Month: July 2021

The ancient hill-forts and groups of barrows strung out along the crests of the Purbeck Hills are the setting for repeated sightings of phantom armies,…

According to a strong local tradition recorded early in the nineteenth century, there was a violent encounter between deer poachers and forest keepers in Cranborne…

Writing in 1922, J. S. Udal records that it was thought in the 1880s that Bagley House near Bridport had long been haunted by a…

For several generations the owners of this manor house near Bridport (who, until recently, were the Pinney family) have declared that its luck depends on…

The Dorset dialect poet William Barnes (1801–86) spent his youth in this village, and in later life told his grandchildren how he used to believe…

In 1883, Edwin Guest argued that this large Iron Age hill-fort about two miles (3.2 km) west of Shapwick was the ‘Mount Badon’ where, according…

A farm in this parish was the setting for a series of events made famous in a pamphlet of 1641 entitled A True Relation of…

In the 1920s, the local historian J. Y. Anderson-Morshead compiled archives on the history of this parish, including an account of the ghost of Mr…

Besides packs of demon dogs, Devon traditions also mention individual Black Dogs – or perhaps a Black Dog appearing in many places. One of the…

A stone on a low mound, at the crossing of a footpath and a bridleway on the parish boundary, is said to mark the site…