A pebble that murmurs when all is still, and the existential awkwardness of the solo tea drinker

12 February 2026

Welcome to issue 25 of Tales from the Chase, a weekly newsletter for Cranborne Chase. Local events. Odd tales. Mildly strange goings-on. All delivered by email, free, and occasionally unhinged (in a charming way). Was this email forwarded to you? You can sign up for free by clicking below!

welcome, wet wanderers

This week in the Chase

The Chase, steadfast as ever, endures the sky’s watery assault with a damp, muddy dignity. Many paths are experimenting with new identities as streams. We haven’t been washed away yet, so what have we been up to?

This week, Isla launches a new arcane investigation, chasing people and things that vanish and reappear as if the laws of reality have taken a day off. Meanwhile, Hubert takes on the elements in Compton Abbas, where the wind races across the downs and rain arrives like an uninvited relative.

Umbrellas at the ready. We're off again.

The Pale Gateway

An investigation by Isla Cobb

Local stories say that there’s a door in the chalk somewhere near Compton Abbas, known as the Pale Gateway. The door is said to open onto the Other Chase, a world beneath the hills where the sky is always full of summer stars, shadows act with a will of their own, and the impossible is ordinary.

Those who pass through the Gateway are said to return altered, if they return at all. Some come back bearing changes difficult to explain; they speak differently, have strange memories, changed habits. Those who do not return at all are believed to have passed fully into the Other Chase, where life is said to continue, though no longer in a form accessible to us. In local idiom, they are said to have “gone into the long chalk.”

The information recorded here is drawn from a mixture of sources, none of which can be considered complete in isolation. Taken together, however, they form a pattern too consistent to be dismissed.

A portion of the material derives from word of mouth: recollections passed down within families. These were most often shared reluctantly and rarely volunteered without prompting. In several instances, different informants, interviewed separately, supplied descriptions that agreed in detail while differing in interpretation.

Further corroboration was found in parish records, including notes indicating individuals “gone missing in the hills,” and accounts of unusual objects brought to church authorities for safekeeping and later mislaid.

I have also consulted private notebooks and diaries, kept by local clergymen, schoolteachers, and landowners. These documents were not intended for publication and often contradict public accounts, recording sightings, doubts, and disturbances that were omitted from official histories.

In addition, I have made use of personal correspondence, including letters between family members that refer obliquely to sightings, disappearances, or to objects “best not kept indoors.”

Found objects

Sometimes, objects are found on the hillside, things that it seems are not of this world, things that some say have fallen through the Gateway or that have been dropped (accidentally or deliberately?) by those who have passed through.

Examples of many such findings cited by locals include a coin of some mysterious metal bearing an impression of a heron on one side and a seven-pointed star on the other; a long green feather; a wooden whistle that produces no audible sound; a dead moth dusted with a fine silver powder; a dark pebble that murmurs when all is quiet.

Some objects carry fragments of memory, so that those who handle them recall events they have never witnessed. Others are said to grant their keepers knowledge of what has not yet come to pass.

I received the pebble a couple of weeks ago from an woman in her nineties. Her brother had wandered into the long chalk when they were still young children. She said the moment he found it, he was seized by a quiet obsession, returning again and again to the same place on the downs, as if something unseen kept calling him back. She eventually found the pebble herself while searching for him, and has kept it ever since in a tin in a drawer, “where I couldn’t hear its call.”

I keep it in on the windowsill in my spare bedroom and have found that sometimes there does indeed seem to be a low, indistinct murmur coming from the room, but it disappears as soon as I enter. I have not yet determined for certain whether the sound originates from the object itself or if there is some other cause.

Things that emerge

There are accounts of a range of figures that emerge from the Pale Gateway. The most commonly cited are the "bright riders". They ride out across the Chase on white horses, sometimes swift, like a hunt pursuing an unseen quarry, sometimes slow and ceremonial, moving in deliberate procession. Witnesses describe no sound of hooves, only the faint tinkling of bells.

These occurrences align most often with liminal times such as the solstices, and on bright clear dawns when dew remains on the ground longer than expected and the stars linger in the sky.

Sometimes, it is said that walkers emerge, appearing entirely human at first glance. They walk alone or in pairs and take the paths from the downs with quiet purpose, as though dispatched on an errand, already late.

There are reports that animals emerge occasionally: a deer too pale, a hare that leaves no tracks, an owl that casts no shadow.

A deer too pale recalls the fae stag, a creature that leads mortals astray into enchanted realms. A hare leaving no tracks mirrors the belief that the Otherworld’s inhabitants do not leave a mark upon our soil. An owl without a shadow echoes the old lore of a shadowless bird that heralds winter and death.

These sightings align with the tales of the riders from the Pale Gateway, moving between worlds.

Accounts of those who returned

I have pieced together several tales of people who returned after long, unexplained disappearances. The following stand out as especially significant.

