Grand Tour of England Day 16

We left our site at East Prawle in what we thought was good time to reach Bev and Tim in Wimborne for lunch. I met Bev almost 40 years ago at a women’s group in Suffolk. We were both in CND and both married to men in the RAF and then for a while taught in the same school. She divorced to marry Tim.

As expected the narrow roads out to the A road was slow but we hadn’t bargained for the A roads being even more tricky. Every village had such narrow bits that there were long jams of traffic stuck in places a lorry had met a van. Neither could reverse as each vehicle had cars behind them, thus taking a long time to sort out the situation. It took 1.5 hours to drive 30 miles. When we reached the dual carriageways around Exeter we sped along but then there were miles of tailbacks on the road near Bridport. All for 50 yards of roadworks we were stuck for 45 minutes. It was tiring.

But at 2pm we reached their house and were honoured to find Tim had taken a day off work to greet us. He directed Mr C into their drive and we sat in their lovely garden enjoying catching up. We couldn’t work out how long it was since we had last met - 6 or 7 years.

After lunch we drove for 10 minutes to reach a place from where we had a lovely walk across some of the Kingston Lacy property to Bradbury Rings, an enormous iron age hill fort. We could see the Isle of Wight. The limestone harboured different types of orchid. I took the blip of Tim by the NT Kingston Lacy sign - he is in charge of the house and land and has a large staff to manage. It has been a stressful time but he loves the job. The walk was a brisk 5 miles - Tim is long-legged and 25 years younger than Mr C and kept us going at a cracking pace.

Tim cooked a delicious veggie moussaka for dinner. We also had a very creamy, salty Dorset cheese. They offered us an en suite bedroom but Mr C preferred to sleep in the van. It was a fun evening full of laughter.