Tris and tribulations: Fair yee well, Dorset!

I am just having a brief break from my packing to write a post about my 18 months in Dorset. I am leaving the county and my home and job at the International College, Sherborne, in 2 days time to head to a new post and life at Stover School in Devon.

When I left North Wales in December 2010, I had only been running for 6 months. I was spoilt, taking up running whilst living in Llanberis. Often I would go into work in Bangor, do a day at the desk, then get changed, send my work things back in the car with Moira, and run the 14 miles home via the beautiful country lanes that offered the most majestic views of Snowdon. Some days I would drive home and get in, get changed, don the running shoes and go for an early evening summit run up the Llanberis path. I was terribly sad to leave North Wales and I regretted that I did not start running sooner as I felt as though there was this whole fell running scene opening up to me that I would now have to miss out on. I worried that Dorset, with its mellow countryside and quaint villages, just wouldn't be an adequate swap: but it has been!

Don't get me wrong, you cannot compare the dramatic landscape of Snowdonia to the green hills of Dorset, but the countryside around Sherborne is beautiful in a very different way, and, if dramatic scenery is what you want, you only need to head to the Dorset coastline and you have it in abundance!

My running has come on in leaps and bounds since I've been here, so something about the place has worked for me. However, it must be said, I will not miss being attacked down country lanes by officious farm collies; nor will I mourn the loss of fields full of beligerent bovines who seem to find it amusing to block the stile and the escape route from their field by standing menacingly en masse in front of it. But the country lanes that are lined on one side with thatched cottages and on the other with a babbling brook trickling on past with ducks splashing about in it (Oborne is a classic example - go there, you cannot get anywhere more quintessentially English!), I will miss running along those. I will miss the off-road routes through the Sherborne Castle grounds; I'll miss heading out with Andy, a fellow running colleague, in search of new paths and invariably getting lost down overgrown tracks, being stung to buggery by nettles and arriving back a muddy, bedgraggled mess!

Just as I stopped to look down upon a snowy Llanberis and to reflect upon the whole process of leaving a place and moving on when I summited the Dinorwig slate quarry trails on my last ever run in North Wales, on Tuesday I paused on the hill above Sherborne and gazed down over the school playing fields and thought: for all I am excited to leave and it is time for me to move on, I will miss this place...

Here are some of my running memories from my time in Dorset...

North Dorset Villages Marathon, May 2011

North Dorset Villages Marathon, May 2012

My favourite run around the Sherborne Castle estate grounds. It changes so much with the changing seasons: this run with Tarq was on a particularly cold February day and the muddy ground was frozen!