Cranborne Chase

A Roman Road near Handley Hill

Win Green

Cranborne Chase (ST970180) is a chalk plateau, running across the north of Dorset and into south-western Wiltshire. The plateau is part of the chalk formation covering much of southern Britain and is close by Salisbury Plain and the West Wiltshire Downs in the north, and the Dorset Downs to the southwest.

The scarp slope of the Chase faces the Blackmore Vale to the west, and to some extent the Vale of Wardour to the north. The chalk gently slopes south and dips under clays and gravels. Its highest point is Win Green, in Wiltshire, at 910 feet.

An area of 379 square miles of the Cranborne Chase and of the West Wiltshire Downs has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty; the sixth largest in the country.

History and archaeology

Earthworks of the Badbury Rings

The downland has a long archaeological record history, in its many earthworks, barrows and scattered artefacts from the Neolithic age onwards. The dense woodland originally covering the downs would have gradually been cleared by the first farmers, but would have grown back repeatedly over the centuries as soils became exhausted and the agricultural carrying capacity of the land was exceeded several times over the course of six millennia. Much of the area therefore remained wooded from the Middle Ages until the Second World War.

Analysis of remains found in some of the Bronze Age burial mounds, by experts at Bournemouth University, has revealed that many of the bones had small holes drilled in then, enabling them, it is hypothesised, to have been articulated by means of wooden pegs, which is to say the skeletons were prevented from falling apart during repeated removal and re-burial.

There are many Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, including the henge monuments at Knowlton and the remains of a number of Iron Age settlements on the downs, most notably the hill fort at Badbury Rings (Vindocladia). There is a Roman villa which has been dug by archaeological television programme Time Team.

During the Saxon invasion of Britain the native Britons kept the invaders out of Dorset by building Bokerley Dyke, a defensive ditch, across the Roman Road that runs across the downs from Dorchester to Old Sarum.

The downs have been sparsely populated since Saxon times, largely preserving archaeology until the Second World War (when the need for agricultural land outweighed the archaeological importance). It was here that Augustus Pitt Rivers developed modern archaeological field work in the 19th century.

Cranborne Chase is named after the village Cranborne, and ancient place, which had a manor house and a small monastery. The word "chase" comes from the hunts, frequented by royalty (including Kings John, Henry VIII and James I), which took place on the downs. The Chase was owned by the Earl of Gloucester until it passed to King John by his marriage to Gloucester's daughter, Avisa. The land remained in the hands of the Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs until James I granted the rights to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. The heir of the Marquess of Salisbury today takes his subsidiary title "Viscount Cranborne".

Much of the Chase is still owned by large estates such as Kingston Lacy.

Cranborne Chase School, a former boarding school for girls, was based at two locations in Cranborne Chase: at Crichel House near the village of Moor Crichel in Dorset from 1946 to 1961, and then at New Wardour Castle in Wardour (near Tisbury) in Wiltshire, until the School's closure in 1990.

Geography

The landscape of Cranborne Chase is remarkably varied, its most dramatic scenery being near the boundary between Dorset and Wiltshire where the chalk downland rises sharply to the rounded summits of Breeze Hill (860 feet), with the hairpin bends of the B3081 climbing Zig Zag Hill on its northwestern flanks, and the highest point of the Chase, Win Green (909 feet).

Nearby, another prominent top, Melbury Hill (863 feet) above Melbury Abbas, "appears almost like an island rising above the flat, sea-like expanses of" Compton Abbas airfield.

Further south are two more summits on an outlier of the Chase that define its southern limits: Hambledon Hill and Hod Hill.

Biodiversity

An area of 1,115 acres of Cranborne Chase has been notified as a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest, notification initially taking place in 1975.

As some of the wooded areas in the chase are centuries old, they possess a diverse ground flora that is associated with such sites. The area is one of the richest in southern England for numbers of lichen species; over 160 have been recorded.

Outside links

• Maps: 50°57’41"N, 2°2’39"W, ST970180
• Countryside Agency: Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB
• AONB dedicated website
• Dorset County Council: Cranborne Chase AONB
• English Nature citation sheet for Cranborne Chase
• Cranborne Chase AONB Woodfair

References

• Pitt-Rivers, Michael, 1968. Dorset. London: Faber & Faber.