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Imberbus 2025

Where do you find a bus service that runs once a year, through a military training area to serve a place where nobody lives? The answer to this unusual question is the abandoned village of Imber, nestled on its own in a valley the middle of Salisbury Plain.

Imber is an old village. It was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086^1 (albeit with just seven houses) and at its largest in 1851 had 440 inhabitants. By 1931 this number had fallen to just 152. It was an isolated little place, and unless you worked on the land here or provided services to those who did, there was little for you there. Travelling to Imber was not straightforward: a Mr Fred Maidment of Chitterne recounted to the Wiltshire News[^2] that it lay nine miles by road from the already lonely Gore Cross, and when he walked to Imber to preach became regularly fog-bound to the point that he would leave a lamp in one spot, carrying another one forward until he found a familiar landmark.

At around the turn of the century Imber had become hot property – the Ministry of Defence had been buying up land in and around the village, and by 1902 owned some 43,000 acres. They took advantage of the lean years of the twenties and thirties to acquire further areas of land, and by the outbreak of the second world war in 1939 owned the entirety of the village and its surrounds as part of the Salisbury plain training area.

In late 1943 the MoD issued its tenants in Imber with notice to quit, with the expectation that they would all have moved out by 17th December of that year. As with the similar possession of Tyneham in Dorset, the residents were promised that they could return after the war – and as with Tyneham this promise was never fulfilled.

Access to Imber is now permitted on only a few days each year, and one of these is dedicated to the gloriously bonkers Imberbus.

Imberbus was born from a pub chat between a group of bus industry managers on the subject of “where is the most unlikely place you could run a proper bus service?”, and started in 2009 with just four vehicles. Excepting a break for the ‘vid in 2020 it has operated every year since, managing a bumper run-out this year of some forty vehicles. Passengers can hop on and off at villages and hamlets like Chitterne, Tilshead, and Market Lavington, with Imber itself being the star attraction in the middle of this little one-day transport network. The buses run as a normal public service – no reservations are needed, you just show up and pay the conductor, and spend the day riding between remote hamlets, soaking up the scenery and the oddness of double-deckers traversing the military and very rural landscape, passing places with such evocative names as Brazen Bottom and New Zealand Farm.

Imberbus has built a friendly, almost festival feel, with stops at museums, local cafes, and church hall fundraisers along the way. The day runs entirely on volunteers, and proceeds go to the upkeep of St Giles Church in Imber and charities such as the Royal British Legion. Taking a trip on Imberbus is a like a visit to lost England—a nod to the past with Routemasters, across land where civilians very rarely tread.

Read more about Imber here and here. See more photos from my visits to Imberbus below, or check out these Flickr albums:

[^2]: Wiltshire News
17 December 1943
Image © Successor rightsholder unknown. Please contact us via support@britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk if you wish to claim rights to this title.. Image created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

At a High Angle

The High Angle Battery (New Ground, Portland DT5 1EF) is one of the Isle of Portland’s slightly less well-known gems, hidden away on the south side of the Verne citadel. Its guns fired up at a high angle to be able to land shells down on the decks of enemy ships from above. Constructed in a disused quarry in 1892 in the wake of Lord Palmerston’s Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom, it was intended to protect Portland Harbour and ships at anchor within it. Its high, hidden position and network of sunken gun emplacements and underground tunnels made it invisible to enemy ships.

Advancements in ship design meant that the Battery became obsolete within just fifteen years of its completion. Ships no longer needed to be stationary to fire accurately at targets, and High Angle could only fire accurately at stationary objects. It never fired a single shot in anger, and was decommissioned in 1906.

After years of dereliction the site was renovated as part of a scheme of work by the Manpower Services Commission in the mid-1980s and officially opened to the public (who had spent years exploring it regardless). Further years passed and the site once again began to deteriorate, suffering the numerous attentions of graffiti taggers and other petty vandals. Historical features gradually became overgrown, and Weymouth & Portland Borough Council played a continual cat-and-mouse game of securing the underground tunnels only for them to be broken open again. Nevertheless, the battery continued to offer a quiet and fairly contemplative space for those who wished to make use of it.

