The Scrappy Wall has been added to Tyneham Farm as part of the continuing Tyneham Farm Project.
Outline plan
Our ‘Scrappy Wall’ will be built along the foundation of the old Cart Shed which ran from the Barn towards the Toilets.
The wall will be built from an eclectic mixture of materials ~ Purbeck and Portland stone, bricks, slates, clay tiles and drainage pipes accumulated during the clearance of the farm site. Custom-made Gabion baskets will form parts of the wall. Familiar as rock-filled retaining structures, ours will instead contain a jumble of unearthed metal hinges, chains, bottles, machinery parts and fixings.
Incorporated into the main structure will be a mix of old Farm and Military equipment. The objects will be named using slate and carved stone. A ‘show off’ section has been set aside for the dry stone wallers.
As a continuation of our successful scented garden, the wall will be topped with a carpet of Thyme, star attraction for bees, planted in the hot, dry conditions it loves.
The building handiwork of many volunteers can be admired on the farm site. Date stones displayed in the walls show their progress since the beginning of the Tyneham Farm Project in 2008.
Both the Dry Stone Walling Association and the Dorset Countryside Volunteeers will be involved in this next, rather different creation.
Scraps of information embedded in the wall
Churchill’s War Cabinet ordered the evacuation of the Tyneham Valley, along with the occupants of farms and smallholdings in Povington, Lulworth and Creech. Over 100 properties were claimed by the military.
Responsible for rehousing the evacuees who could not find themselves a place to live, Wareham and Purbeck District Council hastily requisitioned empty properties and rooms in nearby villages.
Dorset has been the ‘home of the tank’ since 1916 when it was developed by the British and tested at Lulworth. It was first used during the First World War at the Battle of the Somme.
In December 1943 Tyneham became part of the wartime ‘Dorset Coast Battle Area’, a training ground for American and British Tank crews based at nearby Lulworth and Bovington Camps.
By the Spring of 1944 the South Coast had become an armed camp in preparation for D-Day. Eleven million acres of land, much of it farmland, became airfields, training grounds, camps and munition dumps.
On 6 June the 34,000 American Troops based in Dorset left Weymouth and Portland for the ‘bloodiest’ of the five Allied landing sites ‘Omaha Beach’ 2,500 Americans lost their lives that day.
The D-Day landings became the largest naval task force in history. On June 6 1944 an armada of 7,000 boats, 156,000 troops and 54,000 vehicles left the south coast for the beaches of Normandy.
The D-Day Normandy landings included troops from Britain, America, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslavakia, France, Greece, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Poland.