Time bends for those who tread softly

4 December 2025

Welcome to issue 17 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 strange companions

This week in the Chase

Time bends, shadows lengthen (when they appear at all), and the land remembers. Isla Cobb takes us into the Sundial Glade, a mysterious clearing in Grovely Wood where visitors sometimes vanish, sometimes meet themselves, and always leave changed.

Outside, December has settled over the countryside: quiet fields, bare hedgerows, and low winter light across the Chase. Hubert visits Cann Common, the only part of Cann parish within the Chase. As usual, he's not impressed. Follow me.

The Sundial Glade

An investigation by Isla Cobb

“Time bends for those who tread softly.”

So reads the inscription etched in writing half-swallowed by lichen on a stone sundial hidden deep within Grovely Wood. It rests at the heart of a clearing sheltered by ancient trees, where the air is filled with an uncanny hush. Around it, so the story goes, time behaves strangely. Watches falter. Footsteps echo late. You might emerge from the woods younger, older, or unchanged, but never truly the same. A few claim to have walked into Grovely at dusk and returned at dawn to find entire days, or years, gone astray. One shepherd, long since dead, told his granddaughter that he’d met himself as a boy in that glade and exchanged a nod of recognition before the vision dissolved like mist.

The inscription is not a phrase found in any known chronicle or parish record, though its sentiment echoes older folkways; the idea that the passage of time can bend for those who move carefully through the world.

They say that the gnomon on the sundial, if sundial it truly is, only casts a shadow when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest. The thin dark line never points to the hour, only toward whatever stirs beyond the boundary; or perhaps to what has crossed it. Those who follow where it points may have strange encounters or lose themselves in the Elsewhere.

To find the glade, so the story goes, follow the path where the teasels grow in threes. When the path forks into three directions, close your eyes. Walk the one that feels like déjà vu. The deeper you go, the quieter things get. Birdsong ends, the wind forgets to rustle the leaves, and your thoughts quiet.

I had found these stories repeated in local accounts going back centuries; walkers lost for days, weeks, even years, returning with stories like dreams. Visions of sun rising from the west, countryside draped in impossible colours, meadows that smelled of seasons that did not exist. Meetings with strange folk, sometimes even with themselves, but older or younger. Hearing music without instruments, or faint bells, drifting through the trees. But some remember nothing at all.

Curiosity sparked, I wanted to see if I could find the glade for myself. The following are my journal entries, a record of each visit as I moved deeper into its mysteries.

Extracts from Isla‘s Journal

14 January, 2024

I made my third trip to Grovely Wood in search of the Sundial Glade today. I walked up from Ditchampton on a bright crisp morning, and about five minutes after entering the wood I saw a group of three teasels on the left of the track.

On my previous visits, I had missed them; but this time, there they were. Third time lucky. Teasels that grow in threes. All the information points to this as a marker for the route to the glade.So I stepped off the main bridleway onto a narrower path through the trees, barely an animal track.

The first stretch of path after the teasels seemed ordinary enough: mud, leaf litter, brambles. A trio of teasels appeared every so often, just when you’re thinking you haven’t seen one for a while. Then after roughly fifteen minutes, something shifted. Birdsong faded. I felt more cautious. And the path forked into three.

I closed my eyes and after a few seconds felt the mild tug of déjà vu, a prompt to take one path rather than the others. Instinct, or whatever passes for it here, pulled me to the right. I followed it.

After a few minutes, a clearing opened suddenly. Not large, just twenty or so metres across. A mix of evergreen and deciduous trees surround it. The temperature shifted slightly, warmer, as I stepped into the clearing.

And there, at the centre, stood the stone sundial.

A pair of blackbirds lifted from the undergrowth, circled once above the stone sundial, and vanished into the trees without a sound. It felt less like a disturbance and more like an acknowledgment, a welcome, or as though something had sent them to see who had arrived.

I approached the sundial. An inscription on the dial read clearly through the lichen:

“Time bends for those who tread softly.”

I stood and checked my smartwatch. Dead. Analog backup: frozen at 6:14. My phone, dead.

Then I noticed that the corroded metal gnomon cast no shadow, despite the winter sun. Looking carefully, it seemed as if light subtly bent around the gnomon. This is no ordinary sundial.

