The Jurassic Electric Tour

Jurassic Electric is not a Steven Spielberg 3D holographic experience, it's a down to earth little company running guided tours on electric bikes around West Dorset. They are one of the very few with guides who take people to Littlebredy, the geographic focus of my upcoming Tour of All Tours for Inside Out Dorset Festival, so they were of obvious interest. The rest of the group was there for the birthday ride of this chap in blue leisure wear, the sun was shining and they were in good spirits.

The tour began with us assembling on a green and Martin our guide in the day-glo green T-shirt getting everyone sorted out with a bike adjusted to their size. We had a short explanation of the bikes and a test ride to get used to them. Although this looked like a formality I heard that it had happened that a woman turned up who was incapable of riding a bike (despite saying she could in advance) and had to end her day at this point as she would have been a serious liability. Harsh though that must have felt at the time, it was correct and I felt there was an eye for safety on the tour that was reassuring without being overbearing.

This is what makes the difference: the battery and motor tucked below the seat. We were told that there would be no problem of the battery running out over the distance of our tour, they are strong and, apparently, if used sparingly can be strung out over a full day's ride very effectively. I was making no such economising and wanted to see just what this baby could do. The hills out of Portesham gave ample opportunity to do this. 

Here is the group making a short stop to hear about a historical building. Usually on a bike I tend to resent making stops like this as the momentum, particularly in hills, pulls me ever forward. On these bikes however, starting and stopping on slopes was a doddle so they work very well for the rhythm of guiding a group of people which inevitably entails making occasional stops to regroup and to explain things.

We made a proper stop at a local vineyard where we were shown around and when the proprietor brought out a bottle of his red and white for us to sample we didn't need any convincing. I haven't tried a great deal of British wine and that which I have had has usually been homemade gut rot rather than the produce of commercial vineyards. My expectations were therefore pretty low. The wine was however, really a great deal better than I expected, I would have happily drunk another glass rather than looking for a plant pot to discretely pour it into. There was even the idea being put around the group of buying a bottle to drink immediately as a birthday toast. Wiser heads prevailed. Stopping at an interesting local business was a nice addition to the tour, it made it about more than just the cycling, we got to meet people, see a new place and hear about making wine in this part of the world. I'm quite sure this will lead to future customers for the vineyard so it really worked well on both sides. 

There were some great views from the spots by the side of the road we stopped at. Maiden Castle, the series of brown horizontal lines in the mid-distance, was pointed out to us with a brief explanation of its role as a iron age hill fort. The sceptics amongst us asked how can you have a fort with no real walls, just banks of earth and ditches. Maybe it's no great surprise the Romans managed to take it... It is a beautiful place nonetheless and worth a visit in its own right. With this tour however there was no time for that, or for further historical speculation, we were back on the saddle again with a hill to climb. 

On our way up that hill we passed a person lying flat on the grass beside the road with a bike lying on the grass behind her. Asking if he or she was OK (it wasn't easy to tell from when flat out), there was some stirring and eventually this older lady propped herself up and said she had just cycled up Hardy's Monument and the last time she'd been up on a bike  she was 17. She was recovering from the ordeal which was a lot tougher than she'd imagined. She had just bought a new road bike and was trying it out, she explained to us. When we suggested she might like to try an electric bike she scoffed at the very thought of it but looking at how wasted she was from the ascent I seriously think she would have benefitted from one. Actually, she was probably the best advert for the bikes that I could have imagined.

Now it was our turn to fight our way up the hill. It is not like riding an electric scooter that does all the work for you, we really do have to pedal. Having come up this same slop before on a section of the Tour de Manche with a bike loaded with kit I know precisely how much effort it requires and this was about half that. Some call it cheating but I daresay some people call cycling cheating and prefer to walk instead.

Excited to have made it up to the top, we pulled the bikes around the fence and, unlike the lady crashed out at the side of the road, we were all standing, smiling and even able to speak.

The view from Hardy's monument is terrific. It's a place that I could spend hours gazing out from on a good day like this. The last time I was up here was during a storm in February to do a geology tour when it was almost impossible to stand upright so powerful was the wind. It's difficult to reconcile the place in two such different states.

