Well, we have opened now for the 2016 season and will continue with the history of this amazing place with which we had loved since  1970s when we came on holiday with our own family. 

This drawing was done by a visitor about 15 years ago. 

In 1965 a small timber building was extended for use as a campsite shop. This was behind where the present shop stands. Planning permission was obtained in 1974 to build a new shop, where the present shop is sited.

In 1968 a toilet block was built next to the Nissen hut and about five years later this was extended. Tom and his father, Titus, used to sell milk from Talbot Cottage, still to be seen in Langton High Street, just past the end of Tom’s Field Road. That building was their home before Drywalling was built alongside the entrance to Tom’s Field. Drywalling was knocked down in 2006 and replaced by two smart stone homes, one of which retains the name Drywalling.

Tom and his dad outside the shop.

There was a dairy where the shop terrace is now and there were at least two quarries on the site. A Spitfire crashed on the field behind Tom’s Field during the Second World War and there are stories that many cows were buried somewhere on the fields after being slaughtered in an early outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Fortunately, none of these has ever surfaced. Perhaps it is an apocryphal tale!

Tom never drove a car and used go to trade shows on his Vespa scooter. This seemed to break down constantly and sometimes Graham Windsor, of Caramarine, would put him and the vehicle into his van to bring him home. Perhaps surprisingly, Tom never went camping and had a fairly cynical view of campers,  “Campers don’t read (notices),” he would say. Yet, he made many friends and would visit his long-standing visitors when they returned to the site year after year. They will never forget Tom. So established was his method of operating the site and he did his best to pass on to us some of his routines. For example, Tom used to make up packs of tent pegs through the winter and often told us that we should occupy ourselves gainfully in the same way. I think he nurtured a deep disappointment that we did not do that.

Tom, who was born in 1931, died in the summer of 2005. He is buried in the cemetery down Crack Lane, in Langton Matravers. Tom never married but had many cousins.