit and sawdust rural charm has gone, along with much of the magic. So has Roy’s plaque, which has been removed from the window seat and replaced by a smart new one, on the outside wall of the pub, commemorating Llewelyn Powys.
What a beautiful story. In my life I have known pubs like that.
‘The society hostess and patron of the arts Lady Ottoline Morrell…. swept in from time to time.’
Now there’s a surprise.
For cultural historians the century between 1860 and 1950 was “the age of cultural despair”, the Somme, The Wasteland, Auschwitz & Hiroshima. God disappeared, until improbably, Heidegger, wandering his forest paths, found him again.
“It remains extraordinary that some of the most radical experiments in post-theistic thinking should have been explored not in an ultra-modern metropolis or provincial city, but a village folded in a valley in deepest Dorset.”
If you go back through history – not just UK, but anywhere in the Cro-Magnon settled world, you occasionally find that groups of “intellectuals” who have attempted to fashion a utopian social/cultural/economic order of some type. Usually they have to create their own village or assume control over an existing village, in order to make their philosophy manifest. This is usually because the modern metropolis they are fleeing has been operating under the chimerical structure they have just devised, for the past century or two.
To wit, the Plymouth/Boston/New Haven refugee colonies? East Chaldon, by contrast, seems less new paradigm-ish, than effete dolce vita, no?
Interesting that the village is described as being 80 miles from Dorchester. A quick look at Google Maps shows it to be a mere 9 to 12 miles (are miles still in use in the UK?) Not really important, but just thought it was worth mentioning. It’s almost a suburb of Dorchester, hehe…
Perhaps he meant 80 miles from The Dorchester, which is the sort of place where these people would have had high tea and high jinks.
Hehe, just possibly so 🙂
Thanks for this – I’ve been there – to the old pub on a dark Autumn night, long ago. Didn’t know any of this history
Infinite space as one plane of existence (godless) or infinite space conceived as multiple planes of existence in the form of holarchical concentric circles (god). I imagine a village is a perfect place to contemplate either and to also contemplate what we are, where we are, when we are, how we are and why we are.
ðŸµï¸ðŸ’®ðŸŒº
In Brideshead Revisited, Charles, after having read Sebastian’s correpondence, peruses a copy of Lady Into Fox whilst waiting for Sebastian in his rooms.
Sebastian is portrayed almost as a child of nature at that stage, to whom art and literature are superfluous, yet it seems he is reading Kafkaesque literature all the while!
Or perhaps it was a fashionable novella of the time, and is supposed to be an indication of frivolity – Sebastian should have been studying texts for his degree! It would have been recently published. One wonders whether he would even have read Lady Into Fox himself, so disdainful of learning is he portrayed! I haven’t read it either!
There is a disastrous fox hunt in BR. Sebastian is perhaps Sylvia and Charles Richard?
‘Wolf Solent’ is a good read, but John Cowper Powys’s greatest novel must surely be ‘A Glastonbury Romance’. I was introduced to it at school and have reread it many times since.