The Shepherd’s Boy, c.1823

A boy of fourteen, tending sheep on the downs near Melbury Beacon, chased a lamb and vanished from sight. Witnesses report sighting figures in the vicinity, described as "bright riders", though no one could describe them fully. When the boy returned hours later, he spoke only in riddles and could not recall his own name. Several weeks afterward, he disappeared entirely, and no trace was ever recovered.

Father Alwin, 1754

An elderly monk climbed Melbury Hill on Michaelmas night, seeking quiet for prayer. He saw "riders, brightly attired" and followed, passing through tall gates wrought of some kind of metal, just before they closed behind him. He returned three days later, unharmed but bearing stories of a landscape with strange stars in the sky, a full moon that never set, and visiting libraries of infinite size whose books wrote themselves before his eyes.

Marjorie Tilley, 1911

While gathering herbs on Compton Down at twilight, Marjorie reported encountering something resembling her own self, illuminated by a strange light. She returned home at sunrise, claiming to have passed through a door in the chalk to a place where the sky was scattered with stars and the light was like day. The chalk underfoot was warm. There were tracks, all pale, all smooth, some rising gradually into the air before thinning into nothing. She saw riders cantering on the latter, disappearing into the air.

The fields were full of grass and wildflowers of types she had never seen before. She came across a river with clear water that showed no reflection; instead, she saw faces and landscapes moving slowly beneath.

Some hollows and ridges appeared translucent. Looking through them, she glimpsed other landscapes, some empty, some busy with movement.

Distant bells often rang, and sometimes she heard higher tinkling notes nearby.

She wrote down these experiences in a notebook in tiny, almost indecipherable, script, including many repeated phrases, like warnings:

The Unknown Stranger, mid-1800s

Found wandering near the remains of St Mary’s church in Compton Abbas, a stranger claimed to have “fallen through the hill.” He described meeting animals that spoke with human voices. Taken in by a kind villager, he had disappeared by morning, leaving a small, carved whistle on the doorstep. Reports say it sometimes sounded softly at night. After the first time, the villager gave it to the parish priest. It is not recorded what happened to it.

Elinor, Candlemas 1931

Elinor heard what she described as “a silver song” at dawn and followed it across the downs in the morning mist, encountering several riders as they passed through tall gates of wrought metal. She returned home several days later remembering nothing more than these brief and enigmatic details. It’s assumed that she followed the riders through the gates, but she could say nothing of what she saw or did there.

What next?

The stories, objects, and accounts I have gathered hint at a landscape where the ordinary and the strange intertwine. In the coming weeks, I will walk the downs myself to carry on my research. I do not know what truly lies there, a door or a gate or nothing at all. Even so, the act of tracing these stories across the landscape is a journey into the unknown, and therefore well worth doing. I’ll report back in a few weeks.

A parish by parish tour of the Chase

compton abbas

Compton Abbas sits on the western edge of the Chase, where chalk meets greensand, and rises in a dramatic escarpment with sweeping views across the Blackmore Vale.

The parish is elongated on an east-west axis, the western part (west of the A350) lying outside the Chase. The total population is only about 216 people in the village and a wide scatter of farms and isolated dwellings.

The village of Compton Abbas itself sits in the Chase east of the A350, in a hollow scooped out of the chalk escarpment, surrounded on three sides by steep grassy slopes.

For more, see Hubert’s guide to Compton Abbas below. All opinions are his own, and may not be shared by Tales from the Chase, or anyone of sound mind.

COMPTON ABBAS

Ah, Compton Abbas. We’ll tactfully overlook the inconvenient detail that a good slice of the parish sits on the wrong side of the A350. The road may bisect the parish, but it functions as a filter. Cross it, and the magic thins slightly. Stay on the Chase side for the good bits, such as they are.

The part of the parish that sits in the Chase is undeniably beautiful. Irritatingly so. The village huddles on the low ground, tucked into a sweeping curve of steep downland.

What this means in practice is that Compton Abbas is permanently overlooked, not socially (though possibly that too), but geographically.

It means the light does theatrical things. Mornings spill dramatically over the rim; evenings linger longer as the bowl opens out to the west.

Like many Chase parishes, the population is tiny. Though few, there are people who claim their families have been here since the Domesday Book. Then there are the people who moved here “for the quiet” and now complain about tractors. As in much of the Chase, dogs are the true ruling class and patrol the paths with the confidence of minor aristocracy; their humans merely hold the leads.

Notable for: Melbury Hill, Compton Down, Fontmell Down

Otherwise known as the Three Peaks of Compton Abbas. Up on the hills on a clear day you can see for miles; on a foggy day you can see into your own soul, which is worse and frankly none of anyone’s business.

Walking high above the rooftops on the rolling chalk downson a clear day, the views are so expansive that it’s difficult to maintain a healthy level of cynicism while bathed in so much pastoral magnificence.

Also notable:

There are two churches. One discarded like an old sock. The other a comparatively shiny sock that still insists on calling itself “new” despite being 150 years old.

Old St Mary’s is now just a ruined medieval tower standing alone in its churchyard. It's atmospheric, photogenic, and ideal for brooding about mortality or taking moody black-and-white photographs captioned “stillness.” It has vibes. New St Mary’s is Victorian, tidy, and very pleased with itself.