I placed my hand on the stone. It was warm. A memory, or something like it, rose. A girl, running across the clearing in summer light, laughing. She disappeared as soon as I tried to focus.

I noticed a faint out-of-season scent, warm hay, fleeting and misplaced. Then it shifted, smelt of snow.

After a few minutes I left the clearing reluctantly. The wood seemed to exhale after I stepped back onto the “ordinary” path, as if it had been holding its breath.

1 February, 2025

I returned today with a small kit: notebook, camera, GPS tracker. I noticed that the electronics stopped working long before I got to where the path forked, and my analogue watch was again stuck at 6.14.

At the fork I closed my eyes for a moment. This time I was pulled to the central path.

I noticed a faint, silver-grey dust along the path that wasn’t there last time. It shimmered slightly in the light, almost like frost suspended mid-air. A twig snapped to my left, and I thought I heard it echo behind me.

At the clearing, the sundial stood silent in the centre. The sun was bright, but no shadow from the gnomon. I thought I heard voices, but no-one appeared. As I moved around, I found that the clearing contains pockets of warm air, like stepping into invisible rooms. The smell of early summer rose briefly; cut grass, sun-warmed bracken, despite frost on the ground.

I stayed a while, found my camera wouldn’t work, then left.

A faint brush of wings passed above me as I stepped out of the clearing onto the path, though when I looked up nothing disturbed the branches. No bird, no movement, not even a shifting twig. Just the after-sense of flight.

18 March, 2025

I conducted my first recorded interview with a local, Agnes from Barford. She had gone missing for nine days, reappearing in fine health, and claimed she was gone for only “a couple of hours.”

She was found walking on the path near the south edge of the wood on the morning of 12 February 2017. Her husband confirmed she had gone for a walk on the 3rd, and had “simply not come back.”

Upon discovery, she appeared neither hungry nor cold, though frost had settled heavily that night. She spoke in a calm, dreamlike tone and seemed unsure of the duration of her absence. “I didn’t think I’d been gone at all,” she said. “Only stepped through the trees.”

I asked her if she remembers coming across the sundial in the clearing, and if she had ever heard the stories about it. She said yes to the first, no to the stories.

I asked what she remembers of the sundial, the glade.

“Not much. I heard bells, faint-like. Not church bells, sweeter, smaller, as though they were being rung underwater. I thought maybe it was children playing, but when I turned round, there was no one. It smelt of May, though it was February, wasn’t it?

(At this point, Mrs. Fell paused, as if listening.)

“Then I saw a woman standing by the sundial. Not moving. I thought she was another walker, but she was dressed like someone from another time, a shawl and apron, all brown. I called out. She looked up, but it was me. I mean, it was my face. Older, I think. Or maybe kinder. She said, “You’ll forget the way unless you go now.” So I turned. And then I was walking toward home and it was morning.”

Her family had organised searches for over a week. Police and local search and rescue teams had scoured the woods and surroundings. She bore no signs of exposure or injury, though her boots were covered in a fine, silver-grey dust unlike the local soil. A sample was taken (now misplaced).

Her story is consistent with older accounts: the air shifting in scent and temperature, the sound of bells, meeting yourself, or a version of you.

When I asked if she fears the wood, she replied, “No. It knows me now.”

I walked the path from Barford later the same day. Saw a trio of teasels at the edge of the wood, arrived at the three-fold fork, took the left hand way. In the clearing, the air smelled faintly of summer meadows. I thought of Agnes. I thought of all the missing days and hours. It was a sunny day, but no shadow from the gnomon.

3 April, 2025

Returned to the glade via the Ditchampton path. Ramsons blooming along the edges. Silent. Cold, for April. All my electronics failed and my clockwork watch stopped as usual, reading 6.14. The forest seems to interfere with instruments in a repeatable, precise way. Whether there’s any significance in the numerology of 6.14, I don’t know. Something to investigate.

I’d brought an old film camera this time. Took several photographs of the path, teasels, the fork, the clearing, the sundial.

I spent a while observing the sundial, hoping to see it cast a shadow. I feel it watching me back. Not malevolent. Curious. Perhaps amused.

I thought again of the people who’d been here and lost hours or days. Years even, if some of the older accounts are accurate. The incoherent impressions, the strange tableaux, the unseen presences moving behind trees. People seeing themselves, younger or older or just changed.

