A shadow that fled with a faint whoosh, an immortal butterfly, and a vanishing woodsman

16 July 2026

Welcome to issue 39 of Tales from the Chase, a fortnightly publication exploring the landscapes, folklore, hidden histories and strange corners of Cranborne Chase. Including odd tales. Mildly strange goings-on. Definitely strange, occasionally amusing, and always assembled with care — delivered straight to your inbox every other Thursday. Was this email forwarded to you? You can sign up for free by clicking below!

welcome Back, strange companions

After a brief, almost convincing run at something more typical of a British July the weather has returned to its latest preference for dry, baking heat. The Chase has stopped pretending to be green and is now easing into the more golden-green-trending-towards-straw tones of a landscape from more southern climes.

The butterflies, unbothered by any of this, are out in force. Read on for some information about recent sightings, plus Rufus is here with a strange tale involving a Chalkhill Blue butterfly of unwarranted antiquity. Hubert, meanwhile, has been sent to Edmondsham, trying hard not to engage with anything weird.

We also have some background on the board game Mad Geoff and Cedric were so absorbed in last time. Its origins turn out to be slightly less innocuous than "just something someone left at the pub," although our favourite phase pub is indeed involved.

Find some shade if the Chase has left you any, and read on.

door in the chalk

Following the last issue, several of you wrote asking for more information about the odd board game Cedric and Mad Geoff were playing in the Horseshoe at Ebbesbourne Wake. Most of you, it turns out, were considerably more interested in that than in what I found in the Owen Files. This tells me something about my readership, though I haven't quite decided what.

I have a standing invitation from the FFS to join their scheduled walks, and I rarely take it up. But I noticed in their summer programme that one was starting from Edmondsham last Sunday, and thought I might catch Cedric or Geoff and press them about the game.

No sign of Geoff. Apparently he's been suspended again. One member simply shuddered when I asked why, while another would say only that he'd been seen arguing with something in the mist near Knowlton Church, and that it had become quite heated.

Cedric was there, though, foggy spectacles and all.

I fell into step with him on the track towards Cranborne and after some initial chit chat about what I'd found on the sea glass USB drive I asked where the game had come from.

"Oh, you mean Door in the Chalk," he said casually. "It's mine."

"Where did you get it? Did you make it?" It had looked a little handmade, from what I could remember.

He hesitated, looking thoughtful for a moment, then gave me the expression he reserves for questions he considers reasonable but poorly phrased.

"I came by it. About six months ago. I got it at the Star and Lantern."

I'm always on the lookout for stories about the Star and Lantern, so this immediately piqued my interest. Not least because Owen's disappearance happened there. And I remembered that Cedric had tracked it down last December to ask Silas and Elowen about their favourite Christmas songs for the Tales from the Chase Christmas playlist. He hadn't mentioned coming back with a board game. I reminded him of this.

"Well, whilst I was there, someone asked whether I'd make up a fourth."

"A fourth for what?"

"The game. Before I knew it, I was already sitting at a table by the fireplace with three other people... there was an elderly gentleman in a beautifully cut tweed suit whose shadow kept wandering off. Every so often he'd apologise for it, and it would come back."

I nodded as though this were perfectly reasonable.

"There was a young woman who knitted all the time. She wasn't using wool, though. It was a strange sort of yarn that shone like moonlight. Occasionally she'd drop a stitch, and the candle on the table would blow out."

"And the third?"

"A tall man in an expensive raincoat. I mean, it was wet. There was a puddle below his chair. Every time he made a move, his sleeve dripped all over the board."

"So they were playing this game?"

Cedric laughed.

"Yes, and it was fun! Like, I spent three turns 'blindfolded' because I picked up a Magpie card that told me a thief was behind me. I wasn't allowed to look at the board; I had to play by touch."

"There was a bit where we all had to stay perfectly quiet because something was listening. Nobody explained what. It wasn't anything to do with the game, I don't think, it was just a presence in the pub. When I landed on Regrettable Swan the unseen listener went away. We had a good chat after that, they asked where I was from, whether I'd always had the same name. The gentleman with the wandering shadow recommended a tailor in Salisbury, and the man in the raining coat turned out to know an extraordinary amount about cheese."

"Then I landed on Perilous Otter. The woman knitting sighed, dropped a stitch and the candle blew out. The gentleman apologised for his shadow, which had fled with a faint whooshing sound, and the man in the raining coat moved his chair a little further from mine. Even his puddle seemed to shrink from me. Then on his next turn he lost his last silver coin to the Profound Owl. He stood up, took his drink, and walked out without opening the door."

