Delightfully Dorset
Updated: Oct 4
03.10.26
It was a soft autumn afternoon when Florence met up with a good friend she had not seen for far too long. They both arrived carrying a small bundle of stories, triumphs, frustrations and curiosities gathered since last they met. The miles slipped away almost unnoticed beneath their boots as conversation wandered wherever it pleased; the serious and the ridiculous.
The route formed a ten-kilometre circle from Sherborne, reaching out into the countryside around Nether Compton before looping back again. The subtle hints and promises of autumn lined their way. Leaves were beginning to turn at the edges. Seed heads caught the light like tiny lanterns. Grasses had faded into shades of cream and silver that seemed every bit as beautiful as summer's brighter displays. Fields were harvested. Windfalls lay beneath the trees, adding their sweet fermenting richness to the afternoon. Florence found herself gathering dried flowers and stems as she walked, unable to resist taking a little of the season home with her.
Before long the pair found themselves descending into some of the area's remarkable holloways. These ancient sunken lanes are among the deepest in Britain and possess a strange ability to transport a walker through space and through time. The banks rose high on either side, draped with roots, moss and trailing vegetation. The green labyrinth was carved into the earth itself. Above, branches reached towards one another, filtering the afternoon light across the ground.
It is easy to imagine holloways as something deliberately excavated, but most were created not by digging but by persistence. For centuries, perhaps even millennia, people travelled the same routes. Farmers drove animals along them. Carts rattled through. Pilgrims, labourers, traders and villagers wore the ground a little lower with every passing year. Rainwater followed the disturbed track, carrying soil away and deepening the process. Eventually the land seemed to rise around the road, creating these extraordinary sunken passageways that still survive today.
Beneath their boots lay Inferior Oolite limestone, formed when Dorset rested beneath warm tropical seas some 170 million years ago. Looking up at the holloway banks, Florence found herself wondering how many layers of time surrounded them at once; ancient seabeds below, centuries of travellers around them, and an autumn afternoon slipping quietly past overhead.
Yet if the holloways provided the atmosphere, the Potato Caves supplied the day's most unexpected moment.
Hidden near Stallen beside one of the ancient lanes are a series of caves dug into the bank. Local tradition links them to Sir Walter Raleigh and the Sherborne estate. Raleigh received Sherborne from Queen Elizabeth I in 1592 and made it one of his principal homes, constructing the castle whose grounds still dominate the landscape today. Soldier, explorer, courtier, writer and occasional royal favourite, Raleigh left his mark across English history, and local folklore has long associated him with the introduction of potatoes to England. Whether every detail stands up to modern historical scrutiny is perhaps less important than the fact that the story has endured for centuries. According to local tradition, potatoes grown on the estate were stored within these cool underground chambers.
History took a wonderfully unexpected turn when Florence and her friend peered into one of the caves and discovered that somebody had left potatoes inside. The two women snorted with laughter seeing them perched on a rock inside the cave, discovered with a torch as they entered the grim looking archway. There was something delightfully Dorset about the whole thing. Four hundred years of stories, folklore and local history somehow distilled into a handful of potatoes sitting quietly in a cave beneath an ancient bank.
The afternoon drifted on, unhurried. The holloways gave way to open countryside and then returned again. Conversation meandered as naturally as the lanes themselves. Sometimes they paused to admire the landscape, sometimes to examine an interesting plant or gather another dried flower, and sometimes simply because a story demanded a little more time before the walking resumed.
Eventually the route curved back towards Sherborne. Fields gave way to familiar lanes and the town slowly reappeared ahead of them. They found themselves returning with rather more than they had started with. There were armfuls of dried grasses and seed heads gathered from the hedgerows, certainly, but also the satisfaction that comes from spending an afternoon exactly as it should be spent: outdoors, in good company, wandering old roads, discovering hidden corners of history and laughing heartily at the eccentricity of potatoes in a cave.
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