Pimperne

Pimperne is a village that has spent four thousand years being adjacent to somewhere more interesting, which is the closest thing Dorset has to a personality trait. The long barrow, the hillforts, the barrows on every ridge: the people who built them all looked at this stretch of chalk and thought, good spot, then got on with dying somewhere else. Today the traffic does the same thing, passing through on the way to Blandford at a speed the parish council has been writing letters about since roughly the Bronze Age. It is a quiet, handsome, thoroughly agreeable place, and the only real question is whether you want your evenings to contain anything at all.