Dorset's ancient holloways (or sunken lanes as they are also called) were the subject of my recent entry on March 26th. As mentioned I walked from Symondsbury to North Chideock via the holloway known as Hell Lane which is particularly deep and atmospheric.
 Then I followed another holloway (shown above) into the Marshwood Vale. At the start it was a farm track but further on it became so overgrown that I had to take to the fields and walk alongside it- I would have needed a billhook to proceed along the path such as it was.
 I took a particular interest in this territory because it is the setting for the classic novel "Rogue Male" written by Geoffrey Household and published in 1939. The protagonist of this thrilling yarn is an unnamed English huntsman who decides to embark on what he regards as a "sporting stalk". This leads to his capture in an unnamed country on the continent lining up an unnamed dictator in the sights of his rifle.
 Injured and on the run he makes it back to London where an attempt is made to kill him. He decides to go to ground in Dorset which he knows well ("It is a remote country, lying as it does between Hampshire, which is becoming an outer suburb, and Devon which is a playground"). Even here he is pursued by a relentless and resourceful assassin, the dastardly Major Quive-Smith. He makes a subterranean hide out in the sides of a particularly overgrown holloway in the Marshwood Vale.
 Numerous place names are mentioned in the novel and it is possible to follow the pursuit on a map. As it happens it traverses the very stretch of countryside I have known since childhood from Weymouth to Lyme Regis. When I first encountered this novel I was initially enjoying it as a good thriller then became fascinated as the plot crossed over with my own sense of place.
 Aficionados have tried to determine the actual location of his burrow and have made a number a number of suggestions (I shall not pinpoint them in case this diary falls into the hands of enemy agents). I went to one such that seems plausible, more so when I found that it is riddled with badger setts (the only place I saw them) and in the novel our hero creates his chamber by tunneling into the sandstone and earth in a similar fashion.
 So perhaps this is indeed the right spot but some of the scenes in the novel don't quite make sense geographically, it is after all a work of fiction. I think Household took the actual Dorset landscape he was familiar with and merged it with an imagined one.
 That is something I can relate to: I've been doing it in my head since I was a child.