With the continued dereliction and vandalism showing few signs of abating, Historic England placed the battery on their register of at-risk sites in November 2022:

High Angle Battery within the Verne Citadel is being placed on the register due to ongoing erosion, which is damaging some of the buildings and tunnels. Excessive weed growth is also affecting the archaeology, and theft of stonework, vandalism and graffiti on some walls is a cause for concern.

This allowed Dorset Council (who had succeeded the borough council in 2019) to focus attention on the battery’s preservation, applying for and obtaining a £250,000 grant from the National Lottery heritage fund along with funding from the Fine Family Foundation and other local organisations including Portland Town Council and the Castletown D-Day Centre. This funding would permit a sensitive restoration of the battery, cutting back undergrowth, preserving structures, removing graffiti and installing some interpretation.

Worryingly, the initial proposals involved closing the underground tunnels off completely. In the consultation that followed, this was one of the most contentious bits – people were happy to see the site restored but the tunnels were such a central part of the battery it seemed foolish not to include them somehow in the regeneration.

What has been finally unveiled in the spring of 2025 is really quite superb. The graffiti is gone, apart from a small section that’s been retained to help tell the story of the battery’s dereliction. All the undergrowth has been cut back, and a number of replica guns and shells have been installed, being attended to by lifesize photo cut-outs of soldiers, all modelled by locals, in period dress loaned for the occasion by the Palmerston Forts Society. All this is accompanied by some excellent interpretative boards that nicely set out what’s what and how everything worked when the battery was in operation. Best of all, the tunnels have all been left open, with the sensible advice offered on the boards that anyone who wishes to wander below ground is better off doing so with a torch.

To make a bit of a record I took photos of all the interpretative boards, and these are shown in the album slideshow below should you wish to click through them. There’s no substitute for paying a visit yourself however!

Hong Kong day seven

My final full day in HK . Today I visited the Man Mo Temple which was again busy with people getting their devotions in ahead of the lunar new year.

Lunch was taken in the cooked food centre of the Sheung Wan market. These markets and eating places can be found in every neighbourhood and are a legacy of the colonial government’s largely successful attempts to get traders off the streets in the seventies and eighties – they are not easily comprehensible to gweilos (westerners) like me and I had to do a few circuits of the bustling space before finding an English menu. I ordered, and forgot to photograph, beef and scrambled egg with rice which was just what I needed. Hongkongers don’t like their scrambled eggs all that well done which was fine for me, although I suspect some of the cooking process is still going on when the food is brought to you. With a drink included it cost the princely sum of fifty-three dollars which is about a fiver in sterling – amazing value for money!

There was then further afternoon wandering.

I took my ease in a cha-chaan-teng café for egg tarts and a cup of milk tea – both HK delicacies in their own right. The milk tea is made with evaporated milk which I have a childhood weakness for.

I’m now out for a few beers and something to eat, before heading to the airport to fly home tomorrow lunchtime. I’ve enjoyed beyond measure the bustle and chaos and east-meets-west of this place, and am already thinking how I can work HK interludes into my future family visits back to Australia. Cheers!

Hong Kong day six

My penultimate full day in HK. Today I visited the Taoist temple of Wong Tai Sin, where many Hongkongers were lighting incense and various other combustible offerings that could be purchased from stalls around the temple, in advance of the lunar new year. If I believed in such things, I could have also availed myself of a reading from many of the fortune tellers also located in the arcades of the temple!

I then travelled on the MTR (Hong Kong metro) to the bustling neighbourhood of Mong Kok, home of many watch dealers, where I may have treated myself to a little something following some reasonably extensive internet research as to the more trustworthy vendors. I was offered a seat as I tried on various watches and received several advices including “buying a watch is a tiring business” and “you can’t be a real Hongkonger without a proper watch”.

I also visited one of Mong Kok’s cha chaan teng cafés to experience fusion food in the opposite direction. Years of British influence here have led to these fine establishments offering a wide variety of caff-style food but with a definite Cantonese bent – my “combo sandwich” of spam and scrambled egg being a fine example of this, providing vital fuel for an afternoon’s Kowloon wandering. I might start a campaign to get these introduced in my favourite British greasy spoons.

Spam and scrambled egg cha chaan teng sandwich

I’m now out for evening bunkers (that phrase again) and making plans for my final full day!

I dined at Hay Hay Kitchen, 11 Luard Road in Wan Chai where I enjoyed a cold beer with my barbecue pork and fried egg.

