St Nicholas Studland

I really enjoy visiting churches and try to see the local church wherever I go. Recently I was up in Bournemouth to visit my mother and had read about the church in Studland which is only a 35 minute bus trip for where she lives. The bus trip alone is very good as you get to go across the the mouth of Poole harbour on a car ferry. Upstairs on the bus you get great views of Brownsea Island and Studland Bay, Old Harry Rocks and even the Isle of Wight. Across onto land again the bus travels through the marshy winter landscape of Studland Bay and weaves round past some enormous expensive looking hotels and houses to the village of Studland. Not a place I've ever explored before.

Because it had rained all day and I had been busy doing other things in the morning I only had about three hours of daylight to look around the area and chose first, perhaps unwisely, to look for the Agglestone Rock, which I did find and get to after much squelching of water and mud. Frankly if you live in Devon the rock is not that impressive but I wanted to have a look anyway and it does seem quite incongruous on it's sandy hill, with views of Poole and Sandbanks and the IOW.

After making a hasty walk back to Studland village I only had about 35 minutes to find the church and get back on the bus before it got dark. Luckily the church is very close to the centre of the village and I must say it really made up for the slight disappointment of the Agglestone Rock.

The church was built in about 1080 on the site of an earlier Saxon church and my goodness it does feel ancient inside and is absolutely beautiful. Entrance is through a double doored porch which makes the experience quite dark, as usually the church porches just have an interior door. Once inside the age of the stonework becomes apparent and though like nearly all churches the old medieval stained glass is long gone, it was surprisingly dark inside. I couldn't really get many good photos of the interior but did my best with the one lens that I had with me.

I was lucky to have the place to myself so had some time alone to feel the atmosphere. The scale of the church is interesting - it's not really miniature but it is small and I was aware that the scale of the building was something quite rare. On a dark day in Winter in the late afternoon this church felt like I had traveled back in time and did feel very ancient.

Outside there are the curious corbel table carvings. The corbel table is the part the roof seems to sit upon and there are some delightfully rude carvings, quite pagan on a Christian church as they first appear. I think there were two sheelagh na gigs and two male counterparts exposing themselves and what appears to be a rather amorous couple, amongst other faces and animals and abstract shapes, some unfortunately defaced over the years. The church is worth a look for these alone but the siting is beautiful and the stone and atmosphere lovely. A rather special church I thought. I'll put a link below to another website that has some good information and photos.

https://www.greatenglishchurches.co.uk/html/studland.html
 

Kittwhistle Garage

Lyme

Sheep, Lambs and Rookery

Pilsdon Pen - Dorset

A trip across the border into Dorset. Pilsdon has a long history of occupation. Flint tools over 10,000 years old and two Bronze Age burial mounds are evidence that the site was in use long before the hill fort was built. The hill is topped by an Iron Age multivallate Durotrigian hill fort which was excavated in the 1960s by Peter Gelling of the University of Birmingham with his wife Margaret Gelling at the request of Michael Pinney. The remains of 14 roundhouses were uncovered near the centre of the hill fort. From 1795 to 1797 Dorothy and William Wordsworth lived at Racedown House - a property of the Pinney family, situated to the west of Pilsdon Pen. They walked in the area for about two hours every day. Thomas Hardy's Wessex has it as Pilsdon Crest.

Like the other hill forts in Dorset, Pilsdon was abandoned after the Roman conquest, after which it's thought that it was used for rough grazing, much as it is today. It was bequeathed to the National Trust by the Pinney family in 1982. It's the second highest point in Dorset, though there's not a lot in it, and the other one is nearby.

The Pinney family have an unusual legend associated with them, in that they have one of the best known 'Screaming Skulls'

As it says here a screaming skull is a type of paranormal object. Supposedly several such exist today or did so in the past. Screaming human skulls are only found in England, where most counties have at least one such tale. When a skull of this type is removed from a house, screams will be heard and general poltergeist-type disturbances will be felt. This will continue until it is replaced or returns on its own. Supposedly, the person that removes the Bettiscombe skull will die within a year. In some stories these skulls have almost become the 'luck' of the house, in much the same way as some stately homes and castles have an heirloom, which in tradition must be kept safe to maintain good luck for the home and the family. These screaming skull stories seem to originate in the 1600s.

The tradition (which has many variations) to account for its presence suggests that it was the skull of a black servant of the manor some time in the distant past. It was his dying wish to have his body returned home to the West Indies. Unfortunately the master of the house - a man called Azariah Pinney - had no intention of returning his earthly remains to the West Indies, and he was interred locally in Bettiscombe Churchyard. Soon after his burial terrible screams and strange guttural noises issued from the grave, and the house was plagued by poltergeist activity. Finally after the local villagers and family members could take no more, the skeleton was recovered and brought into the house, whereupon the haunting ceased. The bones of the skeleton became lost over the years until only the skull remained. Any attempts to rebury the skull are always said to have resulted in the same disturbances.

Apparently it was examined by an archaeologist called Michael Pinney (unknown if related) in 1963, who dated the skull to the Iron Age. He suggested that the skull was that of a female, and was most probably associated with the Iron Age settlement of Pilsdon Pen close to the Manor House.

The pointy hill in the third photo is not Pilsdon Pen but Colmer's Hill near Symondsbury, and the last, aerial view, is not one of mine but from somewhere else that I can't find at the moment.

maiden castle