Making amends for a geographical error

A READER quite properly called me last week to complain that my description of the course of a Dorset river showed a woeful lack of accuracy. The Frome, she correctly pointed out, does not “rise near Bovington” as I had said in a piece about declining salmon numbers, because if it did it would be less than ten miles long!

She told me its source was closer to the downland village of Evershot, some 30-plus miles from the sea at Poole harbour where it enters the sea. Apologies all round. It was a silly mistake.

It was also a useful illustration of how people feel about their own personal geography and how offended when others get it wrong. I grew up within spitting distance of another classic south of England chalk stream, the Wylye, which rises close to Kilmington, near the National Trust’s Stourhead Estate and joins the Nadder, west of Salisbury, before the waters of both rivers merge with the Avon to continue the journey south to the sea at Christchurch.

I once admonished a bookseller and keen angler, who wrote about trout fishing on the Wylye for getting the name wrong, so I know how it feels to have a little bit of countryside you know well mucked about with. I fear journalists probably do it more than they should. I’ll try to take more care in future.

I now live not far from Devon’s river Avon – one of seven UK rivers that share that name, five in England, one in Scotland and one – more properly the Afan – in Wales.

I should have known better about the rising and route of the river Frome. Friends and I used to spend the odd weekend walking in Dorset – generally ending up in a pub – and on several trips we used a guide book of walks based around the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Evershot, where the Frome rises, is widely said to be Hardy’s Evershead from Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There are numerous clues in the novel that link the fiction to places rooted in the real Dorset countryside, which Hardy helped – literally – to put on