Because late August into… well, halfway into October, really, was incredibly busy, I began to fantasise about taking a weekend away from it all. Glamping with a hot tub, maybe. A cottage in the countryside. Somewhere cosy where I could have long lazy mornings, do some writing, not think about work or Guiding. But glamping was either expensive or a long way away and the only cottage that looked tempting literally overlooks a school, which isn’t an issue from Friday afternoon to Sunday, especially at half term but it was offputting. And so I ended up at Kingston Country Courtyard, apparently a popular rural wedding venue, in the Purbecks overlooking Corfe Castle. And for a little context, I’m up to a nice round 30 Girlguiding events this half term; that’s just September and October and only 14 of them are my own regular Ranger & Brownie meetings, which is less than half. So I was ready for a weekend off, away from responsibilities, away from the dishwasher and the clothes on the floor, just a weekend of being lazy.
Friday
Didn’t start out all that lazily. I went to Studland with a brand new shiny digital National Trust card, parked at the Bankes Arms and walked out to Old Harry Rock. I try to kayak out there at least once every summer but it’s been a while since I’ve walked. I walk 84km a month every month (except in September when it just got away from me) since May 2020 and I had two days left in October and 5km left to walk. Well, I don’t need to do anything Saturday beyond my self-imposed 2km daily walk because it was a more than 4km round trip from the car park to the church to Old Harry and back.
The church is interesting. It dates back to Norman times and looks like some kind of defensive structure, with a grey big windowless grey tower in the middle, a stone nave on one end and a sanctuary on the other, which look like but are not later additions. Inside, the rounded arch between the chancel and sanctuary, coming up a millennium old, is badly cracked. In the 19th century, the church was in danger of collapsing but was shored up in what feels like a very ham-fisted way but you can’t really see any of it and it’s still standing now. Halloween score? 2/10, very old but not at all creepy but did have to walk through the graveyard to get to the door. Not creepy either.
Then I walked out to Old Harry Rocks. Halloween score 5/10 because it’s walking on top of a chalk cliff, although the majority of the walk is kept well back from the cliff edge and woods and shrubbery do their best to make sure you’re unaware the cliff edge is even there. People are far too blase about cliff edges. They’re probably alright except the few days after a big storm but sometimes they just spontaneously collapse. Sometimes people lose their balance. I’m keeping away from the edges. I’m not going to complain that it was warm and sunny enough that I did it in sandals, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece that I had to take off because it was too hot. It’s not very autumnal but imagine that I’m wearing cord trousers in a colour called mustard that’s actually a corally-orange colour. Autumnal. I wear them in late October and then forget I own them for another year.
It was a bit of torturous drive back Corfe behind a grockle in a campervan who drove the entire way at 20mph. I even stopped at the viewpoint to enjoy the panorama over Poole Harbour and still caught up with it only a mile or so away. And then it went all the way through Corfe and turned right exactly where I was turning right and we crawled up the hill in 2nd gear because someone thinks country lanes are too scary. But when I got to the top, to my home for the weekend, it was worth it.
I wanted to go glamping or something like that. A hot tub and some peace and quiet away from the world. Glamping being expensive or not having a hot tub or being a three hour plus drive away, I ended up in a Forest Suite room at the Kingston County Courtyard, which is a somewhat rustic wedding venue; a square of old-fashioned stone cottages surrounding a courtyard, with a second square of rooms above it. Its Facebook page claims it’s a 16th century Purbeck stone grade II listed barn, but I’m at least 90% sure the courtyard at least isn’t that old. Maybe I just haven’t found the old barn itself yet. I reckon that must be in the upper courtyard.
The “rooms” within the courtyard are like miniature terraced houses with big front windows and mine is a double-level one. Downstairs I have a living room with a comfy grey sofa with room to sprawl – kind of an L-shape, I don’t know what the right word is. Opposite my sofa is the bathroom, which has an actual bath, and then up the creakiest stairs is the bedroom in the eaves. I suspect it has underfloor heating because I don’t believe the October sunshine coming in the window can make the floor that toasty, and a stone wall at the back and a table made out of rough wood and copper pipes. For someone who’s had a busy few months and a bad week (toothache; entirely my own fault), it’s kind of like being in paradise. I brought my laptop because I want to spend some time finishing off the last blogs before I go away and actually spend a couple of hours writing the Bath Book, which I haven’t touched since at least June, and sleeping in late with no responsibilities and as of 17:01 on Friday evening, I think it’s going to do the job so well that I’m going to wish every weekend that I was back here. Halloween score? 1/10. There’s not so much as an orange bunch of dried flowers to remind you of what’s going on this weekend but there is a plastic pumpkin bucket of sweets on the desk at reception. This is just cosy vibes and so far it’s exactly what I wanted.