Descending from on high was easy, we rolled down Portesham Hill in no time at all, returned the bikes and headed over to the pub for a well earned pint. It was a friendly group who were most accommodating of a stranger like me. I left them deliberating over the steak or seafood linguine as I had to return to my hotel before sunset when by bike turned into a pumpkin. That, unfortunately, meant cycling back up the same hill I had not an hour previously flown down with such ease. It may be that the electric bikes create their own sense of necessity for I was expecting it to be a steely ordeal but, it finally turned out to be  basically OK. I am a regular cyclist and have a decent bike so am probably not the target public for Jurassic Electric as I am able to make my way up and down these steep Dorset Hills under my own steam. That said, the stops en route and the possibility of being in a mixed group with people like me and people less accustomed to such efforts does bring something of value. The proprietor of the hotel I was staying at told me about two couples who visited for a cycling holiday last year; the two guys were keen cyclists their girlfriends enthusiastic but less seasoned. After two days on the hills the bikes were ditched and it became a walking holiday instead...

I also rather liked the general atmosphere of the bike tour too; Martin and his partner who accompanied us, were clearly enjoying showing people around a part of the world they loved. When you have a guide who is in their element you usually see them at their best and, what they decide to show you also has greater weight as well. What's more, I can now see the point in electric bikes in a way I never did before. While I am unlikely to rush out and buy one for a good while yet, I have made a mental note to add one to my 70th birthday wish list. If, God forbid, I am still around and haven't been put away by then, I rather like the idea of wizzing about like a teenage-pensioner over hill and dale.

The Out of Date Tour: how the landscape is not as timeless as it may seem

After having spent the last 5 months in Beijing, working on a tour in rural Dorset is quite a change of gear. One thing that is quite certain, my lungs are appreciating the fresh air, I don't think I knew what fresh air was until I went to Beijing and got a good chance to experience its lack.

The cricket pitch was being used this time round so I talked to the batting team to find out about cricket tours. Unfortunately they were the home team, it was the fielding team who were the visitors coming from 'up North'. The pitch is quite idyllic, indeed it has been famously painted by David Inshaw. 

I realised the church deserved greater attention than I had previously given it and so I started in the church yard with the stones which are said to be on a ley line, at least that is the story I get from a book on Dorset stones and Earth Mysteries that finds significance in every stone.

The visitor's book proved to be very interesting as it is a record of people's visits to the village. Some come to remember a lost relative, other to discover one: there was a note from a Canadian family looking for their roots. I noticed a pilgrimage thrown in there too: a  bike ride to Canterbury. I remember making long bike rides before and doing so with a very different frame of reference, such as a trip from London to Sizewell nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast. I could try and call it a nuclear pilgrimage but I would be stretching a point as I basically wanted to ride and was looking for a destination to give the trip a sense of purpose. It is also good to remember that not all pilgrimages are deep spiritual experiences, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales reads as a more worldly holiday with a light religious packaging. 

My favourite entry was from one of the cricketer's who must have popping in while visiting the village for a match. I actually saw the team and so could understand his visit.

I then set off on a walk that I found in a 1983 guidebook to South Dorset. The book's directions got me going out of the village but the walk took an unexpected turn when I came across a couple of Danish students who had lost their way and were looking for the South Dorset Ridgeway (SDR). I was heading that way so could guide them and at the same time ask them all about their trip and how they ended up in Littlebredy. It seems as if it was a mistake that brought them there. They had been given a lift from a motorist and were dropped off not on the coast path but nearer the inland route (SDR). Following my out of date guidebook, I too would get lost as the signs were decayed and information out of date. Fortunately I had a proper map, too, that got us out of the village and them to the their path.

After many questions about their trip, I put them on the path and took a highly circuitous route to these stones. The guidebook was interesting in that it was written as if there was a set route but then the writer said that he could not find it so took an alternative. His route was therefore already somewhat improvised back in 1983; mine much more so 30 years later. Not finding a direct path to these stones added hours to my journey. Arriving was an anti-climax as there was little to see, though I later read in my book on Earth Mysteries, there is rumoured to have been concealed, within the burial mound, a solid gold coffin.

The route then took me to the next stone circle that is flat but nonetheless clearly laid out. I'm currently reading a book that suggests these stones have a site-memory and may be instrumental in saving the planet at a future point in time. I find that a little hard to swallow, but then again, my experience was coloured by having to climb over barbed wire fence to approach them as my guidebook was so vague and out of date. The fact that the book was obsolete was at first frustrating, but I have come to see potential in this as it leaves a gap between what is described and what is seen and in the gap something interesting can happen.

