Dorchester; Sunday, 29 September, 2024

The weather forecast as late as Friday had Sunday being a pretty bad day, in the end it turned out that the worst of the weather had been delayed to the mid-afternoon so I was able to keep dry for more sightseeing.

After checking out of the hotel I headed into town and back over to The Keep Military Museum to have a look around their exhibition on the history of the local regiments from their formation through to the current day. The exhibition includes a well designed reconstruction of a World War I trench that you can walk through to get an idea of how bad life on the front lines of the Great War could be.

However, the most impressive part of the museum are the views to be had from the roof of the tower – with views over the town centre and surrounding countryside – though the most impressive view, which would be of the Maiden Castle, is blocked by the buildings of the neighbouring hospital so you can’t see that.

From The Keep I had another wander through the town centre stopping off at the Roman Fountain before heading over to the Dorset Museum & Gallery to have a look around their collection that tells both the geological and human history of the county from it Jurassic and pre-historic past through to the modern day.

Museum completed I headed over to a café for a quick lunch and to work out what to do for the rest of the afternoon. There were two more museums that I could have visited, but they were quite expensive, and I wasn’t really interested in them. At the same time the weather apps were now predicting rain in the next hour or so and the train apps were alerting problems with the rail replacement buses that I would have to use, so a quick check on the price of two museums vs buying my way out of a late fixed time train showed a new train ticket was cheaper, so I brought that and headed in the direction of Dorchester South Station.

The journey down to Dorchester had taken just under 3 hours, the journey back was looking like it would take at least 6, with engineering works closing a large part of the railway line meaning buses from Poole, south of Bournemouth, all the way through to the other side of Southampton which were timetabled to take around 2 hours and also meant you missed the prettiest part of the train ride through the New Forest.

The first indication I had chosen right was as I boarded the train just as the rain started falling in Dorchester, and this band of rain would chase me back East across England, always arriving just as I boarded the next connection.

At Poole it was a quick change onto a very late running replacement bus which – because it was so late – was being run direct to Southampton Airport and Eastleigh, rather than stopping off at Bournemouth and Southampton, which almost immediately knocked about 45 minutes off my journey. The only decision to make was whether to stay on to Eastleigh and wait the 35 minutes on the platform there for a train that was on it’s way over from Portsmouth, or to hop off at Southampton Airport and wait out 50 minutes in the airport terminal building coffee shops for the train that started there. It wasn’t a particularly difficult decision, but one that only about three of us took.

After a pleasant 45 minutes in the warmth of a conveniently placed international airport terminal with a cup of coffee and a charging point, I headed back over to the station and picked up the train north back for the final leg to Clapham Junction (and the 29 minute connection to my half-hourly train home), once again seen off from the station by the start of the rain from an impressively dark looking cloud.