IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Tricketts Lane, FERNDOWN, BH22 8AT

This postbox serves this little estate of desirable bungalows, each with arches in their design and few with a frontage wall or fence or hedge. The box is emptied at 5:15pm on weekdays and at 12:30pm on Saturdays.

Turbary Road is the access road for a large housing estate which comprises a mix of council housing and desirable bungalows. Here, by the junction with the main road, are shops including a general store (round to the left), fish & chip shop, off licence and (out of picture, right) Chinese takeaway. The postbox, like the three in the estate, is emptied finally at 5:15pm on weekdays and at 12:30pm on Saturdays. For many years residents of the estate campaigned for a post office, since it's quite a distance into Ferndown town from here – but they never got one.

This little postbox is one of four in the estate accessed off Trickett's Cross which have identical last collection times: 5:15pm on weekdays and 12:30pm on Saturdays.

This view down Golf Links Road from its junction with the A347 (Ringwood Road, near Trickett's Cross) shows at first sight a fairly ordinary suburban highway disappearing into the distance; however its almost perfectly straight alignment betrays the fact that it was once an ancient trackway - traceable on 19th century maps - that led to Dudsbury Fort (or Dudsbury Camp), an early Iron Age fortification on the bank of the River Stour. In later centuries, it would almost certainly have been used by smugglers moving from the south coast inland to cross the heathland on their way to Cranborne and Salisbury.

Lost in the encroaching greenery is the continuation of a once ancient trackway that stretched from Dudsbury hill fort on the River Stour, towards St. Leonard's Common (West Moors) and then on north to Wiltshire and NE Dorset. The track is traceable on old maps of the 19th century. The road in the foreground is the A347 (Ringwood Road) which was very busy - it was quite a feat to capture this with nothing on it!

This image, roughly halfway between the busy Wimborne Road and the even busier Ringwood Road (A347), both former turnpikes of late 18th century vintage, shows the 'true' nature of the track that might have been familiar to folk using the way over a couple of centuries ago. I doubt the trees would have been so developed - the track would have passed across a heathland landscape and the shrubbery would have been cropped by ponies, cattle & wild animals etc.

It is peculiar that this milestone should specify "through Ringwood" – from here, no reasonable route could possibly avoid Ringwood (in the way that it would not be odd to state "through Winchester" as opposed to, say, Andover).

At the junction of Ringwood Road (A348) and Wimborne Road East.