"Finally I managed to scramble across to the Boundary space with nothing left but a twist of salt. My hands were shaking. I'd won, technically, but it felt more as though the game had simply grown tired of playing with me and spat me out."

"Then the others left and Elowen came to the table."

"She cleared away the glasses, folded the board, tied the Ask the Horse cards with a faded green ribbon and the Lost Property of the Moon cards with a blue one, put the various nails, silver coins and twists of salt in an old wooden cigar box and handed the whole lot to me."

"'You enjoyed it more than the others,' she said, 'and you saw more. There's a rules booklet in the box, be sure to read it.' Then she gave me a few extra tips."

"Such as?"

"'Don't play after midnight; never let the board finish setting itself up; if you land on Tuesday twice, be sure to go home by a different road after the game.' That sort of thing. And it was her who told me the name, Door in the Chalk."

We spoke no more about the game. In true FFS fashion, the group had been distracted by a clearing in the woods where the butterflies were apparently "doing something interesting", followed by a brief search for Maggie, who had wandered off but was eventually found having "a bit of a lie down."

Cedric then got into deep conversation with Derek about shoes and moths. Not feeling qualified to join in, I wandered along at the back with Maggie, who was trying to remember whether she'd already had her lie-down or should plan one for later. She asked me whether I'd ever noticed that some footpaths seem relieved when people use them, and wondered whether butterflies ever get excited when walkers do something interesting.

When we reached the end of the walk, Cedric vanished before I could ask whether I might join a game of Door in the Chalk sometime.

One day perhaps.

Dangerous or not?

The following day I bumped into Isla Cobb, the local folklorist, in the shop at Chettle, where she was stocking up on pies. I gave her Cedric's account more or less as he'd given it to me.

She listened without interruption.

"What strikes me is that nobody explained the rules or objective of the game," she said at last. "They expected him to pick them up as he went along. That suggests the point wasn't learning the rules. It was seeing how he behaved."

"Like a test?" I said.

"Perhaps. Folklore is full of tests where nobody tells you you're being examined."

I mentioned Elowen's warnings: don't play after midnight, never let the board finish setting itself up, and if you land on Tuesday twice, be sure to go home by a different road.

Isla nodded thoughtfully.

"Those are exactly the sort of rules folklorists love."

"Because they sound mysterious?"

"No. Because nobody explains them. The oldest traditions rarely justify themselves. They simply say, 'Don't do that,' and leave experience to supply the explanation. That's why they endure."

I asked whether she thought Door in the Chalk was dangerous.

"Oh, probably not," she laughed. "Although the fact that Cedric came home with it is very interesting."

She added more pies to her basket.

"Objects like that have a curious habit of ending up exactly where they need to be. For that reason, I'd like to take a look at it, if I get the chance."

Dear Clown,

Isla tells me you've become rather excited about some board game Cedric acquired from the Star and Lantern.

Allow me to offer a less romantic interpretation.

If Cedric was given the game, it is most likely that whoever owned it simply wanted rid of it.

I speak from experience. Strange objects have an unfortunate tendency to accumulate. Eventually one has to pass them to somebody else. Otherwise the attic fills up.

Now, if the thing starts moving pieces by itself, burn it.

If it doesn't, just enjoy the game and stop inventing mythology.

Yours,

Hubert

P.S. If it ever offers you the first move, decline.

a mosaic of wings

All photos taken last week in and around Vernditch.

There comes a point every summer on Cranborne Chase when butterflies seem to take over the landscape. Along the old drove roads, across flower-rich meadows, and through woodland rides and clearings, they drift and meander in wonderfully unpredictable arcs.

The sheer variety of species is astonishing. On a fine July afternoon, you might encounter, as I did last week, the Dark Green Fritillary gliding along woodland edges alongside the languid, monochrome flight of the White Admiral.

Elsewhere, Marbled Whites float above thistles and knapweed, while Painted Ladies feed among the brambles. These last are globe-trotting marvels. Their striking orange-and-black patterned wings may have wafted them all the way from North Africa.

Commas bask with wings spread wide, only to vanish when they close them, their ragged undersides perfectly mimicking a dead leaf. Peacocks, among our most unmistakable butterflies, patrol sunny rides and woodland edges, their eye-spots designed to startle potential predators. Gatekeepers flicker through the long grass and hedge bottoms. And then there is the Brimstone. With its wings closed, it is the very image of a fresh green leaf, complete with delicate veining, so convincingly disguised that it can disappear in plain sight.

These are just some of the species that weave themselves into the fabric of a Chase summer.

These butterflies tell us something important about the Chase. They thrive because this landscape still retains much of its ancient character. Old hedges connect woods to meadows. Traditional grazing keeps the chalk grassland open. Wildflowers flourish where land management allows.

