A Wessex trail: Dorset’s Hardy Way leads to the historic Smugglers Inn

A circular walk across hills and through picturesque villages known to Constable and Hardy starts and ends at an ancient smugglers’ watering hole near Weymouth

No one appreciated the rural English landscape more than a certain corn merchant’s son from Suffolk. John Constable made it his business to paint bucolic splendour, and perhaps no one has ever done it better. And when he went on holiday, on his honeymoon no less, he chose one particular village.

I’m standing there, by the old, ivy-clad church wall in Osmington, Dorset, surveying the thatched roofs ahead and the rising slope of the chalk hill beyond. Through a gateway I spot a blue plaque on the old vicarage wall: “John Constable, English Romantic Painter, 1816, lived here for three months”.