VISIT TO DORCHESTER-ON-THAMES ON 12 OCTOBER 2023

By Liz Toms and Michael Redley

The rendezvous was at the George Hotel in the High Street. Twenty-five of us met there for coffee on 12 October with our Blue Badge guide, Debby Keegan. Her task was to show us first the Abbey; then its museum in the old guest house of the Abbey when it was going concern; and finally a walk around the town.

It was drizzling gently as we crossed the road to the Abbey. But much of the tour was to be indoors, and by the time we got out into the open, the skies had lightened up. There was almost sunshine by the time the tour ended at 1.30.

The Abbey is an amazing place at any time, but it was particularly wonderful that we had it to ourselves and could wander around freely. Debbie introduced the main features. She had first come across it organizing tours of the town for enthusiasts of the Midsomer Murders television drama, discovering what a ‘jewel’ it was, which all too few people knew about. There is so much to see, although with major ‘rearrangements’ of the fabric at the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century and through Gilbert Scott’s massive restoration in the nineteenth century, one sympathized with our guide as she tried to chart a clear line through its story.

Fortunately, the remaining fragments generally speak for themselves, and we had plenty of time to explore them, although a number of people said they’d want to come back to do the Abbey justice. Among the extraordinary things to see was the large wall medieval wall painting of St Christopher discovered in a recent renovation; the tomb of a knight, whose sculpted form had inspired Henry Moore; the extraordinary and renowned ‘Jesse window’; and the eighteenth-century memorial to Sarah Fletcher of Clifton Hamden, who, we heard, had committed suicide, on whose tomb it said that she had been ‘a martyr to excessive sensibility’. A union flag which was used to cover the coffins of British prisoners of war at Kuching in Sarawak during the Second World War hangs almost forgotten in a corner.

The corner of the abbey containing St Birinus’ shrine, attracting pilgrims from Britain and further afield, apparently rebuilt to its original designs only in 1964, also has a small but wonderful roundel of the oldest glass in the Abbey dating the middle of the thirteenth century. St Birinus, the pronunciation of whose name gave Debbie a certain amount of difficulty, had been one of the original missionaries to Britain from the Pope in the eighth century. His death as a result of a snake bite resulted in a stigma being attached to snakes in and around the town, which is referred to in the inscription on one of the Abbey’s bells. As a centre for pilgrimage, the Abbey grew to its considerable size out of the offerings of the pilgrims. Clearly this a central part of Dorchester’s story, and I’d liked to have known more.

We were very grateful for the gallery, built recently on the site of one side of the Abbey’s cloister, which contains carved masonry found in and around the Abbey and gives some kind of account of the different phases of its construction. Also extremely helpful was the little museum manned by knowledgeable volunteers which had been specially opened for us. Its displays filled in many gaps in knowledge on the earlier history of the town as a prehistoric, Roman, and Saxon centre. Displays included objects which are still being turned up in the gardens of the town. A coin of AD 78 may have marked the end of its military phase when a civilian Roman settlement developed which underlies the modern town.

One of the guides in the museum struck a more chilling note. She said that what had been done to the sites of more than a dozen neolithic, bronze, and iron age structures north and west of the town through gravel workings and the construction of the Dorchester by-pass after the Second World War would not be permitted today. One could only marvel at the traces of what had been there, glimpsed on aerial photographs taken before the Second World War – a cursus monument, barrows, and cemeteries of what had evidently once been perhaps the densest area of settlement and ceremony from 1,000 BC to 1,000 AD in the whole of the middle Thames.

Our guide then walked us down to Bridge End, where the bridge crossed the Thames until it was replaced by the current structure in the eighteenth century, and then back along the High Street, noting the many coaching
inns originating when the town was on the stagecoach road to Oxford.

It was impossible to do justice to Dorchester in a couple of hours on a rainy autumn morning. But with Debbie and the volunteers in the museum, we did our best. There can be few places that in a few yards provide so rich a glimpse into so many facets of Britain’s past.