The river Lydden rises in the chalk near Buckland Newton and flows for 12 miles, mainly through green north Dorset fields, to where it joins the Stour near the hamlet of Bagber, a mile or two outside Sturminster Newton. A straight road takes you across Bagber Common, past the primitive Methodist chapel, the ornately gabled old schoolhouse, and the farms spaced out on either side, to what feels like an island, a triangular area of grassland enclosed between the waters of the Lydden and the Stour. We crossed the disused railway line where it used to go through a cutting, and found this place uncannily silent.
Our track (the map calls it Pentridge Lane) bent round to the right and brought us to an impressive, ancient barn. We seemed to have found the place where William Barnes, the self-taught scholar, poet and priest, born in a cottage close by in 1801, used to play with his cousin. Much later, when he had long left Blackmore Vale, he recalled Pentridge and his uncle's farm there as a childhood paradise. In one of his later poems, he wrote of the leafy hedges and the encircling river with its dark and glistening face, and claimed that there was, for him, no land like "Pentridge by the river".
On our way back, we took a halter path leading to Sturminster Newton, the market town known as "Stur" and the capital of Blackmore Vale. Despite the dry autumn, the passage of tractors had made deep, muddy furrows, and you needed to pick your way with care. There were patches of copper-coloured leaves in hedges that were now otherwise black and bare for winter, while an oak of great age beside the track was still full of leaf. When we came towards a coppice at the top of a rise, we could see rooftops and a church tower ahead, under a winter sky striped pink and grey.