Having very specifically requested a bath, once I’d caught up on blog post so far, put 30 minutes into the Bath Book and spent far too much time scrolling mindlessly, I got in my bath where, for once, I didn’t scroll mindlessly on my tablet, although I brought it and its waterproof case in with me. Part of the purpose of this weekend is just to have a quiet weekend, part of it is to do some writing, hence bringing the whole laptop, and part of it is to read, so I devoured the fourth Thursday Next book on my Kindle. The eighth one in the series has just come out, some 12 years after the seventh, so I’ve got some catching up to do. No point reading the new one if you can’t remember what happened in most of the rest of it.
And then I went upstairs, closed the blinds on my forest view, opened the window and got into a massive comfy bed with far too many pillows.
Saturday
I could have done without the giant wasp-like thing that started buzzing furiously in the window somewhere around 7am. Not trusting it not to figure out its way out from behind the blinds, I gathered my stuff and went downstairs to lounge on the comfy sofa until breakfast time, which was very specifically at 9. Could have done without the neighbours in number 3 as well, who brought a toddler which started burbling about the time I got up. I could just about have lived with that too, although I came here for peace and quiet and not to listen to someone else’s toddler but the parents started having an actual fight at 7.30 in the morning – I think he’d looked at her phone and they thought a country hotel at the crack of dawn was the ideal time to start yelling about it.
I got up for breakfast for 9am as agreed and there was such a heavy mist as I crossed the courtyard that I wanted to rub my eyes free of it. Don’t love the mist but it’s more typical autumn weather than we had yesterday and you can’t deny that there’s something kind of festive about a heavy grey haze, if the festival in question is Halloween. I was directed to my table and told I could help myself to the buffet but I could also order hot food. Nah, buffet’ll do me fine. They had a conveyor toaster and I very quickly realised that the bread has to go through twice if you want something that you can reasonably call toast. I also accidentally spilled apple juice all over the floor because it comes from a dispenser with a tap that you have to turn back quite hard to turn it off properly.
Then I came back to my tiny apartment and I’m now writing this while lying on my sofa and deciding what time I want to actually go out. I do want to stay here and write and be lazy and just enjoy this space but I also have to do some Halloween-y things and my last two kilometres of walking. I went to Corfe Castle, which you can see from the gardens by the upper courtyard or from the end of the drive.
Corfe Castle is a ruin, a castle begun around 1089 as a hunting lodge for William the Conqueror – conqueror he may have been but the man was into building things; as well as Corfe Castle, he’s responsible for the first wave of Norman-style cathedrals, including my beloved Winchester. It went through several royal owners before Elizabeth I handed it to Sir Christopher Hatton. By 1635, it had been bought by Sir John Bankes, the Lord Chief Justice and a staunch Royalist. That’s how the castle came to be ruined. It’s not just the fact that it’s coming up a thousand years old. It’s that the Bankes household held out at Corfe Castle during the Civil War against the Parliamentarian forces, right up until a traitor within opened a sally port and let the enemy in. Unbeknownst to Lady Mary Bankes, he’d also brought in a pack of turncoats and the castle was simultaneously attacked from both inside and out and the castle was taken. By order of Parliament, it was slighted, which means that it was destroyed in such a way to exert control and humiliation over the former owner. That was somewhere around 1645. In 1660, the monarchy was restored and Corfe Castle was given back to the Bankes family. They opted not to rebuild it but instead to move the family to Kingston Lacey, a large house still standing near Wimborne. The Bankes were big landowners; besides Corfe Castle and the Kingston Lacey estate, they owned a huge chunk of Studland, including presumably the church I was at yesterday.
