On entering Abbotsbury from the east, past the Swan Inn and along Rodden Row, there is a left-hand turn, a small back road which passes St. Peter's Church, the Abbey ruins and great Tithe Barn. This road descends to the Swannery before wending its way past two farms towards the turning to Elworth hamlet and onwards to Rodden. Just past the Tithe Barn there is a right-hand fork known as Grove Lane, along which there is a scattering of cottages.

It is over 20 years since I encountered my first 'apparition' along that back road. As I live two miles away, on the boundary of Abbotsbury parish, my babysitter who resided in one of the cottages along Grove Lane, required a lift.

The evening was clear and frosty when I left the hamlet of Elworth to drive her home, so after I dropped her off at her house, rather than return back along the main Abbotsbury to Portisham road, I decided to return to Elworth via the back road. As I drove past the swannery car park at the end of Grove Lane, a sea fret was creeping up across the water meadows to cloak the road in intermittent patches of swirling mist, that admittedly gave one a sense of eerie unreality that was of itself quite fascinating. I was vaguely aware of passing the track to Clay Hanger farm on my left because the mist on the lower parts of the road blotted out definitions of landscape, but as the car climbed the hill to New Barn farm the mist dissipated to show the stars in the night sky once more. Dropping down the steep hill after passing the farm however, I was soon back into a patchy mist, although not as opaque as it had been when closer to the coast by the swannery. Nonethless I drove cautiously, aware that a thicker swirl of mist might cause me to put a wheel in the ditch running alongside the narrow roadway. An uneasy feeling had already entered my sub-conscious that this was not a time or place where I wished to get stuck!

As I passed the copse on my left, my windscreen suddenly went black, obliterating all vision of my car lights and the road ahead. I breaked hard bringing the car to a halt because my instant thought was that a wayward piece of plastic (perhaps from a silage bale) had somehow got flung up across my windscreen by the passage of the vehicle. Leaving the engine running and headlights on, I got out of the car to remove the obstruction, but there was nothing there. I checked my front lights but although strangely dim they were free of debris. I was however aware of a cold beyond the normal chill of outside air. Put simply, it was like stepping into a freezer. Thus I was not really surprised when I turned to get back into my car to see a white figure standing silhouetted against the darkness in the roadway behind the vehicle. I told myself that this was only a metamorphosis of the mist but the attempt at logic seemed ludicrous. The glimmering shape was lit by its own luminosity - a man in seventeenth century clothing, his features obscured by his wide brimmed hat which despite the 'glow' of his person, flung a muted shadow across his face. I vaguely remember saying something, neither expecting nor getting a reply and then he moved, slowly walking into the copse. As he disappeared, the air resumed a more normal temperature. I waited a moment, strangely calm within myself considering the experience, before getting back into the car and driving along the road to take the left turning to Elworth hamlet and home.

Upon relating this experience to a friend, who had been born in Abbotsbury, I was told that the apparition had been sighted by other local residents. It was believed that 'the ghost' was that of a loyalist supporter who had escaped from the confrontation in Abbotsbury during the English Civil War. Local lore suggests this poor man to have been caught by parliamentary forces and 'strung up by the neck' in the copse at the bottom of the hill below New Barn farm!

One fine morning in early spring and I have got the 'gardening bug'. The humid air is redolent of the promise of new growth but first to remove the old! To be precise, an ancient stump of bay tree right underneath the cottage window, which has been hacked back so many times it had concentrated all its energies into thwarting further attempts at control. Put simply - it would have to go! Easier said than done. Suspecting a complex root system, I had already sussed that one and organised some assistance. So when I heard the front gate squeak open and clang shut, I gave an inward sigh of relief but did not stop my digging labour for I wanted to at least appear willing! But I admit to being somewhat surprised when a gruff voice coming from behind my shoulder stated "thee didna oughta take they up lass".

The gentleman I was expecting had a strong local accent, so I did not immediately turn to acknowledge him as I was intent on cutting through what I judged to be the 'leading' root - incorrectly as it turned out!

"Why be that then?" I asked, responding in kind but feeling slightly irritated - after all I had contracted him to help with this very labour, of which he was fully aware.

"They be there to ward off witches," he asserted, in determined fashion.

"Well there's enough bay trees in this garden to ward off all the witches in Abbotsbury!" I responded ascerbically, as my spade rebounded off the root to almost sever my foot instead.

No response.

Thrusting my spade firmly into the ground I now turned to greet my reluctant 'gardener'.

There was no one there.

I called out, thinking he must have taken offence at my petulance but in truth, in the moments it had taken for our verbal exchange to take place, there were few places unsighted that he could have disappeared.