Also on my mind as I was tramping up and down was the state of my feet. I have been taking a Chinese remedy to burn off a wart on my toe, the red patch in the picture. It seems to be working but it is a slow and grizzly process that doesn't combine well with camping and hiking. Still, fixing my feet seems like an important thing to do and I was very happy to discover a specialist foot clinic just before I left Beijing that said they could remove the growth. Quiet and undercover, these things remain significant in how I experience a place, that's why they are not quiet and undercover here on the blog. A challenge for me in constructing a route for Littlebredy will be introduce a wart like element, as all the existing dimensions are really quite attractive. That is not to say I want to see problems where they don't exist, but rather, that there must be some depth to the work and hidden processes that can be made visible through constructing a tour.

The Littlebredy Tour

Little Bredy or Littlebredy, the village gets spelt both ways, is indeed little. It's a village in South Dorset that I was shown around in preparation for the arts festival Inside Out that will be held there next September. I shall be constructing a tour for the festival which takes the South Dorset Ridgeway as its frame and Littlebredy as its focus. 

The day began in the village hall with talks about the area and an opportunity to meet the other artists. We assembled outside later in the afternoon to take a walking tour.

This tour led us past a number of points that the artists had selected to site their work in. Here for example is one of the artists with a plan of the landscape artwork she will create showing it to us and describing how it will sit upon the side of the hill. 

There was no precise tour guide leading this walk so there was no group commentary but instead a straggle of artists following a route that had been more or less decided in advance. The leader at the front of the group changed from time to time but was always one of the festival team who knew the route. As there was no ongoing commentary it was far more a chance to walk around the village and ridgeway and talk with the other artists. The going underfoot became increasingly muddy as it had been raining recently. There was much sidestepping of puddles.

We encountered our first real obstacle with a series of gates, this being one of them. We had to clamber over them but when it came to the dog in our group this variously meant coaxing it to squat under the gate or lifting it up and passing it over the gate. Undignified.

We then met the livestock. They took us for intruders and a showdown ensued. After a few nervous advances they scattered and let us pass. This was one of those moments that divided the group into those of us familiar with animals and farms and those of us more familiar with the Coffee Republic and city life.

We then came to an impasse by a farm at the bottom of a hill. There ensued much consultation of maps and smart phones, which started failing as we drove deeper into the folds of the South Dorset Ridgeway. Finally we had to ask the farmer.

Our path was an unlikely overgrown one that passed beside the cow shed. They eyed us keenly, they don't get many walkers coming this way.

And where you have cows you have cow slurry. Our path passed directly through several ankle deep, hold-your-nose stretches of manure and mud. There was no alternative but stoically soldiering on and hopping that it did not get any deeper.  

We reached an abandoned chapel in the woods some distance from Littlebedy as the light was failing. Later than expected with the night closing in we took it in and made an exit for the road which seemed to be some distance still.

By the time we reached the road it was a dark and not long after a taxi arrived to whisk us through the winding roads back to the village. This ended the first day and first part of the village tour but there was more to follow the next day.

As I had expressed an interest in tours I was offered a tour around the village's visitor attraction, The Walled Garden. I was joined by some of the artists and our guide was both responsible for maintaining the garden and showing people around so she knew the place very well.

She told us that various people visited the garden such as ramblers and horticultural societies from as far away as Somerset. I asked her if she could offer her standard visitor tour so I could get a sense of it and she agreed however as we started looking around I realised that what I was experiencing was something quite different. The artists were asking about the buildings and looking inside in order to see if they might be useful locations to site artworks and events in. Our guide was obliging and shared what she knew about the places and I realised that I was not on a normal visitor's tour but was instead getting a different sort of tour: the artist's site visit tour. Once I realised this was what was happening I relaxed more into it and took it for what it was rather than wishing it to be a different sort of tour.

With a storm forecast for the next day there were preparations afoot to limit possible damage to the garden by taking down temporary structures such as this gazebo. The approaching storm was a bit of a conversation topic in general over the weekend as it was being talked up as if it was going to be a devastating hurricane when in fact it turned out to be far less.  

Perhaps as a nod to our curiosity and the nature of the group we were treated to the ghost story. While our guide acknowledged she was not a believer in the ghost she did not disappoint us by omitting the fact that a ghost was said to haunt the garden. Coming on the back of the Haunted Holborn Tour I'm starting to see a strange connection between ghosts and tourism. This will have to be investigated a whole lot more. 

Overall then, this was a very relaxed and informative introduction to the village for what will be a new commission for The Tour of All Tours. I'll be returning here next year to develop the project and have many ideas of tours to reference. As it is not a saturated site I will have to be creative and this may in fact mean the work refers out into the society more than it might do in a place where there is an overwhelming amount of tours already in place. The festival will take place in September next year, details and updates will stream in before then.