Stratton Redivivus

It was a surprise that my mum wanted to go out at all, given how poorly she’d been, but it was a lovely day and having seen very little apart from a hospital and her house for about a month she needed a bit of a lift. After visiting Poole Cemetery to tidy up the family graves she asked whether we could go to Stratton, a couple of miles north of Dorchester, for lunch. After not quite an hour driving through a Dorset which looked particularly sumptuous in the Spring sunshine we were seated in the Saxon Arms with very nice (though not the cheapest) food.

My mum has often referred to Stratton through the years. I discover, looking back through my photographs, that we went there in 1989, after which we always referred to it as ‘the derelict village’. It was a wet, grey day, I remember, the sort which doesn’t show any place to its best, but even so Stratton didn’t present that attractive a picture. Windows were boarded up, doors split and open to the wind, mud and dirt clogged the street. The next time I drove through, on my own, about a dozen years later, the village looked completely different: the houses were bright and clean and lived in, there were new developments opening off the main road, and as I looked at the little square with the Saxon Arms on one side and the Village Hall on the other I struggled to remember whether either of them used to be there.

In and out, I’ve thought about the rejuvenation of Stratton, and our visit the other day prompted me to find out more. What seems to have happened is that in 1989 – the year of our first visit – the major local landowner, the Wrackleford Estate, sold some 16 acres of land in the village to a property developer. This isn’t a great deal of land really, but its release led to the population of the parish virtually doubling: more people meant more souls to do things, to get involved in things, and to campaign for facilities and support them when they were provided. That apparently quaint old village pub in fact was only built in 2000, replacing one that had closed a few years before; the village hall was constructed around the same time. The church has a team of bellringers for the first time in decades (heathens to a soul, I expect, they usually are). It seems like a model of how to revive a community, on different lines from how it once was – which is the only way, I suspect, you can.