You have to wonder what happened to the Durotriges nobility, and why they abandoned such a magnificent fortification when the Romans came. In the 1930s, Maiden Castle’s primary archeologist published a colorful paper detailing a horrific Roman attack on the hillfort, but later studies have rejected this. Archeologists now believe that the Durotriges rulers just left. They moved to the new Roman civil settlement, donned togas and kept themselves warm with hypocausts instead of open fires in the middle of timber huts. Honestly, you can’t blame them.

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If you are feeling a bit peckish after walking around this huge Iron Age fortification, you are in luck. It is a pleasant 1.5-mile walk from The Poet Laureate, the first-rate pub in the heart of Poundbury. (Follow the lane back until it passes over the beltway, then walk up the paved path on the left; the views back towards Maiden Castle are great.) The Poet Laureate is almost unique—a newly built pub that’s been turned into a traditional village local by its owner. This was so contrary to the normal trend that its owner was declared “Beer Drinker of 2002.” Its owner happens to be Prince Charles, who built it as an integral part of his experiment in creating a humane urban environment, named Poundbury (see British Heritage, May 2007).

Charles, it turns out, is a champion of the village local as a place where all the classes mix and meet, and has done it up right. Good food and good local ale complement a walk around Poundbury Market, an architectural wonder that mimics a traditional market square.

From here, downtown Dorchester is less than a mile to the east down one of the town’s Roman roads. Dorchester’s commercial district is about par for an English market town—dense, noisy, full of bustle and hurry, with lots of shops to poke into. It’s fairly large, taking up 2,000 feet along High Street, then going two or three blocks deep to its south.
In this area are no fewer than four mu­seums, covering every aspect of local history, geology and culture. The best part, however, lies one block north. Take the B3147 (another Roman road) past the statue of local novelist-poet Thomas Hardy and the Dorset County offices, then take a dogleg over the River Frome, to the riverside footpath.

Along this path is more than half a mile of some of the most intensely beautiful scenery in England. Never more than three blocks from downtown, the riverside walk will lead you past water meadows and weirs, thatched cottages and woods. Be sure to cross the low, stone arch bridge, for a fine river view, then a view of Hangman’s Cottage, a remarkably pretty thatched cottage once home to the town’s executioner. Return to the river path, which now follows the town’s millstream, crystal clear and pebble-bottomed, alive with birds, with woods and meadows and views to the historic neighborhoods. Here, 18th-century town houses rise straight up from the river bed, and throw cast iron bridges over to the path from their rear garden gates. There’s a short circular path off to the left that explores the wooded environment of the water meadows, then a fine little urban garden. The path exits on High Street, on the eastern edge of downtown.

The literary minded will note that Thomas Hardy describes this walk in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Even if you are not particularly literary—or are unimpressed by Hardy’s dense Victorian writings—Thomas Hardy’s Cottage is worth a visit. Run by the National Trust, the cottage sits 4.2 miles east of town, a distance Hardy walked every day of his childhood to attend school in town (although if you decide to take a taxi, no one will blame you). The cottage represents a typical yeoman farmer’s home, furnished as when Hardy lived there, with exceptional gardens of the sort a successful farmer might have had. It backs up onto Puddletown Forest, several square miles of open heath, coppice and hardwoods, through which you can see the embanked remains of yet another Roman road.

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