St Catherine in the Autumn

My patron saint was largely absent from my holiday this year: there is apparently a statue of her in the Beauchamp Chapel of Warwick parish church, but of course I couldn't get into there. Instead she turned up at Compton Verney House, in the shape of a 15th-century altarpiece image, looking, if truth be told, somewhat ill-tempered.

Down in Dorset, I returned to the chapel at Abbotsbury on the first rain-sodden visit I can remember in a long while. I had never taken the footpath that leads south of the chapel towards the Chesil Beach, and did, finding it somewhat more hazardous than I thought: my splendid walking boots made traversing the mud I encountered no easier, as each step led to a slide along a worryingly steep incline.

But on the eastern margin of the county, in what was Hampshire until the mid-1970s, is another Catherine site, St Catherine's Hill outside Christchurch. I hadn't been there in positively decades, and had a memory that despite its rich history it's very hard to find your way around and discern what you're looking at. The recollection, it turned out, was still accurate. The hill is a mixture of pinewoods and heathland, some of which is encroached on by more trees and undergrowth. The crown contains an old gravel pit, now filled by a pond, and though it isn't that high - at 45 metres slightly more than half the elevation of its little counterpart at Abbotsbury - it offers wide views over the countryside around.

There is definitely something uncanny about St Catherine's Hill: I think of it as a sort of east-Dorset equivalent of Alderley Edge, that charismatic Cheshire landscape that features so largely in legend and fantasy. Its features include Bronze Age barrows, a Roman signal station, the site of the chapel of St Catherine (excavated to somewhat frustrating effect in 1968 - the finds are lost), gravel and clay workings, the remains of 19th and 20th-century military activity, sandstone bluffs, hollow ways, allegedly ruins of cottages, brutal concrete reservoirs, radio masts and a trig. pillar. I certainly couldn't locate the ruined cottage with a bell mounted in a gable that others have seen, so I will have to return and traverse more of its mysteries, remembering to take my boots.