My friend eventually arrived through the gate a good half an hour after this incident. Puzzled I asked where he had disappeared to - an even more puzzling reply was that he had not 'been' anywhere as he had only just arrived!

It took both of us the best part of the day to remove the bay and even now, some many years later, little shoots persistently appear beneath the window to mock our attempt. I may have been warned by a 'ghost', but at least there should not be any witches at Elworth!

A very hot day and a busy day, it is changeover day for the holiday cottage but there will be a concert to look forward to in the evening.

Having worked the day within doors, there is just time to walk the dogs upon the hillside above the farmhouse before having a quick shower, grabbing the picnic and rushing off to see the opera, 'Dido and Aeneas' being performed at Ashley Chase.

As I walk up the narrow track between two hedges that leads from Elworth hamlet to join the coast path upon the ridge, a gentle evening breeze provides relief after a day spent cleaning in airless conditions. My collie ranges ahead, scenting the hedgerows for an unwary rabbit whilst the labrador puppy, constrained by a lead, pulls me in all directions in an attempt to follow suit. It is six o'clock and a perfect summer's evening.

Through a break in the hedge I note a figure at the far end of the adjacent field. Not a walker, for the person is clad in a long, black cloak and eighteenth century tricorn hat! I smile to myself - I am obviously going to be witness to a preview of the opera, as I know that members of the cast are staying with my next door neighbour. The gentleman has most certainly come upon the ridge for a final practice before the show, and what better place to sing than up here with the seascape stretching endlessly away into the distance.

I am to be disappointed, however, for not a sound disturbs the serenity - and that in itself is strange, for now I am aware that the breeze has dropped and there is an absence of birdsong that is uncanny.

I have just reached the brow of the hill where a few yards ahead of me a five-barred gate gives access to the main coast path. The gentleman is now standing just the other side of the gate. It appears his back is towards me for he is perfectly silhouetted against the skyline.

The collie stops a few steps ahead of me, head down, hackles up, he growls ominously. The puppy pulls back on his lead whining his fear.

I call out to the man not to worry, that the collie will not hurt him (I hope!) and bend down to pick up the squirming pup. When I look up again some seconds later, my collie has disappeared and so has the gentleman.

As I walk towards the gate, trying to keep hold of a panic-stricken puppy, the air becomes frigid; so cold I can see my breath. The gate is swollen shut so I climb over it, calling for my dog. I am now standing on the ridge looking down across the valley. I spy the collie running along the hedge line that borders the back lane below New Barn farm. To have run that far in so short a time the dog must have been terrified. Of the man there is no sign. My vision sweeps across the vista lain out before me but there is no one there and few places of concealment. Again I call out, this time to the gentleman, but there is no reply.

Concerned for the collie, I decide to walk quickly eastward along the ridge, hoping that the dog will follow the roadway back to Elworth and home. The short walk along the ridge brings me out onto this road just above Merry Hill barn and sure enough, the collie is running up the track. He does not stop or respond to my calls, but continues up over the hill and down the other side towards the hamlet.

The puppy is still a quivering heap with head buried in my armpit as I run back to Elworth.

When I get home, I find the collie, also a quivering heap, in his bed!

Gathering up picnic and family we leave for the concert.

I met with the cast of the opera the next day, as they were packing up to leave my neighbour's. Some of them had worn black cloaks in their performance but all of them vowed that they had left for Ashley Chase to practise and set everything up long before 6pm and that none of them had had the time to walk up the hillside onto the ridge!

A typical school holiday - three teenage boys materialise just before midday to demand a full cooked breakfast! Not impressed with that idea, I suggest they disappear off down to the end of the paddock where they have a 'do-it-themselves' bar-b-q. Armed with what looks like the entire contents of my fridge they comply with surprisingly little fuss.

Getting into the swing of 'swallows and amazons' they later announce they will cook their own dinner as well, so I pretend to ignore the evidence of a beer can protruding from the top of a rucksack in joyful expectation of an entire day's peace!

The boys return at dusk, doubtless replete, seemingly only intoxicated by their outside activities, stating that they have put out the fire, so I need not worry.

'Not worrying' however, does not feature in my makeup, so once my chores are over, I decide to go down to the paddock to check that the fire is indeed out and not least to see what the little devils have been up to!

It is now dark with a waning moon, so I take a torch to light my way as the ground is uneven and there are thickets of hawthorn to snare the unwary.

From the red glow and occasional sparks, it is immediately obvious that the fire is far from being put out! I back track, fetch a bucket on the basis that it is preferable to do the job myself than to attempt to tear the boys away from the 'playstation', even though I know that sort of attitude does not portend well for the future!

Armed with a bucket of water filled from the nearby duck pond, I douse the fire but just before the last spark is extinguished I sense a presence at the edge of my vision before I am plunged into total darkness.

