If you fancy a walk with a bit of history attached, Dorset has a quiet one that packs a lot in: the Lawrence of Arabia Trail. It is a seven-mile circular route that follows the life and times of T.E. Lawrence, the man who became a household name after the Arab Revolt, and it starts and finishes at the Bovington Tank Museum, where he served in the Tank Corps from 1923 to 1935.
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The centrepiece is Clouds Hill, the cottage Lawrence rented in 1923, bought in 1925, and lived in until his death in 1935. Originally built in 1808 as a forester's or labourer's cottage, he spent years rebuilding it between 1922 and 1934, and he called it his earthly paradise, signing it TE Shaw. Now in the hands of the National Trust and Grade II* listed, it is kept much as he left it, without electricity, and still holds his books, maps and original furniture. A thatched garage built in 1930 on the site runs an exhibition on his life, and the place once took visitors like Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster and Robert Graves.
From there the trail leads to St Nicholas Church in Moreton, where Lawrence is buried. The church dates from 1776 and was largely destroyed by a German bomb in 1940 before being rebuilt, and his funeral there on 21 May 1935 was attended by Winston Churchill and Lady Nancy Astor among others. The building is also known for its glass windows engraved by Laurence Whistler, a project that took thirty years to complete between 1955 and 1984, and every year a wreath of 46 white roses is left on his grave. A short distance away in Wareham, St Martin-on-the-Walls, the oldest church in Dorset, holds a life-size stone effigy of Lawrence in Arab dress, carved by his friend Erich Kennington and installed in September 1939, showing him with the jambiya dagger given to him by Sherif Nasir after the capture of Aqaba in July 1917.
A bit of background helps the walk land. Born in Caernarvonshire, North Wales in 1888, Lawrence studied history at Jesus College, Oxford, worked as an archaeologist at Carchemish in Syria, and organised the operation that took Aqaba in 1917. After the war he joined the RAF in 1922 under the name John Hulm Ross, adopted TE Shaw in 1923, and published Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1926. He was also a keen motorcyclist, owning seven Brough Superiors over the years, the last of which he nicknamed the steel horse. He died at 46 on 19 May 1935 after a motorcycle accident near Clouds Hill, swerving to avoid two children on bicycles.
As a walk, it is an easy seven miles, though parts are out-and-back, and information boards are set up along the way to fill in the gaps. For the competitive, there is a GPS file and a recorded fastest known time of 41 minutes and 23 seconds, set by Keith Wigley in April 2021, so it works as a gentle stroll or a brisk loop depending on how much you want to stop and read the boards.
Published Date
4 October 2026
