We're turning the clock back again to a very different kind of winter - that of the winter of 1962/63 - the great white-out.

And we're returning to Bryan Sefton-Smith's fantastic collection of pictures in which we can see the scale of snow in west Dorset.

Click into the photo gallery above the see the pictures full-sized.

The Bridport News reported drifts of up to 15ft deep in the winter of 1963 and snow ploughs were out in force, even coming from Gloucester to help clear the A356.

The River Asker froze over and the surface had to be broken for horses to drink.

Residents had to walk through seven foot drifts to the Beaminster factory to get milk and one eyewitness said, looking down into the valley, people looked like war refugees.

In Lyme a blizzard of snow didn’t stop electrician Stan Williams, who piled his tools on a sledge and walked to his jobs.

And the pupils at Lyme Regis Grammar School helped replenish supplies of fruit and vegetables after the headmaster Major TB Pearn told them to bring their sledges to school.

He joined the boys in a ‘fetch it yourself’ campaign where the boys spent most of their morning hauling five tons of fuel from the railway station to the school and delivering vegetables to the boarding house.

The deputy coroner had to go by sea in a cabin cruiser to Lyme to conduct an inquest. Beaminster’s weather man Albert Dawe, who predicted the big freeze six months earlier, was featured on television.

The road from Bridport to Dorchester was cleared at 20ft an hour by bulldozers and excavators and even flames, although they proved spectacularly ineffective after a crew worked all day and only shifted 35 yards.

Pneumatic drills were used to clear Beaminster Square of ice.

Askers Roadhouse was cut off for two weeks, coal ran short and industries like Duncan

The bill for getting roads passable was estimated to be around £150,000 to clear 1,000 miles of county road using 63 snow ploughs and 161 diggers.