PREFACE

The coming of the motor car rapidly brought about the demise of the gated road but the gate at the top of Eggardon Hill remained until the seventies.

To approach the Hill through the gate from the east gives one a spectacular view of West Dorset countryside with Pilsdon Pen and Lewesdon Hill on the skyline.

It was only yards from the gate that the events of the first story happened. The other pieces are almost all about the place and its surrounds. About the dog which worked the sheep on the steep slopes, about the village pubs and the people who went to market in Bridport.

The final story is fiction but it seemed safe to assume that at least two people from the parish would be involved in the Monmouth Rising. I was most surprised to find that assumption proved right when researching another subject. Two Faures took part in that ill fated adventure and there is a Faures’ Mead in the parish today.

I lived and farmed on the northern slope of the Hill for thirty odd years and the cover illustration with its Dorset gate captures the mood of the place exactly, hard and unkind.

H.S. Poole.

Bridport 1987.