I immediately assume that I have scared the neighbour's cat, but I curse the torch because I had only just taken it 'off charge' and it should have had full battery power.

Negotiating my way back through the paddock avoiding stones and thorny branches, I am amazed when my torch suddenly flickers into full beam once more as I approach the farmhouse. I decide to retrace my steps; firstly to make sure that the fire is now fully out, but secondly I want to count just how many beer cans there are littering the place!

As I approach the boy's camp site, the torch dies once more. Ahead is total blackness; no glow now from the fire so at least I am satisfied on that count. Cursing my erratic torch, I turn homewards once more. In almost exactly the same place as before my torch comes full on providing a welcome beam.

I had always wondered why my dogs had a strange reluctance to venture down to the end of the paddock. The awareness of an animal is so much keener than that of humans!

Attached to my seventeenth century farmhouse is a thatched wing, which I let out as a holiday cottage. It was once the kitchen of the farmhouse, the downstairs having an inglenook fireplace, bread oven and copper washbowl. The 'above stairs' served as a store room having iron hooks ranged along the beams to hang meat from and hearsay suggested dried produce stored on the floorboards. A friend of mine, by profession a surveyor of ancient buildings, reached the opinion the cottage predated the farmhouse by at least a hundred years.

Not long after we renovated the cottage for paying guests, we had staying with us an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter. Upstairs being only a single room, we furnished it with a king-size bed and single bed to let out as a family room. Mother and daughter thought it 'charming' and booked in for a week's stay. On day three of their visit, however, they announced that they had had a visitor during the night.

"Oh I'm so sorry," I instantly responded, "the cat will come in if you leave the windows open."

"No, dear," the old lady replied, "not that sort of visitor, a very particular visitor."

By now I was beginning to suspect a rat (no - hopefully not in the literal sense of the word!). But still, having got used to the normal complaints of 'pity about the weather, dear' and 'the TV doesn't seem to be working' (not surprising in an area of poor reception), I was ill prepared for:

"We had a visit from a ghost, dear."

Oh heck! Not much point on calling my husband to sort that one out!

Trying to appear unpeturbed, I asked "what sort of ghost?" Hoping we did not have the 'throwing things around the room' type which would certainly have been a first regarding excuses from the visitors for broken objects!

Receiving what obviously appeared to them to have been a sympathetic response, they needed no further encouragement.

"Such a nice lady, my dear. She knocked to come in, so I went to see who was at the door."

"There was no one there," interjected the daughter.

No great surprise!

"She was knocking at the bathroom door," the daughter explained.

I managed to hide a grin. So much for the ghost; there had been no bathroom, let alone a door, until we put them in only a few years before this time.

"She walked upstairs and sat at the end of the bed," the mother continued. "Such a very nice lady, just smiled at us for a few moments then disappeared."

"What did she look like?" I asked - after all it is politic to humour one's guests!

"Elderly," was the response, "wearing quite ordinary clothes."

"But she did have such pretty red shoes," her daughter added.

Needless to say, in the decade since this 'appearance' the 'ordinary lady' has not shown herself to any of my other guests. My mother, who had died some short time before this incident and who had briefly lived in the cottage, did however, have a penchant for pretty red shoes!

One of the recurrent visitors to my holiday cottage is a rather serious, professional gentleman, somewhat of a workaholic, whom his wife complains is married to his lap-top rather than to his family! It has certainly been his habit to take his lap-top and sit at the picnic table on the lawn at the side of the house, whilst his wife and son frolic in the swimming pool.

One particular morning he was thus engaged when a strange encounter occurred to shake his equilibrium.

I was alerted to this by a hesitant knocking at my front door. There stood the gentleman, white of face and visibly shaking.

"I've just had the most weird experience," he informed.

Thinking he must have suffered some sort of sudden illness (a slight stroke or heart attack!) I immediately invited him in to sit down at the kitchen table and offered him a glass of water.

Once he had gathered himself sufficiently, he told me that he had been reading the newspaper when he sensed someone to be in the garden behind him. Turning around he had seen a group of men strangely dressed in, what appeared to him to be, seventeenth century clothing. They were engaged in prodding around the shrubbery with sticks, but as he was about to ask them what they were doing, they simply disappeared!

My poor visitor was unaware of the history attached to Elworth so he had no preconceptions, nor was he the sort of man I would have thought to be subject to hallucinations. I, however, was informed sometime before this that after the English civil war, parliamentary forces searched Elworth looking for Royalist sympathisers escaping from Abbotsbury. When I related this to my visitor, he surprisingly felt much calmer, presumably because he was not after all 'going round the bend' as he put it. I did note that in subsequent visits he gave up sitting at the picnic table!

