![]() ![]() Our mission began in the hamlet of Lower Denhay, a cluster of stone and thatch buildings lodged at the base of a steep hill. I was startled when a friend who knows the area intimately said that they had researched old maps and found the specific lane. Or it has been suggested that it was one of the nearby holloways, paths worn deep into the landscape by generations of packhorses carrying goods inland from the sea.įor 30 years I had assumed likewise. Household gives a detailed description of the location, but most readers have presumed it to be an imaginative mix of local features rather than an actual place. ![]() Hunted like an animal, he digs into the bank of a sunken trackway, burrowing into the soft, sandy foxmould (a type of sandstone) to create a cramped den beneath a patch of bramble and sloe. ![]() Here, in Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a political assassin goes to ground after failing to kill Hitler. It was a lost lane, overgrown with a hedge the width of a cottage, on a “half-moon of low rabbit-cropped hills” overlooking the Marshwood Vale. ![]() Soon after the first chiffchaffs arrived, I visited one of the most secret places in Dorset. ![]()
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