OS Explorer map OL15, Purbeck & South Dorset: Poole, Dorchester, Weymouth & Swanage – I own this map, and had visited before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 18th September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Axminster, Abbotsbury, Weymouth, Yetminster
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 2 of the trip; for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead. The Previous Visits section will be new though.
I’d started my second full day of the trip in Tavistock, from where I’d travelled by way of Okehampton to Exeter and on to Axminster. My final destination for the day village of Yetminster inland in Dorset, and to get there I planned to take the X53 bus to Weymouth, and the train from there to Yetminster. That X53 route is one of a few branded “Jurassic Coaster”, forming an impressively nice, frequent, tourist-oriented network of long-ish-distance bus routes unsuprisingly covering the Jurassic Coast – a long area of the Devon and Dorset coastline known for its fossils and dramatic rock formations. It was a fairly quiet double-decker bus with giant windows so there were some nice views as we passed through coastal countryside and the towns of Lyme Regis and Bridport – the latter of which I visited last year.
It was long bus leg from Axminster to Weymouth, and I wanted to make at least one stop to explore somewhere interesting: I chose the village of Abbotsbury, in this map area. Abbotsbury came after a section of the route where the bus had been high up, travelling along a ridge labelled Limekiln Hill on my map, and when we started descending towards the village, the most amazing view opened up – I could see the full length of Chesil Beach right out to the Isle of Portland, and nearer at hand could see the building that had drawn me to Abbotsbury: the medieval St Catherine’s Chapel, sitting atop a hill outside the village.
As planned, I got out at Abbotsbury, and stashed my bag in a hedge while I did the short walk up the hill to St Catherine’s Chapel.
The chapel was built as a pilgrimage chapel, which makes sense as the top of the hill would be a bit of an odd location for an ordinary village church. It was indeed in a very nice spot, sitting on a cow-grazed hilltop with the same great view out to Chesil Beach and Portland that I’d seen from the bus. The village itself, once I headed down, was a stereotypically postcard-pretty English village, oozing with thatched yellow stone cottages and so on. Unfortunately I needed to get moving towards Weymouth to catch the infrequent train onward to Yetminster, so I didn’t get a chance to explore the ruined Abbey, but oh well!
I therefore got on another Jurassic Coaster, which turned out to be an open-topped bus! It wasn’t a particularly warm day but I decided to brave it, and it was enjoyable enough, though it would’ve been nicer on the first half of the hourney, I think, as that had better views. I had a little problem in that when I got on the first bus at Axminster, I’d asked for a ticket that would let me go through to Weymouth but get off and back on in-between, and was given what looked like an ordinary single for £7. (This whole holiday would’ve been a lot cheaper if I were doing it now – I’m writing as the government’s £2 cap on single bus fares is in operation! It’s been renewed a couple of times now, so we’ll have to see how long it lasts.) Getting on my second bus, the driver told me it was invalid for this purpose and I should’ve been given a return, which allows breaking the journey in this way – fortunately though, he let me off this once.
Weymouth had a reasonably nice seafront, with views out to the cliffs further along the Jurassic Coast. The rest of the town was pretty drab and unremarkable though. I needed to buy some dinner to have in my B&B that evening, but it being a Sunday evening, I only had a choice of several dingy corner shops – in the end, after rejecting some 12-year-olds who wanted me to buy beer for them, I ended up with the somewhat odd combination of some instant noodles, tinned chickpea curry and a tin of sweetcorn, which I’d try to heat up with my B&B room kettle as well as I could!
My last travel stint of the day would be a train up the Heart of Wessex Line, which runs from Weymouth to Bristol via Yeovil. It’s a rural route with trains only every two hours, and I took just the first forty minutes or so, out of this map area and up to the village of Yetminster, where I checked into my B&B for the night!
Previous visits
I’ve been to this map area once before, on a trip to Dorset in December 2014, which I don’t remember all that well or have many photos of, and won’t describe in detail. I do know that I visited the well-known Lulworth Cove, of which I managed to take only the below rather disappointing photo, that makes it look a lot less impresssive than most other photos on the internet! Oh well.
Visiting all the maps! 