I closed my eyes and asked a question, not aloud, just in my head.

Why won’t you show me anything?

I opened my eyes. Nothing had changed.

Then the light softened, somehow; it’s hard to describe. And I felt seen, as if I had the attention of something in the clearing; the sundial itself?

Footsteps sounded behind me. I turned but no one was there.

A warm scent hit me, and I remembered a childhood summer, somewhere specific but I can’t quite place it. Then whispering drifted through the clearing, I couldn’t make out the words but it sounded uncomfortably close to my own voice. Light flickered in the trees to one side.

I do not yet know if this is temporal distortion, liminal perception, or some entirely new phenomenon. I only know it exists. And that it demands care.

While walking the path back from the clearing, I thought I heard the faintest flutter of wings behind me. I turned, but the path was empty.

5 April

I had my film developed. I was expecting all frames to be blank. They were, mostly. The last one had a very faint, almost invisible impression of a face, laughing.

2 July, 2025

I have walked this path six times now. Each time, the clearing feels slightly different. I have glimpsed what might be past and future selves. Not just visions, but echoes: voices, movements, presences. Some faint, some insistent.

I feel like I'm no longer merely observing. Am I part of the wood’s memory?

11 July, 2025

Today, I simply stood in the clearing for about twenty minutes (I think). I asked no questions. The forest knows me now.

I noticed that the shadows of the trees remained perfectly still even when the branches stirred in the wind.

A thread of silver-grey dust drifted across the clearing, passing through the sundial.

A small crow landed at the edge of clearing. It cocked its head, looked directly at me. I heard a tinkle of bells, close behind me, and turned to look. Nothing there. When I turned back, the crow was gone.

I do not understand it. Perhaps understanding is impossible.

Travelling home I had a feeling something was not right. When I got home I found it was the day after I'd left. I thought I'd been gone for a few hours.

13 July, 2025

Last night, I dreamed I was in the glade at dusk. I saw myself as a child, running along the path and then across the grass to the sundial, which stretched impossibly tall. Shadows moved backward, trees crowded in. I reached for a branch; it moved away like liquid. A crow landed silently on the gnomon, tilting its head, and behind it, another cawed somewhere just beyond the treeline. Above, a goshawk glided low, its wings slicing the darkening air, hunting something I could not see. Faint bells rang in the distance, delicate and impossible, as though carried underwater, their notes both close and unreachable. I woke suddenly, heart pounding, the echo of wings and bells still sounding in my ears.

I decide this will be my last visit to the glade for a while. I confess I’m afraid of what may happen. Each time I return, it feels less like a place I observe and more like a presence that observes me. I can feel the weight of its memory pressing at the edges of my mind, and I am no longer certain where my own thoughts end and the wood’s recollections begin. There is a fascination I find hard to resist, but also a quiet dread. The loss of time yesterday has unnerved me. What if, in returning again, I step too far into the glade’s remembering, and there is no path back? For now, I will wait, knowing that the wood will continue to notice me, even in absence.

Addendum: On the Elsewhere

What happens to those who step beyond the Sundial Glade’s circle, or rather, through it, remains uncertain. Yet tradition in the Chase holds that there is an Elsewhere, and that Grovely Wood, like a fold in old cloth, conceals (at least) one of its entrances. There are three main theories around this.

(a) Otherworld hypothesis

Rooted in Celtic lore, the Otherworld is a place of beauty and wonders. Entry is often accidental, through mists, mounds, or music. Immortal beings dwell there. The seasons may run backward, and time becomes threaded and looped, no longer linear. So the Sundial Glade may function as a thin place, aligning mortal and immortal realms and allowing crossings between the two.

(b) Fae road hypothesis

Some folkloric research proposes that ancient trackways align with unseen routes of the Fair Folk. The sundial’s shadow, when it stirs, may indicate not the hour, but the direction to a Fae Road. Follow the shadow pointer and take a path to leave this world, for a time. So the glade itself is not the crossing point to Elsewhere, but the sundial points you towards the path.

(c) Memory-field theory

The Sundial Glade may possess a memory-field: a place where time folds inward, replaying fragments of itself. Those who enter are remembered by the land. Within this recollection, the boundaries of self and location dissolve. A person becomes part of the wood itself and may see things the wood has seen in the past, or indeed the future (for example when a future self sees a past self, the reverse also happens).

