This week: Craig writes about a legendary pub in Worth Matravers, Dorset
Friday evening. I’m hurtling south, having stayed the last two nights in Salisbury. Evening falls and, as I drop down into the fringes of the village that is our home for the forthcoming months, a solid stone building squats on the brow of the hill. To the front, a sign swings in the March winds; it is a dependable sentinel watching the dark stretches of the ocean that swells beneath darkening skies.
A time before, this place was called was The Sloop, an eighteenth-century auberge for quarrymen, stonemasons and, legend has it, smugglers. Half a century later, it took on the name by which it is now famed across the Southwest: The Square and Compass inn. Over the centuries, the demographic of clientele has changed radically; but thick timber and stone has absorbed every yarn, every vagary every squall that has been traded through the years. If you listen carefully, the building will whisper its stories back to you.
This is the kind of hostelry you see in the Harry Potter films or that you read about in the great adventure tales of Robert Louis Stevenson – a place where horses were tethered to the thick stone walls as their owners struck dubious deals within; a place where the hard stares of feuding families locked across tankard and flagstone.
But this place is real. Where once hard leather soles aged by salt and stone would have worn those flagstones smooth, now it is the gentler tread of Hunters wellies and sturdy walking boots that scuffle up to the bar. Where the single file queue would have carried gossip of rutted lynchets and swelling tides, now it buzzes with discussion of coastal erosion, cliff-edge trails and fossil finds.
Sepia nostalgia clings to the walls – Maydays, jubilees, ghosts of the village: familiar strangers clutching pitchforks and staffs, staring warily down the annals of Time. There are faded posters of spent occasions; piles of dog-eared local newsletters pushing bygone trades.
At The Square and Compass, there are only two rooms to drink in. To the left, three solid farm tables grooved by a million elbows, glasses and flagons are surrounded by benches and pews. Some of the furniture is painted into the walls so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends; all are invariably occupied. Where wax, canvas and leather were tossed across the backs of random chairs and pews, now you’ll find rucksacks and Gore-Tex outerwear. Towards the far wall, a grouchy old wood burner still spits and groans beneath a shelf tacked with nick-nacks and old bottles – paraphernalia that one suspect has gathered decades of dust. In this room, you’ll mostly find ‘grockles’. Should you strike lucky and find a place to perch, you’ll be so shoulder to shoulder with new company that, by the time you’ve supped up, you’d have acquired one or two new life-stories to take home.
To the right of the bar, the main seating space is equally brim-full of early evening drinkers. Occasionally, their easy bonhomie may be quelled by fiddle strings telling tales of lives lost to broken hearts and cruel seas. As with the other room, the ceilings are as low as the voices; every soul is dowsed in the perpetual amber fug of a well-stacked inglenook and in the easy conversation – occasionally peppered with a Dorset accent. These things and the tart bite of a dry farmhouse cider are the panacea to the wounds of the working week.
Here and now, I find myself at the front of the queue and the cider is on my mind. I order two pints of Eve’s Idea and a packet of crisps for The Boy, to turn and trade smiles with the stranger behind me. Centuries fall away we’re back in the era of hay wagons and quarter-decks.
Perfection.
©Craig Ennew 2025
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