Welcome to the website of the

Caer Dur Festival

The Caer Dur Festival is named after the old Celtic name for the county town ‘Caer Dur’ meaning City of Oak, the aims of which are to provide a focus locally for Pagans of all traditions; an annual event which gives like-minded people a chance to express their spirituality in a positive way to which the general public regardless of faith or ethnicity can relate.

The festival is actively supported by the friends of Caer Dur, payed for by donations and money raised on the day through stallholders and evening ticket sales. We support Dorset Wildlife rescue and will hold a raffle on the day for them and donate part of any profits to DWR.

The Origins of Caer Dur

It is normally considered that pre-Roman Britain was pretty much devoid of infrastructures, virtually uninhabited perhaps, but this simply wasn’t the case for it is a fact that Britain had cities and Julius Caesar mentions them specifically, although he was somewhat disparaging about them saying they were not like Roman cities. Nevertheless they existed and Dorchester was specifically named as Caer Dur.

In the book 'The Origin of Language and Nations’By Rowland Jones published in 1764 we found references to Caer as meaning City or Fort and to Dur meaning Double or Oak. This could relate to the two large circles of oak that existed at Mount Pleasant and in the area of the Tudor Arcade and Waitrose in the centre of Dorchester*. This site, when in its prime, would have been huge, on a prominent hillside in the neighbourhood, along with Maumbury Rings, Mount Pleasant Henge, Maiden Castle and Poundbury Hill Fort which all featured in the area over a period time.

* Apparently some 600 mature oak tree trunks would have been required for its construction. A radiocarbon date for it is about 2100 BC and it covered a projected area of around 380 metres in diameter.