I wild camp for several reasons, and only sometimes because of cost (even the dingiest of hotels in Dorset at the moment seem to go for north of £200 a night). I like the cool evening air and the views I get from on high but I also like to be within easy striking distance of the next morning’s dawn photography target. I’ve been looking forward to Day 58’s target for some time, a series of “hollow way” tracks worn down by hundreds perhaps even thousands of years of foot and hoof passage. Hell Lane was waterlogged and muddy when I got there early doors and I wouldn’t recommend riding along it but to hell with that because it leads to the stupendous Shute Lane, probably Britain’s best holloway. It’s certainly its most evocative holloway. Libby walked down Shute Lane with her dog. (Libby is another bivvybag camper and, she is a digital detox refugee from the tech industry, she told me later; she’s been walking, and bivvying, with her black lab for more than a year). I let them pass before digging out the drone for some low level — and noisy — photography. I got some grand shots, which I’ll share in due course but the one of me with the lit Exposure Strada front light is a taster. After the darkness of these famous holloways I headed for the bright light of Bridport. I took more drone shots at the high-level Hardy memorial, taking care to fly outside of the SSSI zone — it’s very useful to have a drone with a zoom lens. (I incorrectly wrote that this was a memorial to the author and Dorset resident Thomas Hardy, but — to my great embarrassment — I have been politely told it was, in fact, raised to the memory of Vice-Admiral Hardy of Nelson “kiss me” fame. Sorry about that.) Thomas Hardy, of course, was a 1890s bike boom cyclist (a late convert) and he would cycle all around Dorset with his wife, Emma. “I have almost forgotten.” he wrote, “that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of – bicycling!” No doubt they visited the Iron Age hillfort of Maiden Castle, near Dorchester. If so, I followed in their wheel ruts. Sort of. There’s a statue of the great author above the foundations of the Roman wall that once ringed the town. Down the hill there are mosaics and more under cover at the Roman town house. I flew the drone again. Lots more finials on display in Dorset, too. So many that I silently mock those home owners who chose not to fit their roofs with these thatch animals. Atop one roof in Piddletrenthide I thought I spotted a thatch squirrel, but it moved. Later, in Cerne Abbas, I flew the drone to grab shots of a finial fox chasing a finial hare. These were the most realistic thatch creatures I’ve seen so far, with painted on eyes. It’s not the eyes that’s the draw on the giant chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. He’s faded, but still quite an upstanding fellow. I wild camped beside two tumuli, high on a Dorset ridge ready to photograph the Dorsetshire gap in the morning. This is an ancient crossroads, antiquarians have long argued, and I’m a sucker for such tales.