We moved to Elworth farmhouse twenty years ago and mother came to! Being a widow she wanted to be close to her daughter and grandchild. This did not seem such a bad idea - after all one would have to be a fool to deride the advantages of a built in babysitter! 'Close', however, was the operative word.

The derelict cottage at the end of the farmhouse driveway was also for sale and this mother bought for us to do up for her. Do up was out of the question as total renovation was required, for it had not been lived in since half of it burnt down almost a century ago. Therein lies a tale worth mentioning. The last occupant of the dwelling had reputedly also been a widow. She had awoken in the night to find her cottage on fire downstairs. Although she had managed to get out of the building before the fire really took hold, being a Victorian lady and clad only in a night-gown, she had hesitated about raising the alarm with her neighbours, not wishing to be seen 'deshabille'! (It was after all in the days when it was considered shameful to do so much as show an ankle). By the time she overcame her sensibilities sufficient to raise her neighbours, the fire was well and truly blazing, the south end of the building beyond saving. What happened to the lady no one recalls but the cottage was thereafter utilised by the farm, hence, when mother purchased the cottage, it was simply known as 'the dairy'.

West Dorset planning authority were not at that time sympathetic to the idea of returning what was by then considered to be an agricultural building, back into a residential home. Mother was homeless!

We gave up the idea of 'close' and bowed to the inevitable. Granny moved in with us - as any family will appreciate, no matter how attached, this was not an ideal situation.

Eventually the 'dairy' was sold and subsequently the necessary planning permission to return it to a dwelling was obtained. The new owner commenced renovation (took most of it down) but lost enthusiasm for the daunting task ahead and so it was left for twelve years; a pile of rubble with one ivy clad gable wall retained and the small portion rebuilt rapidly sprouting rampant weeds.

Mother never gave up thinking of it wistfully as 'her cottage' and it grieved her to witness its desolation. She did not live to see its completion.

Some years later we were given the opportunity to buy back Dairy Cottage and we decided to rebuild it in her memory. Although her name was Mary, the family always called her Poppy, so in mother's memory it seemed appropriate to rename the cottage 'Poppy's Cottage'.

The week we finished building the cottage, a single red poppy grew out of the concrete cementing the capping stones on the boundary wall between our farmhouse and Poppy's Cottage!

It was a cold, January night; frost on the ground and moonlight streaming through the bedroom window.

Sometime during the early hours of the morning, the farmer was awoken by the cold. As he opened his eyes, he could see his breath. Reaching to pull the bedcovers more securely around himself, he became aware that he was not alone. A man was standing at the foot of his bed.

The farmer politely told the figure to "b----- off" and went back to sleep.

The apparition came and went twice more during the night and each time the farmer awoke to tell it "get you gone" and "leave me be".

Weird dreams disturbed the farmer's sleep that night. He dreamt that he was standing, all alone, on the top of Abbotsbury hill, the road ahead silvered by the moonlight. Another snatch of dream had him standing in the churchyard at Abbotsbury watching mourners. He saw the hearse leave from outside of the church with a draped coffin within it - but the hearse was leaving the church instead of arriving, which puzzled the farmer.

The farmer arose at a little after dawn. As he milked the cows he was not in the best of moods for the lad who was supposed to help him had failed to turn up for work. He was told later on that day that the boy had been killed on his motorcycle at the top of Abbotsbury hill the previous evening upon returning from a 'night out' in Bridport.

A few days later, the farmer arrived at the funeral to see the hearse already departing the churchyard on route for the crematorium at Weymouth. He had mistaken the time and had missed the church service - thus the hearse was seen by him to be going the 'wrong way', as in his dream.

Fifty years later, with different occupants residing in the farmhouse who knew nothing of the former incident, the apparition, was again seen entering the bedroom during a frosty night. The ghost was described as a 'quiet young man'.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, having a conversation and a cuppa tea, like, when I hears the porch door open and shut. That shut us up, I can tell ee, cos that there door hasn't been opened since I can't remember when.

"Did you hear that?" I asks Ma.

"I did too. Tis the porch door."

"Gettaway," I says, "that door's swollen shut."

Then, there it came again, the noise of the porch door grinding open like, and with the noise a draft of cold air around our feet. Then it slammed shut again.

"Ain't ee commin in?" asks Ma.

"No one can come in," says I. "That door's bolted, unless I be mistook."

We go and take a look, and sure enough the door is bolted shut, like I said it was. The bolts are stiff but I slide them back, both top of door and bottom and try to open the door. Swolled it was with all the rain of late, but open it I did. There weren't no one there though. But Ma and I heard it open and shut sure enough. Strange that!

This incident happened to two local residents who are "not in the habit of seeing ghosts"!