HQ is based in the tiny hamlet of Toller Whelme high up on the western limits of the Wessex chalk. The name comes from the rising of the river Toller (now called the river Hooke) that joins the river Frome (pronounced Froom) at Maiden Newton. From there it flows east past Dorchester and Wareham until reaching Poole Harbour. Until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Toller Whelme was a grange farm of the Cistercian house of Forde Abbey although presumably the place was always significant because of the springhead that never fails. HQ is situated at the back of a huge medieval lynchet (there are many spellings of this word). At an altitude of over 600’ Toller Whelme enjoys weather extremes and in winter it’s important to be snowed in and not snowed out! Thomas Hardy claimed his ancestors lived at Toller Whelme after they came to Dorset from Jersey in the sixteenth century. It probably features as one of Hardy’s ‘places’ in the opening of the second chapter of Far From the Madding Crowd when Gabriel sees Bathsheba for the very first time. The hamlet is on the Wessex Ridgeway which is part of the Greater Ridgeway stretching 362 miles from Hunstanton in Norfolk to Lyme Regis on the Dorset/Devon border.
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1 West Farm Cottages
Toller Whelme
Dorset DT8 3NU