Hong Kong day five

Day five in Hong Kong . Last night I returned to Sing Lum Khui in Kowloon for another bowl of beef and pork noodles in that fiery soup that I so enjoyed the other day (see posts passim).

Today I travelled cross-border to Macau which was to be honest a slightly frustrating experience. Where Hong Kong is easy for a Brit to understand, I found Macau to be confusing to navigate with the ferry terminal being on the outskirts of the centre.

Practically it’s difficult as well as few places seem to accept western credit cards (in HK Visa, Mastercard and Amex are universal in the same way as they are at home), preferring the Chinese payment systems that are based around QR codes but need to be tied to a local bank account, or a system completely proprietary to Macau that again requires you to have a local bank account. I was finally able to pay for something in cash with HK dollars to get Macanese Patacas as change.

The Portuguese architecture that is probably worth seeing isn’t easily walkable from the ferry terminal in the time I had so I spent most of my time wandering around various unlovely 1960s shopping arcades and the all-enveloping Vegas-style casinos which were of little interest to me.

As someone who does much of their tourism by walking around it was a bit of a disappointment and I would have probably benefited from some slightly better planning.

That said we are all the richer for the experiences we choose to take! I was however pleased to get back to Wan Chai for evening bunkers in a pub I had come to quite enjoy.

Hong Kong day four

Day four in HK, and a visit to the Kowloon Walled City park. The Kowloon Walled City was a Chinese military outpost that despite being in Kowloon never entered into British possession, however because of that possession covering everything around it could also not be used by the Chinese. It thus became something of a grey area and the home of one of the densest unofficial settlements anywhere. Surviving numerous attempts to shut it down, it persisted until the early 1990s when the colonial government was finally able to relocate the 35,000 residents. It was replaced with a rather lovely park containing a detailed model of the settlement in its final days.

The previous evening I dined at Wan Gui Chuen, 107 Hennessy Road in Wan Chai. This is another of those places with an Argos-style form that you fill in to communicate your order. The form here (annoyingly I forgot to photograph any of these during my stay) contained no English so I had to complete it with the help of Google Translate.

What appeared was maybe not quite up to the standard of Sing Lum Khui the night before but I really had little to complain about, the soup was hot and the umami strong.

Hong Kong day three

Yesterday evening I paid a visit to Sing Lum Khui at 23 Lock Road, Kowloon where I enjoyed noodles with various bits of pork and beef in a hot and sour soup (ordered “medium spicy” on the Argos-style card that I forgot to photo) that provided a delightful spice blast unlike anything I’ve known before.

The soup these noodles came in was really something, well-seasoned and incredibly spicy with the abundant coriander providing a welcome punch of freshness. The Argos-style order form that’s often used in these sorts of restaurants is just visible in the container with the chopsticks. If you come to Hong Kong you should really make an effort to eat here, it is superb.

This morning I crossed the water to Kowloon once again to hop on a bus to visit the street markets of Sham Shui Po and sample some of the food available from the various walk up shops around the market. And now I’m out in Wan Chai for some evening refreshment – can anyone spot a theme here?!

All of Hong Kong’s infrastructure standards were imported from the UK. Thus, HK is one of the only places other than the UK where one can find double decker buses in mainstream use. The two main bus operators, Citybus and Kowloon Motor Bus, run large fleets of air conditioned triple axle vehicles, all with bilingual real time information and announcements. Hong Kong also has a tap-to-go card called Octopus that can be used on all public transport (except taxis) and for a host of other things – the vast majority of convenience stores and fast food places accept it as well. There’s an Octopus phone app (which I’ve got) that you can recharge using Apple Pay or the Android equivalent as well.

These rice sticks are a bit uninteresting until they get covered in soy sauce, peanut sauce, some other type of sauce and sesame seeds at which point they become really quite nice. Apologies for photographer hand, you eat them in an alleyway so there’s not a lot to put the bowl on.

Curried fish balls – the Hong Kong delicacy everyone should apparently try. To be honest I didn’t think these tasted of a great deal. The photographer’s hand (and watch strap) makes another appearance.

Hong Kong day two

I ascended to Victoria Peak via the nearly vertical Peak Tram and walked the scenic path around the base of the peak. Later, I travelled across the water to Kowloon for evening bunkers in a properly authentic Irish pub.