Wings between worlds

Across much of Britain and Ireland butterflies were regarded as the souls of the departed, or sometimes their messengers. A white butterfly entering a cottage might be greeted rather than chased away, for who knew which ancestor had come calling?

The ancient Greeks used the word psyche for both "soul" and "butterfly," imagining the spirit leaving the body on delicate wings. Across Europe, butterflies are symbols of resurrection, renewal and hope.

Local folklore sometimes warned against catching the first butterfly of spring, lest you steal your own good fortune. Black butterflies were occasionally regarded as omens, while in some places it was believed that butterflies gathering in unusual numbers meant the boundaries between this world and the Other had grown especially thin.

Perhaps these stories arose because butterflies seemed to appear from nowhere, stay only briefly, and vanish again before summer has properly settled, so people imagined they belonged to more than one world.

I'd heard that Rufus had a story to tell about a particular butterfly that has graced the Chase for generations, so I sought him out to learn more. We arranged to meet last week for a butterfly safari on Martin Down. This is the story he shared.

the one who chooses

We had been exploring Martin Down for nearly an hour before I finally asked him. By then we'd encountered many of the butterflies that make these chalk grasslands so special. It was a quintessential July afternoon. Heat seemed to rise from the chalk as much as from the sun itself, while the flower-rich grassland hummed with bees and grasshoppers.

We were sat high on the down having a drink and a snack, looking west over the vastness of the landscape below.

"There's a Chalkhill Blue on the Chase," he said, at last. "Older than any butterfly has a right to be. Normally these die off every year. Not this one though. She comes back, same one, year after year. Seen all over the Chase, on the old grasslands, on the chalk. Out of season too. One old lad over Melbury way swears blind he saw her in February on the downs up there."

The old shepherds, he told me, called her Morwed, which was supposedly an old Chase dialect word meaning "the one who chooses." He was careful to emphasise that nobody had ever shown him where that word was written down.

"I once asked a retired linguist who used to walk the Chase with a notebook" Rufus said, tracing a circle in the dust with his boot. "She was collecting field names before they died out with the old men who used them. When I said the word to her, she went quiet for a long moment. She asked me where I'd heard it, and when I told her, she said only that she'd have to check something. She never mentioned it again. I saw her twice more that year; she didn't bring it up, and I didn't ask."

According to the old men of the downs, this butterfly would take a liking to certain people, although no-one could quite work out why.

"Butterflies generally want nothing from you," Rufus said. "She's the exception."

As Rufus tells it, the story is that she ignores most people entirely. But some, she circles, three slow turns, clockwise, low and unhurried, and then she's away. Then you get the sense, Rufus explained, of having been marked somehow. Judged. And chosen.

"I met her once, over at Fontmell Down," he said, his voice dropping. "It was an evening, the air was crystal clear and the light was golden. She circled me three times and was gone over the scrub while I was still wondering what was going on".

He shook his head when I asked what happened next.

"I can't tell you for sure. I still walk the same paths, greet the same neighbours, sleep the same side of the bed. But there are gates on the Chase I won't go through now without lifting my cap first, whether or not anyone's watching. It's a habit I don't remember starting and can't now stop."

He looked down at his hands. "I find I know when rain is coming before it gets here. And once or twice a year, always in August, always somewhere between four and five in the afternoon, I'm overtaken by the absolute certainty that someone has just said my name aloud in a room I isn't in."

"Are you alarmed by this at all?" I asked.

"No. You'd think I would mind. But I have never once, since that evening, felt forgotten by this place. I like that."

We sat a while longer, then headed back to the car park.

As I unlatched my garden gate that evening, out from the shade of the hedge rose a single butterfly.

It wasn't a Chalkhill Blue, just a Peacock, a common, everyday resident of the garden. It dropped low, and performed an unhurried circle around my knees. Then a second, wider loop. Then a third.

It lingered for a fraction of a second at the completion of the final turn, suspended in the evening light, before lifting over the hedge and vanishing.

I stood perfectly still in the quiet of my garden. I didn't move for a long time, concerned that if I stepped inside, I might miss the sound of someone calling my name.

Post script: I have found no record of Morwed in any local dialect glossary, including Barnes's Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, nor in any Wiltshire or Hampshire volumes. A correspondent who prefers not to be named for this piece confirms only that she "would need to check something," and has not, as of going to press, checked it. I also asked Isla Cobb, who thinks perhaps the name may be Brythonic/Celtic, pre-dating Anglo Saxon settlement, and could be around 1500 years old or more.

Isla thinks that if Morwed is indeed Brythonic rather than a shepherd's invention, then what we have here is not a piece of nineteenth-century pastoral whimsy but the last visible fragment of something considerably older, changed by generations of retelling.