Who made the sundial (an ongoing dispute)

The dispute divides roughly into three camps, each convinced the others are missing something essential.

1. The keeper-mason argument (locals)

Older residents in the Chase insist the sundial was carved by a solitary stonemason “of the old ways,” a man who lived on the edge of the wood sometime in the late 18th century. They tell the story with a kind of practical certainty, as if remembering a neighbour rather than a legend.

According to them, the mason created the sundial as a counterweight to “pin the clearing in place” when the glade was beginning to slip. They claim he wanted to anchor it. Some say he vanished after completing the dial, “walked straight into his own shadow and didn’t come out again.”

Folklorists dismiss this as a literalisation of legend, though locals maintain they know what they know.

2. The otherworld claim (folklorists and esoteric researchers)

Folklorists argue the sundial is of great antiquity, and not “made” in the ordinary sense at all. They point out that the stone bears no markings of tools, and there is no historical record of its erection. To them, the glade is a thin place, and the sundial is a structure that has slipped through from the other side by accident or design.

They cite the shadow's independence of sunlight as evidence of an Elsewhere origin. Some claim the sundial's presence is a deliberate act on the part of beings from the otherworld, marking and maintaining a regular crossing point.

Locals dismiss this as academic romanticism; however their own stonemason argument does support the idea of the sundial as protecting or maintaining the glade.

3. The memory-field position (contemporary investigators)

A newer theory, favoured by a few field researchers who have experienced the glade directly, argues that it is the forest’s own recollection of a sundial: an impression drawn from human visitors across centuries, crystallised into stone by the glade’s peculiar memory-field.

Supporters point out that those who spend time there report déjà vu around the stone itself, as though recognising an object they have not yet encountered.

Folklorists scoff at this as pseudo-mysticism. Locals say it sounds like the sort of theory made by people who don’t get out enough.

A parish by parish tour of the Chase

This week, Cann. But only part of it; it's another one of those "edge parishes".

CANN

Cann is one of the Dorset parishes, south of Shaftesbury, sitting on the western edge of the Chase and historically known for its mills. It covers a fairly large area, but only a small portion of it actually lies within the Chase, the area around Cann Common. This was common land until enclosure in 1812.

Cann Common consists mainly of houses arranged in a ribbon along the B3081, and Melbury Motors, where you can pick up a second-hand car or arrange an MOT or service. The orange shading on the map below shows the area in the Chase.

Hubert's guide to Cann is below. All views expressed are Hubert's own, and are not necessarily shared by Tales from the Chase.

CANN

How delightful. Another week where we don’t get a whole parish, just the leftovers someone’s pushed to the side of the plate. Pretending it belongs with the grown-up landscapes while the rest of the parish lurks outside the Chase boundary, doing whatever it is Cann does. Over there, there's a prison. And there are mills. But not here, oh no.

So welcome to the only fragment of Cann Parish that’s managed to weasel its way into the Chase. Cann? More like Can’t. As in: Can’t be bothered, Can’t find anything interesting, and Can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would write about it.

There's a settlement of sorts, known as Cann Common, a smudge of semi-rural suburbia that, through some landscape assessment boundary setter's whim, technically happens to fall within the Chase. I am legally obliged (by my own catastrophically ill-conceived protocols) to comment on it.

So what can I say? The fact that Cann Common was once common land seems to be the most interesting thing about it, which is depressing. Except for maybe when in 1916 workers quarrying for road construction materials in one of the fields unearthed a lead coffin containing a Roman child, sprigs of box leaves arranged in a perfect circle at its head.

But if you’re hunting for anything more ancient, quirky or weird, you might as well be looking for a unicorn. Although I never met any of the residents, so you never know. Statistically, a few must tick at least one of those boxes.

NEXT WEEK: CHALBURY

Prepare to be utterly underwhelmed.

The low sun slants over Cann Common while storm clouds gather over Zig Zag hill. Deep in Grovely Wood, the Sundial Glade waits patiently for Isla to recover her nerve. Next week, the Forgotten Footpath Society brings a story that may make you reconsider every footstep you’ve ever taken in the Chase. Do come along.

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