Local Landmarks & Heritage

Bincombe Churchyard

Alan Doyle was busy putting the finishing touches to the wall when we arrived at Bincombe church near Weymouth, painstakingly matching in the repairs with the existing wall. Running alongside the inland route of the South West Coast Path National Trail, hundreds of walkers pass the churchyard, the walls being a distinctive part of the village character. Sadly, sections of the wall had fallen into disrepair.

Alan, a local builder and skilled waller, helped organise a party of volunteers to clear vegetation and retrieve some of the lost stone and the local landowner was able to offer further stone. Over 30 metres of wall have now been repaired, setting off the Grade 2* church beautifully.

Victorian Landscape Heritage Project

The Friends of Durlston wanted to restore part of the Country Park's Victorian designed landscape along the South West Coast Path National Trail, also the main pedestrian route to Durlston Castle. One of the traditional dry-stone walls along the path had been dismantled and replaced with a chain link fence, detracting from the ‘New Elysian' landscape envisaged by the creators of the Park.

The Friends Group removed scrub and the offending fence and the recreated wall, using locally quarried stone and local contractors. Part of the wall was built by local volunteers, trained in dry-stone walling through two training events. These introduced 18 new volunteers to the craft of walling and set the foundation for a larger initiative to develop a Dry-stone Walling Centre at Durlston.

Landscape and our heritage go hand in hand in the Dorset AONB and the Sustainable Development Fund has given local people a way of expressing the landscape heritage that is especially important to them.

• Remedial repairs to the White Horse at Osmington by Dorset Countryside and local volunteers.
• Preparation work by the National Trust for the under-grounding overhead cables at West Bexington to restore this special coastal landscape.
• Enhancing the local playing fields at Long Bredy to make them a pleasant place to sit and relax.

Restoring Dorset's traditional Fingerposts

Dorset County Council received a grant to restore traditional fingerposts in the AONB. Dorset's fingerposts are part of the county's heritage and much loved by local people. They can be expensive to repair and this work goes beyond the normal statutory work of the highway authority. With the grant, 39 fingerposts in the AONB were brought back into good condition. The characteristic finials on top of the posts, which often include the location and grid reference of the post, were specially made by a local foundry in Bridport.