A creature that "chooses" people, that circles three times, and that marks them without explanation, is a recognisable structure. One finds the same shape, or similar at least, in other traditions collected further west, and in at least two other accounts Isla has gathered from the chalk country.

A parish by parish tour of the Chase

edmondsham

EDMONDSHAM

Ah, Edmondsham: a parish straddling the eastern edge of the Chase, where the chalk finally loses interest and gives way to woods and heath, unlike so many Chase parishes that sprawl smugly across the open downs. I shall shamelessly ignore the parts that are merely Dorset, life is complicated enough already. The village itself sits mostly within the Chase boundary, so I suppose it ought not escape my attention.

Once larger, fewer than two hundred people live there today. An outrage. There are market stalls that attract larger crowds. Pleasant enough if you enjoy tranquillity; personally, I find the population density faintly insulting.

Most notable for: A family that forgot to leave

Many English manor houses have changed hands through bankruptcy, political catastrophe, scandal or the occasional inconvenient beheading.

The owners of Edmondsham House ignored this tradition.

The present house was begun in 1589 by the Hussey family, who had already been associated with the estate for centuries, and astonishingly it has remained in the same family ever since, albeit through marriages and changes of surname. Over four hundred years it acquired Georgian wings, Victorian alterations and modern plumbing, but nobody ever seems to have packed the furniture into a cart and departed.

Also perhaps unusually, it has been adjusted by successive generations without anyone feeling the need to demolish the lot and start again.

And you can even go inside, and visit the gardens.

Check the opening times before setting off, because they are gloriously inconvenient, usually a Wednesday afternoon. Turn up on the right afternoon, however, and you will be shown around by an actual member of the family who still lives there. Not an enthusiastic volunteer in a fleece, nor a retired accountant with a laminated badge and a memorised script. The genuine article.

Also notable:

The gardens at Edmondsham House are genuinely splendid.

This is irritating. I much prefer gardens that contain at least one disastrous experiment involving bamboo. Instead, these are beautifully maintained, with a walled garden and woodland walks.

Visitors wander about murmuring things like "How peaceful." It is. Suspiciously so.

Castle Hill Wood. The open downs are honest country. They lay everything before you in plain sight. If something is coming, you can usually watch it approach from three miles away and decide whether to put the kettle on or to leave.

Woodland is another matter entirely.

Castle Hill Wood is shared with neighbouring Cranborne, where the castle that gives the wood its name once stood. These are ancient woods, the sort that have spent centuries perfecting the art of appearing entirely harmless. The paths are pleasant enough, the oaks magnificent, the shade welcome on a hot day.

At about two o'clock on a bright July afternoon, I encountered an elderly woodsman carrying a lit lantern and a felling axe. The lantern seemed an eccentric choice. The sunlight was filtering through the canopy in broad golden shafts. One could have performed minor surgery by it.

He touched the brim of his hat.

"Looking for the boundary?" he asked.

"I wasn't."

"You should be."

He stepped behind an oak tree no broader than an ordinary wardrobe to the left of the path. But he did not emerge the other side.

I took a look, but there was nothing behind the trunk except brambles and silent woodland. I decided there must be a perfectly rational explanation. I also decided that finding it was someone else's problem, and headed back.

Curiosity is a virtue in libraries, but in ancient woodland it is a method for a person to become local folklore.

St Nicholas Church dates largely from the twelfth century, although like every respectable parish church it has acquired additions, alterations and improvements from almost every century since.

English churches tend to be accumulated rather than designed. They resemble geological formations, every generation leaves a layer.

Some historians can become very excited by this. Everyone else wonders why one window is Norman, another Perpendicular and various bits no one really approves of appear to have wandered in around 1870.

The village pump survives largely because nobody has yet found a sufficiently convincing reason to remove it. It no longer performs its original function. Instead it fulfils the far more important role of reassuring visitors that they have arrived somewhere authentically rural.

Leaving Edmondsham

Musing about how Edmondsham is not a dramatic place, its charms being quite subtle, and all the more irritating for it, I returned to the car. As I drove off I glanced in the mirror, and just for a moment I thought I saw the elderly woodsman standing by the roadside, lantern glowing in the afternoon sunshine.

He raised the lantern slightly in acknowledgement, or perhaps to warn me. When I got home I went to put my map back in the drawer and noticed someone had written on the cover in black ink "Find the boundary".

I strongly suspect this is yet another piece of inexplicable nonsense involving those clowns at the FFS.

Well, they can find the blasted thing themselves.

NEXT TIME: FARNHAM

Prepare to be underwhelmed.

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