Dorset Wildlife Trust Project: King's Lane Orchard

 "...turn around and walk along this lane, past the pub. Follow the lane down to the thatched cottage on your right, the orchard you are looking for is the one to the left of the cottage, not the orchard on the right of the cottage. You'll not miss it".

I'd arrived in Powerstock looking for King's Lane Orchard, a remnant of the many cider orchards which once surrounded the village a century ago. This isolated village clings tightly to a steep slope, a vertiginous crossroads by the church contains a many-directional signpost of ancient construction, but the lanes radiating off from here are less well documented. I'd walked in the opposite direction to my intended destination. However, meeting a local, unpacking his car, he put me back on the correct path. Maybe I should have brought a map? 

King's Lane, thatched cottage and the orchard

 I headed past the pub and began a short descent along King's Lane, a lane just wide enough for a car, and reaching the cottage (Hillside Cottage) I could see the small gate into the orchard. Best of all the sun was shining.

Bought by Dorset Wildlife Trust in 2008, this 1 hectare orchard was opened to the public in April 2009 when schoolchildren sang a song celebrating spring and apple blossom, written by Dorset based Tim Laycock, before they headed off on a mini-beasts & treasure hunt. It was a lot quieter today. Ahead of me were the remnant apple trees of an industry which once supported both the local economy, people and wildlife, a mix of interests which ensures cider orchards hold a place in nature conservation under Biodiversity Action Plans.

Entering from the lane, the orchard gently slopes away from you, down to a small stream. The research notes I had brought with me mentioned the ground can be wet and boggy by the stream, which, even after a number of rain-free weeks, proved accurate later on in my visit. What these notes did not mention was that my arrival would be heralded by a kingfisher flying along this stream calling its thin, but penetrating, call. It was a good start.

There were possibly a dozen apple trees in the orchard, many surrounded by a fence to deter the grazing sheep who are occasionally brought here to help with the biodiversity management. As one of just two orchards owned by Dorset Wildlife Trust, the other being Broad Oak which I visited in March, these community reserves mix habitat management with general visitor use. The website suggests visitors can wander around, or pick a spot for a picnic. I did the former. 

The reserve is roughly the letter P in shape, having a larger section by the cottage, leading to a small linear area by a five-bar gate and a second entrance. Sadly the apple trees on this visit had finished their blossom, small fruitlets were forming already. Despite being on the edge of the village this is a very quiet spot. No vehicles moved along the lane while I was here, leaving the only noise to come from chiffchaff, chaffinch, robin, blackbird, long tailed tit, jackdaw, rook and greenfinch (and the kingfisher of course).

It doesn't take long to wander about the main orchard area, and soon I found myself exploring the stream. The stream isn't obvious from the entrance, but scramble under some low branches and a quite delightful hidden riparian feature is revealed. 

Looking up at the orchard from the stream

Here it is all mossy and dark, light is shaded from the ground by overhead sycamore and hazel, ferns and ivy cascading down the steep stream bank. I couldn't see any fish from the bank side, but its gravelly bed would be ideal for bullhead, stickleback or minnows. Neither were there any signs of otter, but they are present here.

As I walked along the stream edge it suddenly became boggy and climbing back into the orchard itself I found I was standing on quite spongy ground. It is quite possible that if I had noticed the presence of a large clump of yellow flag iris, I may have realised I was walking towards a wet flush trickling out at the bottom of the orchard slope. These iris were just coming into flower, and looked perfect. Just beyond these, recent habitat clearance had been completed, with the scars on the ground from the removal of brambles and nettles.

It is a lovely spot and had I brought a picnic (and rug as there are no benches) I could have stayed here longer with a flask and some sandwiches. Not having these with me, I slowly climbed back up to the lane while trying to avoid trampling the many cuckoo flower peeping through the grassland. I like the fact that Dorset Wildlife Trust have secured this orchard. All too easily it could have been left to decline or worse still, being on the edge of the village, have suffered from residential development.

Date of visit: 14th May 2026. 16:00 to 16:45 (leaving the church at 17:30)

Selective list of species: Kingfisher, long tailed tit, chaffinch, chiffchaff, robin, blackbird. Apple spp., cuckoo flower, meadow buttercup, harts tongue fern, ivy, moss spp. bramble, nettle, Sycamore, hazel, oak with blackthorn hedge, Fresh molehills.

Postscript: 1 of 2

After visiting King's Lane Orchard, and being in the village, I made a pilgrimage to see the grave of the naturalist and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop. A Yorkshireman by birth, in his later years he lived at the nearby hamlet of West Milton. Allsop fell in love with this part of West Dorset and championed protecting the area from development, including the threat of oil exploration. His grave lies apart from others of the same era in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, in the centre of the village. I sat on a nearby bench with a flask of tea I'd collected from the car. The sun was warm, there was birdsong everywhere, lichens colonising his headstone. Not a bad place to rest in peace, whether that is alive, or dead. 

Postscript: 2 of 2 

On May 19th 2026 I received a lovely email from a Richard Dolman. Now 88 years of age, as a farm student aged 16 in 1954 he worked at King's Farm, a mile or so along the lane so named.  Mr Dolman was actually commenting on a 2020 post of mine about Eggardon Hill. However its relevance to this post makes me want to include a link to his memories here, published in March 2013. Thank you Mr Dolman for your memories.

