This gate opens onto farmland and scrub stretching just half a mile from the Jurassic coast, up and over the Dorset ridgeway.
If you head due east, maybe a touch to the north, you can walk with your dog (or dogs) for five or six miles and never come across a building nor even a road.
Yet Weymouth and Portland Borough Council choose to threaten us with a £5000 fine for not having our dogs on a lead, or £1000 for allowing them to, ahem, shit (for want of a better word).
The path leads away from the main road through Sutton Poyntz and the signs can’t be directed at people coming towards the village because they’re impossible to see from that direction.
Half a mile further west it’s the same thing on Chalbury Rings, the bronze age hill fort, which is as remote as anywhere. In five years, walking there regularly, I might have bumped into someone else once, perhaps twice.
The nasty, dog-hating, money-wasting, officious ‘little Hitlers’ that devise and operate this policy are the very worst of Britain. Local government seems to be infested with them.
Peter Reynolds