Worth Matravers

The pub with no bar

The Square and Compass has no bar. You order your drink and your food through a single hatch in the wall, and it comes back to you the same way: a meat pie, a veg pie, a sausage roll, a pasty. That is roughly the whole menu, and it is deliberate. The pub presses its own cider behind the building, pours local ales, and has appeared in every edition of CAMRA's Good Beer Guide since 1974 — one of only five in the country to manage that. The pasties divide people. One critical TripAdvisor review is titled "Forget the rubber pasties!" Another review, more common, simply says: "This is a proper pub."

Out the back there's a hillside garden with stone tables carved from the local rock, chickens wandering about, and views across the Purbeck valley to the sea. Charlie Newman, the current landlord, bought the pub from the brewer in 1994 and opened a fossil and archaeology museum in 1998, filled with things he and his father dug out of the ground nearby. The Newman family has run the place since 1907. Before that it was called The Sloop and had smuggling connections; a stonemason turned landlord named Charles Bower renamed it the Square and Compass around 1830, after the tools of his old trade.

A village built from stone

Stone is the reason the village exists. The cottages are grey Purbeck limestone, clustered tightly around a central pond where the ducks live, and the men who cut that stone worked the coastal quarries just south. You can walk down to them. The path to Winspit drops gently through the valley to cliffside quarries and sea caves that supplied building stone for London until about 1940, and have since appeared in Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and a Disney film. Seacombe, next along, has underground galleries thirteen feet high. At Dancing Ledge, on the coast path, someone blasted a tidal swimming pool into the rock for local schoolchildren.

For a walk with less scrambling, the Priest's Way runs mostly between dry-stone walls toward Swanage — the route the parish priest once took to hold services there.

Norman carving and Benjamin Jesty

St Nicholas of Myra is one of the oldest churches in Dorset, built around 1100 and largely left alone since. The chancel arch has two courses of Norman zig-zag moulding, and the corbels are carved with grotesques, a squatting man, a bird's head, a rabbit. In the churchyard is Benjamin Jesty, a farmer who in 1774 — more than twenty years before Jenner — used a stocking needle to inoculate his wife and two sons against smallpox with cowpox matter. His headstone, which he wrote himself, records him as "the first Person (known) that introduced the Cow Pox by Inoculation." His wife Elizabeth added the word "known."

Tea above the pond

The village has no shop, but there's a tea and supper room above the pond serving cream teas on vintage china. Getting here means minor lanes off the B3069; the nearest station is Wareham, and the More Bus 40 reaches Corfe Castle in about eight minutes.

When the chisels return

In late July the stonemasons come back for a carving festival, and the sound of chisels returns to a village that used to run on it.