Tollard Royal and Ashcombe House

 St. Peter ad Vincula

We are on our way back home from a visit to Poole and it seemed like a good idea to do a walk on the way. This 4.5 mile walk from Tollard Royal, just in Wiltshire, seemed the perfect choice. We parked by the interesting church of St. Peter ad Vincula (St Peter in Chains") which dates from 1469, with later alterations. It is one of only 15 churches in England with this dedication, which is taken from the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.

Nearby is King John's House. It has nothing to do with King John and is instead a former manor house which was later a farmhouse, and has at its core a 13th-century hall house. Remodelling in the 16th and 17th centuries added wings, in part timber-framed. Augustus Pitt Rivers restored and extended the house, and opened it to the public around 1890 as a museum, but by 1907 it was again a residence. (Information from Wikipedia.) You can get a glimpse of half timbering, but nothing more.

The village is charming and a delightfully whimsical programme is clearly underway to enhance it. The first house we passed had this delightful workman suffering a slight mishap. 

Across the main road is the village pond and here a gnome seems to be fighting off a large snake. There were several other examples.

Now we started the walk proper and walked up path to the left of the pond and then forked left to follow a delightful track at the bottom of a sloping hillside.

There were innumerable Meadow Brown, White and Common Blue butterflies.

Further along we began to diverge from the hillside and some very attractive open country lay before us.

Soon we encountered a series of path junctions and after some deliberation managed to work out the right route heading north along a ridge. We walked through the wide-open spaces to reach a decision point. "Cross a stile and turn right along the byway" said the walk book, but we could not locate these vague descriptions. We spotted a trig point which gave us confidence to head off to the right and we followed a path which had other people heading towards us, though not close enough to intercept.

This route led us skirt the edge of Ashcombe House, of which we could see nothing at all. There have been several buildings on the site and according to Wikipedia, the current Ashcombe House was originally part of the much larger mid-eighteenth century structure, and is an L-shaped three-bay survival of the eastern wing.

Once we emerged from the wooded grounds we found difficulty in finding the route back to Tollard Royal. We followed a tarmac road which meandered through the countryside confident that we were on the right route.

Near the end of the road we realised that we had somehow missed a turning as we were back at the "delightful track at the bottom of a sloping hillside" as described earlier. Chastened, we followed the track back to the village pond.

Conditions: very pleasant.

Distance: 4.5 miles.

Map: Explorer 118: Shaftesbury & Cranborne Chase.

Rating: four stars.

Source: 100 walks in Wiltshire (The Crowood Press). The walks in this book are very inviting, and we have done several of them, but the walk descriptions seem always to be lacking in precise detail. We have several times got lost.