Beech avenue

This avenue is not yet at its autumnal best, but the strong winds forecast for this area might well strip off all the leaves they reach their full glory.

William John Bankes (born 1776) was as a young man an aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington and became an active Member of Parliament. In 1835 he inherited Kingston Lacy in Dorset.

One of the first things he did was to plant a beech avenue lining the road from near the house’s entrance drive to beyond Badbury Rings. The road was a turnpike, and the Bankes family enjoyed the revenue from it. The avenue was a birthday gift to William John’s mother, Frances, and there were 365 trees on one side of the road for each day of the year and 366 on the other, for a leap year.


Today the road is the B3082, the main route between Wimborne and Blandford. The trees are not surprisingly showing signs of age and disease. The National Trust have so far replaced some seventy of them with hornbeams, which are just as attractive but are better able to withstand the disadvantages of being alongside a busy road.