6 minute read
Health & Beauty
56 The West Dorset Magazine, May 6, 2022 Health & Beauty Walking West Dorset
with retired Dorset rights of way officer Chris Slade
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FROME VALLEY TRAIL: 4th WALK
This walk of 6 miles is easy going and much of it is on the cyclists’ Route 26. Park at the walkers’ car park, about 100 yards beyond Greenford School in Higher Frome Vauchurch. Walk down past the school to the junction with the A356. Cross the road and then the bridge over the river Toller (aka Hooke) just before its confluence with the Frome. Walk diagonally to your left across the field, through a gate and alongside the Frome, to join a road that continues downstream to Lower Frome Vauchurch. Continue past the Church until the tarmac runs out at a gate. Follow the path across a couple of fields and cross the Frome twice at an island on the boundary with Maiden Newton parish. Turn right and follow the river to the next bridge then turn left along the road to Cruxton. Follow the road until the houses run out and turn left and follow an unpaved Council road, which is muddy in places, to Notton. The surface improves along the next mile, a bridleway, that, past Throop, passes Nunnery Mead, a wild flower meadow with the site of a medieval village and a Roman villa that you might like to visit. Continue through a short section of woodland and you’ll arrive at Southover, a suburb of Frampton with lots of houses that will make you wonder where the flint mine is. Continue through the hamlet until you reach a junction. Turn back and follow your footprints back to the start unless, at the west end of Southover, you’d like to join the bridleway that takes you up the peaceful and beautiful Southover Bottom, a coombe that takes you up to Notton Hill Barn then down through Notton Bottom to rejoin the route.
Dealing with difficult life decisions
Alex Fender
youcantalk.net is a new wellness and mental health resource launched by Bridport-based duo Kerry Miller and Alex Fender. It features lots of free resources to help people relax and take stock.
I thought it might be helpful to share a Life Review with you. This one developed into a supported biography (more about that another time). I should say at the outset I keep all work secure, under lock and key whilst in progress and destroy all work when the Life Review is completed. The client keeps the work we produce. I don’t keep copies. What I share below is from memory and anonymised. When I first met Janice her hands and arms were shaking, she was generally fidgety and over time it seemed to be getting worse. I wondered if there was something deeply buried, and toxic, in her past. Eventually, with me as an empathetic writing companion in a safe nonjudgemental space, she told me her father took his own life in the family home and the grief of that led to her having sex with a former boyfriend much against the mores of the conservative and religious society she lived in. She became pregnant and decided to bring up the baby herself. Her mother supported her. One day Janice was invited to a wedding and her mother urged her to go. She met Tim. Tim and Janice married. Tim adopted Raymond, now three. Janice and Tim had four children together, none of whom knew Raymond was a halfbrother. Janice was on constant high alert because Tim would make mistakes about how long they were married for and in his job and the society they lived that mattered. We discussed the corrosiveness of these two secrets – her father’s suicide and Raymond’s illegitimacy – if we were continuing with a Supported Biography, perhaps Raymond needed to know the facts and all the children should know the truth about their grandfather’s death. I felt hugely privileged to be given this task and saw Raymond and told him the story. A week later I went to see Janice, she opened the door looking like a different woman: fresh, smiling and incredibly, the shaking had gone. She said she felt peaceful for the first time in decades. If you want to know more about Life Reviews, Supported Biographies or Legacy Writing go to youcantalk.net
By Miranda Robertson
newsdesk@westdorsetmag.co.uk A woman who runs a blissfully peaceful wellness centre bursting with plants and wildlife near Melbury Osmund is making an urgent appeal to buy land for a new centre. Michele Hounsell, 56, has run the much loved Potting Shed, on the side of the A37 towards Yeovil, for the last 11 years. Just before Christmas she received the shock news that the land’s owners wanted to reclaim it for other uses. She quickly found another plot near Thornford, and had her offer accepted at the beginning of January. But the process of buying the land has been delayed and delayed and now she faces having nowhere to rebuild the centre and nowhere to put her thousands of plants, trees and shrubs when she has to leave in June. Michele is being supported by her partner Andy Cole, a reiki healer. He said: “We’ve even signed the paperwork after months of delays, but still nothing is happening – we are in limbo.” Andy met Michele when he was at his lowest ebb. He said: “This place has turned my life around. I had been through a divorce and lost my business and I was on antidepressants. But then I walked in here and the ambience of the place is so calming, so healing. “It’s helped me and helped other people too. “Customers were in tears when they found out we had to leave here.” The couple have been trying to plan the move, with scores of trees, hundreds of plants, veg, fruit trees, arches, arbours and art sculptures set to be shifted at the end of their tenancy. But they fear the purchase will never happen after so many delays and they are desperate to find an acre or more to establish a new centre. Michele said: “I definitely want to buy – I’m not going down that road again. I want to plant permanently. We are having to leave many established trees behind, such as oaks, because the delays mean it’s now too late in the year to transplant them. “We think if we can just buy the land we can get the therapy side up and running quickly. The planting will take till next spring to establish.” The Potting Shed offers all sorts of wonderful therapies, with workshops, teas and jams on sale, and all sorts of help on offer. People can just turn up and potter around, picking fruit and planting seeds. If the couple can just find a plot of land to buy, Andy hopes to add a garden design course into the mix, as he specialises in therapeutic planting. And there could be the option to run retreats with yurts pegged out on the land for guests. They need an acre minimum, preferably with a building such as a barn or outhouse. Michele said: “We can establish the yoga garden quite quickly even if the rest will take longer. “We just want to recreate the wellbeing centre, which is so needed. We have about 100 regular customers and others who pop in and out. We have to find somewhere so they have somewhere to go.” n Anyone who knows of land Michele and Andy could buy should call them on 07940 803927 or email Michele. secretgarden@gmail.com.
LOOKING FOR A PLACE: Michele and Andy at The Potting Shed
