Talk about keeping to the path. I had barely begun my walk from the viewpoint at Whiteway Hill, near Lulworth in Dorset, when I came across an information board showing a pair of smouldering training shoes alongside what little remained of an artillery shell. The Tyneham Valley has been an MoD firing range since the 1940s, and here was a graphic reminder that live ordnance may lie beyond the yellow posts and "keep out" warnings marking the paths that run through it and are regularly opened to the public (most weekends and some weekdays).
Why, you might wonder, would anyone other than tank spotters and spotty war-gamers choose to visit a mock battlezone in the first place? Well, the fact is that 60 years of MoD control, even with all the inevitable explosions, has served this beautiful corner of coastal Dorset surprisingly well, just as it has done at many other sites across the 600,000-acre defence estate. It has kept development and intensive farming at bay. Tyneham remains rich in wildlife. There's an abundance of archaeological interest and lots of old military hardware lying about, plus the poignant story of the Tyneham villagers who were forcibly evacuated when the MoD took over the valley in 1943.
The path led west to Flower's Barrow, an iron-age hillfort which the MoD had thoughtfully furnished with picnic tables. From here, I looked north over the vast veldt-like expanse of the Povington Heath range and south along my onward route to Worbarrow Bay. Kestrels were working the valley slopes as I dropped towards the beach. In the scrub of lichen-covered thorn and yellow gorse, I sighted a profusion of rabbits, roe deer, stonechats and pied wagtails.
Concrete tank traps from the 1940s lay half-buried on the long shingle beach, and a steel gun turret looked out from a sandy bluff. I followed the path inland. To my right were hillsides littered with rusting tanks and armoured personnel carriers where cattle wandered (not one, according to the MoD, yet lost to ordnance across the estate). On the other side of the track was Tyneham Gwyle, a thickly wooded glen carpeted in wild garlic. A sign here explained how it was range shrapnel embedded in the trees which had preserved these woodlands by preventing the use of chainsaws. Fair enough, I reflected, but wondered how the shelling had gone down with the local birdlife and sika deer.
I walked into Tyneham, a ghost of a village but a smartly turned-out one; the village pond fringed with daffodils, the lawns freshly mown and the period telephone box. All the village buildings, from the rectory to the farmworkers' cottages, were roofless shells except for the excellently maintained church and schoolhouse with their moving exhibitions to the village's history. On the church door was a copy of the note that the departing villagers had once pinned there. "We have given up our homes," it read, "to help win the war to keep men free. We will return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly." They had lost their village, but something of the past had been saved.
· Allow a generous three hours for this walk. For information on access days and opening hours of the village exhibition, call 01929 404819 or visit access.mod.uk and click on "Walks on the Defence Estate".
