Dorset picture 8: Burcombe

"Fairy hills" abound in this magical landscape...

Burcombe, located in a remote corner of West Dorset north of Bridport, is a very intriguing location. We are already planning to go back and explore. 
You feel really far away from everything and you can genuinely enjoy the quietness and the solitude. 
Burcombe is basically one building - it is a rented property, and yes, it would make a perfect writing refuge - although it is too far from the sea for me. I need to be nearer the coast. 
According to my walking companion book, Louise Hodgson's "Secret Places of West Dorset", this area is rather special indeed: 

This part of West Dorset is a landscape within a larger landscape, a self-contained parcel of land that has all the ingredients of a latter-day Arcadia. If the hunting pipes of Pan could be heard anywhere in this county it would be here, trilling from a hillside wood in the blue dusk of a late summer evening.

One local mysterious character is John Walsh, who lived in the mid-16th century. He was known as the "Cunning Man of Netherbury" and this place was his backyard. He declared the hills and barrows around Burcombe were "the abode of the fairies". 
I like a good legend, and as we sat down in the grass to have a rest on the edge of a field overlooking Burcombe and the narrow vale you can see on the picture above, we couldn't help getting the strange feeling that indeed, this place exuded some kind of uncanny atmosphere that played with our senses and could make us believe in fairies... 

"Under a full moon, careening in and out of the wilderness, careening in and out of the sensibility of the Cunning Man, the fairy hordes would manifest their wyrd wisdom and John Walsh would look and listen, translating the strangeness into the language of human undertanding."

                                                        Louise Hodgson, "Secret Places of West Dorset"