Mickeypops muck and cow whispering:

https://westdorsetconfidential.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/mickeypops-and-cow-whispering/

Allsop's Haggerdown Hill

From its summit on a clear day one can see all the way from Dartmoor sixty miles to the west around to the Isle of Wight sixty miles to the east.  In Thomas Hardy’s novel The Trumpet-Major Eggardon Hill is called ‘Haggerdon’.

And it is somewhere I have been visiting since the summer of 1982.

I've loved this part of West Dorset ever since as a teenager coming on a two week holiday to Toller Porcorum, with my parents. Before then we'd oft holidayed in Bournemouth (including the infamous hot summer of 1976). Despite the 350 mile 8 hour drive from our North East home my parents loved Dorset, but always gravitated towards the east, land of furze heath, sea stacks and long sandy beaches. Why we ended up at Toller Porcorum that year I know not. Though I'm pleased we did. Something clicked. If memory serves me down the years, I recall spending much of the holiday lying in the bath of this holiday cottage reading Far From the Madding Crowd. The huge windows were wide open, not a breath of wind, my view a heat shimmering steep hill hard by the hamlet. Birds sang, swallows swooped and as many a romantic teenager before I enveloped myself in a sepia mist of that imagined artistic self lost in a bedrock chalk landscape.  

Which is interesting as these days I take many sepia photographs such as this one of the view down to Maiden Newton with Eggardon on the far right horizon.

That holiday as a teenager was remarkable for a single moment. Most people have pivotal moments in life, moments which change life and direction forever. Mine was asking my father if I could go for a drive (I'd recently passed my driving test) on the last evening before we trudged back to the north. In the passionate musing of a smitten teenager, I dreaded going back. 

It was mid July, warm, the sun setting slowly, allowing a golden hue to caress the fields and I just drove out of Toller Porcorum with no specific plan in mind. I headed east, not west. Coming back to the cottage I found myself on the Roman road climbing steeply out of Winterbourne Abbas. Vivid remain the memory of excitement, this straight, but crooked, Roman road was bathed in late evening summer light. Tall grasses brushed by the car as I sped along, windows down, I was free, enjoying that freedom teenage boys love when being away from parents. And then I came to a crossroad. In front of me was a single lane track, curiosity bore down on my decision where to go. Ahead. 

Only on writing this piece have I discovered this lane is called King's Lane. For decades it simply was the track on Eggardon Hill, a track with a view which took my breath away on that summers evening.  I stopped the car, got out and stood memorised. Silence, a meandering lane grass growing up through the middle, a hill fort to my left and precipitously to my right a steep steep drop into what I now know is Powerstock Common and beyond. Northumberland had huge skies and empty landscapes, but nothing like this. Of course I was not the first to discover it.

For the last few years of his life, the late great countryside writer Kenneth Allsop lived under the shadow of this "arrowhead plateau" as he called it. It was to become the backbone to this Yorkshire-man's life, as it has become to me. It draws me towards it by unseen threads, once pulled taut resistance is impossible.  

A decade before I discovered this Wessex Height, Allsop in his book In the Country elegantly summed up what Eggardon, or Haggerdown as he called it, meant to him;  I understand fully - it would be futile to add to his words, 

"This rooftop of turfed limestone is a place for kestrels and orchids, for butterflies like flecks of the sky itself, the chalkhill blue and the Adonis blue, they waver among the scabious and harebells, vast angels against the miniaturized woods and barns on the unfolding tracts below"

Allsop continues..

 " On this last great limb, a domination of wind, cloud and turf, there is a sense of pure form and power of rock-formation which I have felt nowhere else. Ahead the vale of clay dissolves into the Devon border"

One of the absolute joys of moving to Somerset in the early 1990's was being able to visit Eggardon as a day tripper. Before my move south, living in the North East of England and despite the distance, I had visited and re-visited this rooftop of turfed limestone every year, sometimes more than once. During a mad moment when I was feeling especially low, I spent a solitary hour on the Hill, after the 16 hour round trip. Youth was on my side for the energy needed to stay awake that long. Luckily I can now head down there as and when the pull of the threads draws me in. As it did this week, only 6 weeks after my last visit. The two days could be no different.

On my visit in May, Dorset was (as indeed was most of England) in the midst of the sunniest and driest spring for decades. On that day the land was parched, 30 degree heat bore down on these turfed ramparts making the day stifling for the few specks of sky I observed fluttering along it's flanks. 

My visit six weeks later reversed the mood. Rain bearing clouds scudded across the vanishing clay lands. Uncoordinated raindrops threatened to, but failed to, materialise into more organised downpours. And the wind blew. It was exactly why I walked along the track. The energy remained from a dilapidated tropical storm which had barrelled over the Atlantic this week. Low pressure squalls added to the feeling of isolation. I had the Hill to myself, just how I like it, though I never feel alone here. I'm always aware that many feet have trod this way since Eggardon's hill-fort was created around 50BC. Each and every owner of those passing feet leaves a presence, unseen, though still felt today.

I'd come to take photographs. Eggardon is almost impossible to either paint or photograph and do it justice.  The landscape is simply huge, omni-directional and never-ending.  I took many many more than are visible here, they will provide reference for the winter months, for I will conquer this image on canvas.  

  Until then I'll leave the last words to Kenneth Allop.

"As ever the gigantic hulk of Haggerdown filled the sky...........to earn the right to love a place you have to learn about it bit by bit. Dear Wessex - 'that wondrous world of sap and leaves' of Hardy"

Reference:

Allsop, Kenneth. (1972). In the Country. Hamish Hamilton