Alan Turing’s walk to the Dorsetshire Gap

During the winter term of 1930 the Headmaster granted the School an extra half holiday. Alan’s housemaster, Geoffrey O’Hanlon, used the opportunity to take two boys from Westcott House, Alan Turing and Peter Hogg, on a walk to the Dorsetshire Gap on the Wessex Ridgeway.

In a talk he gave to the Sherborne Wesleyan Guild on 10 February 1931, Geoffrey O’Hanlon described the walk as ‘One of the best walks I have done’ and outlined the route they took that day:

‘To Okeford Fitzpaine and then on to Okeford Hill. At the top turn as usual westwards… After a mile and a half or so, you join the track from Belchalwell to Bulbarrow… From Bulbarrow go on to Rawlsbury Camp… From Rawlsbury drop down to the stream this side of Ansty, and cut across some fields, a sort of common and a copse, which is very wet indeed, and up the hill again. Presently you arrive at Dorsetshire Gap, a network of small paths cut deeply in the chalk, most forbidding when I passed it with two boys who shared with me the adventures of the day… I feel sure that it was a meeting place, and a very safe one far from anywhere, for the smugglers who might land their freight at Lulworth Cove or Worbarrow Bay. They might get rid of part of their loads at Tolpuddle. But for distribution farther north the Gap was an admirable meeting place.’

The route of Alan Turing’s walk to the Dorsetshire Gap.

I am grateful to Michael Hanson for providing me with details of this walk, taken from Geoffrey O’Hanlon, By-Ways in Dorset. Recollections of the Twenties. Edited version of a talk given by Geoffrey O’Hanlon to the Wesleyan Guild in Sherborne on 10 February 1931. Edited by Michael Hanson, May 1992.

Rachel Hassall
School Archivist

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