A great Dorset coast walk to a great pub: the Sailor’s Return

A hike over rolling hills, taking in a ghost village and smugglers’ coves, ends with delicious seafood and a pint

Despite its name, only a traveller coming from Poole will need a ferry to reach Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck, an island that’s not really an island, famous for its chalky downland, cliffs and quarries. Tucked into Purbeck’s hills, the village of Chaldon Herring, known also as East Chaldon, feels remote and sequestered. It’s the perfect place for a varied walk, with few roads, quiet valleys, a spectacular coastline and some intriguing history.

I made my way from the village green between thatched cottages past the church, where rooks noisily established their order of things. Leaving the village, I walked down a lane between rolling fields – plastic sheeting had been laid to warm the soil for crops, so the view resembled the swell of the sea, the foraging rooks imitating gulls. Under the long-nosed hill of High Chaldon at the end of the lane was West Chaldon, only a few houses and a farm, but once part of a larger settlement, Holworth, abandoned in the 15th century. The ebb and flow of human life over millennia is written into the ground in Purbeck. Just north of Chaldon is a barrow grouping known as the Five Marys. When excavated in the 1860s by an exiled Bourbon princess, the Duchess of Berry, the remains of two adults were discovered, one male, one female, both in sitting positions, stag antlers resting on their shoulders.