The ancient stuff. Compton Abbas has its share of earthworks; like bits of three cross dykes and half of an enclosure around Melbury Beacon, shared with neighbouring parishes, plus exclusive use of a bowl barrow. These are the usual subtle lumps in the landscape that archaeologists get excited about and everyone else squints at while thinking, “Is that it?”

The beacon on Melbury Hill was lit in 1588 to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada. The enclosure is older; people have probably been climbing up there for millennia to build things, watch things, signal things, and generally stand about contemplating horizons.

The Airfield (and the Lore of the Sky). Yes, there’s an airfield. Perched high on a flat stretch of downland, small planes come and go, piloted by men who look as though they may own several scarves.

Once a modest, much-loved grass strip for hobby pilots and bacon-sandwich enthusiasts, the airfield was acquired by Guy Ritchie, film director and former Mr Madonna.

Pre-Ritchie revitalisation, the airfield café was basic, friendly, and faintly chaotic in a reassuring way.

Now rebranded as a restaurant/bar, The Lore of the Sky, it has become polished, aspirational, and somehow quieter, despite serving better coffee. It markets itself as a place where “aviation heritage meets Texas-style barbecue,” which sounds like someone put fake information on their online dating profile. Food is smoked on site using a J&R Oyler Smoker imported from Texas. One of the only ones in Europe, apparently. Are you impressed? Me neither.

To be fair, some people love it. They’ll admit the location is stunning and the concept of a smokehouse on a country airfield is weirdly delightful. Others mutter darkly about image over substance while eating the brisket anyway.

Me? It’s very industrial-hangar chic. Or aspirational airport lounge. Exposed beams. Polished concrete. Vast windows looking out over the grassy airstrip. Aviation and movie memorabilia arranged like tasteful clues, in case you momentarily forget you are near planes, or fame.

I visited one morning recently. Despite an enticing breakfast menu, I was the only customer. The space is clearly designed for crowds; in their absence it amplifies the existential awkwardness of the solo tea drinker. There was a distinct aroma of stale grease hovering like the ghost of steaks past.

Nothing here is actually bad. It just lacks soul. It’s in the Chase but not of the Chase. It wants to be cool. The Chase prefers useful. As I left, I could almost hear the spectral murmur of locals reminiscing about the old café’s proper tea and bacon sandwiches.

Beyond the restaurant, aviation continues; just slightly more curated and slightly better groomed. There’s a programme of vintage flying events, motoring meetups, seasonal gatherings.

Dorset’s least convincing act of street credibility. Residents sometimes joke (awkwardly) that they are “Straight Outta Compton.” This is a reference to late-1980s rap music, LA gang violence, and urban grit. One suspects none of these are pressing concerns here. The most aggressive gang activity typically involves dogs disputing ownership of a stick. The only “beats” are from the church bell. The only grit round here is the sort that gets in your boot and delivers small precise jabs to your heel.

Official legends are thin on the ground. The barrows brood. The wind sighs. But there are no documented hauntings, no spectral horsemen, no glowing lights. Locals will firmly tell you that nothing supernatural ever happens in Compton Abbas. Which is precisely what people with something to hide and in denial about a long-standing pact with ancient chalk spirits would say.

Suggested itinerary

Arrive. Park in the car park at the top of Spread Eagle Hill. Nod at a group of riders coming off the down. They ignore you.

Visit the ancient and the windswept places. Head over Compton Down to Melbury Hill under the vast sky. Pretend you can identify distant landmarks rather than just pointing confidently. There is a toposcope on top of an old trig point if you need some help. If fog descends, move on briskly.

Poke the ancient lumps. Seek out a cross dyke. Squint at it. Say, “You can really see the layers of history,” while privately wondering if it’s just a bump. Feel faintly inadequate because you are not thrilled.

Descend to the village below. Visit Old St Mary’s tower. Take one atmospheric photograph. Resist saying “They built things to last in those days.” You are not your grandfather.

Head back up to the car park. Yes it's uphill all the way. Pause halfway, ostensibly for the view, actually for oxygen. At the top, gaze once more at the view to the west over the Blackmore Vale, the village in the hollow far below. Nod at the riders again. They ignore you again.

Then get in the car, shut the door on the wind, and drive off feeling watched. Don't think about what might be watching. The locals say there's nothing, though you don't believe them.

Optional: Head to the airfield if you are in need of sustenance after your exertions. Enter The Lore of the Sky. Order coffee, tea, maybe sample a brisket baguette, whatever that is. If there is anyone else there, eavesdrop discreetly. If not practise looking like someone who finds empty, industrial-chic restaurants entirely normal.

NEXT WEEK: COMPTON CHAMBERLAYNE

Prepare to be utterly underwhelmed.

Looks like Isla's on the trail of something weird again. Hubert's trip to Compton Abbas included sightings of riders, maybe she should have a word.

Next week, maybe something different. Don't get too excited.

In the meantime, keep your wits about you. And if the rain starts to feel too personal, it’s probably not just the weather.

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