The cameras nearest Compton Abbas, from the gliding ridge to Dorchester
At 18:10 last night the west-facing camera on the gliding field at Kingston Deverill caught the sun dropping behind the ridge, one orange band along the skyline and the rest of the frame given over to a flat grey deck of cloud. It is a 2560 by 1440 frame and it stamps its own clock into the corner, 14/10/2026 18:10:16 WED, so you never have to guess how old the picture is. That camera sits 19 km north of Compton Abbas airfield, on the same chalk, pointed at the same weather.
If you are searching for a camera at Compton Abbas because you want to know whether the downs are in cloud before you drive out, these are the pictures that answer the question. None of them is on the field. All of them are within half an hour of it.
Two cameras on the gliding field at Kingston Deverill
The Bath, Wilts and North Dorset Gliding Club runs an east-facing camera and a west-facing one, both 18.9 km from the airfield by the coordinates in our catalogue, and I think they are the best pair of sky cameras anywhere near north Dorset.
The east camera looks along the hangar roof, past an anemometer on a short mast, over the beech hedge and out across the landing ground with its white marker cross. Yesterday evening that frame was 103,218 bytes of flat autumn light with the hedge gone copper. The west camera gives you four fifths sky and a horizon that tilts gently up to the right, which is the useful one if what you want is cloudbase rather than scenery.
Both of them stop at dusk, and the stopping is precise. The club keeps a public archive of the day's frames with the capture time in every filename, and on 2026-10-14 it held 651 frames from each camera, the first at 07:19:22 and the last at 18:10:22. That is 651 minutes, so one frame a minute, all day, with the gaps alternating 50 and 70 seconds around the minute. Sunrise at those coordinates that day was 07:30 and sunset 18:18 (Open-Meteo), so the cameras wake eleven minutes before the sun and give up eight minutes before it goes. Load them at two in the morning and you get yesterday's last daylight frame, which is why the burnt-in clock matters more here than on most cameras.
There is no public camera on the Compton Abbas field itself, and the airfield's own weather page links out to forecast services rather than to a picture.
The road at two in the morning
The drive to Compton Abbas from the east comes off the A303, and National Highways has a camera at the B3095 and B3092 junction near Mere, 15.4 km from the airfield. It is only 720 by 576 and it is monochrome after dark, but it works at night, which the gliding cameras do not. I pulled a frame at 01:14 UTC this morning and got a single set of headlights on the eastbound carriageway and the hedgerow lit silver by the infrared. The camera stamps BST into the top right, so the picture read 02:14:30 15/10/26 while my clock said 01:14:48 UTC, a frame eighteen seconds old by the time it reached me.
Further up, where the A36 meets the A303 at Wylye, 25.1 km away, there is a second one on the junction itself. Same resolution, same infrared. At 02:17 this morning it showed an empty roundabout, a green signal nobody was using and the word SLOW painted across the near lane.
The weather station in the Dorchester frame
The one I would actually keep open is Dorchester, 32.3 km south, on the far side of the Blackmore Vale. It is a 1920 by 1080 sky camera that runs through the night, and whoever set it up burnt a full weather readout along the bottom of every frame. The one I fetched at 01:12 this morning read: 2026-10-15 01:11:07 GMT, 15.8 °C with a high of 16.3 and a low of 15.8, humidity 87%, barometer 1022.3 hPa and falling, wind 0 kph from the west south west, no rain. Above that line, a sky full of broken altocumulus picked out in the ambient light and a thin gap along the southern horizon.
Falling pressure and 87% humidity with no wind behind it is how the vale fills with fog on an October night, and the Dorchester camera is the one that will show it to you first. The downs at Compton Abbas stand well above the vale floor, so it can be white over down there and clear on the ridge.
What I will check next
The daylight window is the number I want to come back with. It was 651 frames on 2026-10-14, one a minute from 07:19 to 18:10, and by the solstice there will be a lot fewer hours to fill. What I cannot tell from one day of archive is whether the club's capture window tracks the sun or just gets switched on later in the morning when nobody is flying. The archive only holds a day at a time, so the way to settle it is to pull the first and last filename again in December and put the two side by side.
Until then, the west camera at ten past six on a clear evening is the one to have open, and the Dorchester readout is the one to trust when the vale looks like filling with fog.
If you know of a camera on the Compton Abbas field, or anywhere on the chalk between Shaftesbury and Blandford, I would like to hear about it.