I actually wanted to go to Corfe Castle not because I had a shiny new National Trust card burning a hole in my pocket but because they were doing a Halloween event; storytelling in the outer bailey called Gruesome Tales for the Morbidly Curious. John, the storyteller, works in a school during term time but spends his holidays doing this sort of thing. He had three stories. The first involved pulling me out (mostly for my orange striped tights and cloak) and getting me to pick the volunteers. We each had a prop to wear – the brave knight, the stalwart steed, the old crone (that was me), the princess and the blacksmith’s daughter and we went through a story where the audience had to shout various things as particular words were said and we each had a thing to read out. Good fun! Then we had a story of a puppet learning not to pick his nose, which meant shouting “No, Conrad, no, you must not stray! You must be good while the teacher’s away!” and then the third story was about a demon terrorising nearby Wareham with his horrifying breath because he didn’t brush his teeth. All good stories and told by an absolute master storyteller but I was expecting either something more generally supernatural for Halloween or some of the horror stories of Purbeck.
I came home for a couple of hours to charge my phone and rest my feet, then it was time to go to Swanage for the Screams and Steam Halloween train. It had been running all day for children but now it was going 14+ and the screams were going to step up a bit. We weren’t allowed onto the platform until gone 7 for the 7.30 train, to find ghosts and monsters hanging from the roof, a display of glowing inflatable pumpkins and a “pyrotechnic display” to keep us entertained until the fences were removed and we were actually allowed to board. The pyrotechnic display wasn’t fireworks; it was a fire dance, with sticks, fans, meteors and a flaming hoop performed on the opposite side of the platform. I’m more or less past the age where I want to spin fire poi but it reminded me that there are glowing spinning toys I’d like to spend more time trying out.
Then it was train time. Because we were only allowed on five minutes before departure, we had people still arguing over seats as we started to move and in the chaos, a child sobbing just annoyed me, that someone had got their kid past the 14+ rule and it was demonstrating quite clearly why this was teens and up only. Except then the kid came walking up the carriage, dressed in an all yellowy-white outfit and makeup and asking for his mummy and I realised this was the first of the spooky spirits to come up the train.
Second was an undead WWI soldier asking where his friends were in a way that got really old really soon. The lights were off and the train was decorated in Halloween garlands and spiders and undead things but they’d got a set of red and green laser lights that flashed and spun and were just generally really annoying and that combined with “Have you seen my friends?” repeated twenty times had me fed up with this whole thing before it even started.
Part of the fun of a steam train ride is hanging around on the platform to see the steam locomotive, either at Swanage or at Norden, the other end, but we weren’t allowed off the train at Norden and we were corralled at Swanage so that we couldn’t see it there either. If you’re going to go on a train that has a giant glowing skull mounted on the front, you want an opportunity to see the skull! If you can’t get up close to the loco, you at least want to be able to stick your head out of the window to smell the smoke, get smut in your eye and listen to the chuffing and we didn’t get that either. In fact, because it was dark and all the windows were shut and therefore misted up within seconds of us boarding, you couldn’t really see that you were moving at all. You could have laid out seats in a barn and had a similar effect.
It got better. We started to have actual spirits visiting us – Ginny the witch, a servant girl whose (married) boyfriend never made it to Wareham on the train, the undead soldier again with an actual story, a smuggler and Mary Bankes herself, who each came through and performed their little story before moving on to the next compartment and doing it again, and once I wiped my window and pressed my nose to it, I began to see the landscape moving against the sky but on the whole, a bit underwhelming.
Sunday
The toddler was still next door. As I got ready to go to breakfast, I saw the family coming back from their earlier slot but I didn’t hear another sound out of either the child or the parents. I had a golden labrador in the room on the other side, which I saw at breakfast and I didn’t see the table-height St Bernard until they were walking out of the room. It was misty again. Saturday had brightened up by the time I went out but Sunday looked likely to stay disgusting.
Checkout was at 11. By 10:15, I’d finished this blog and was ready to pack up, take my stuff back to the car and checkout. I dithered over what to do on the way home but ultimately, it was a cold, grey, misty day, the sort of day when you don’t really want to do anything and so I didn’t. I just came home. But I’d had a nice day and a half in Purbeck, I’d had a walk by the sea and visited a medieval castle and been on the ghost train and even managed a few hours of relaxing in my rustic hotel suite and so… I just came home.