This paper considers the dispersion of a cloud of passive contaminant released from an instantaneous source in the steady two-dimensional laminar flow near the forward stagnation point on a bluff body. The body is replaced by its tangent plane y = 0 with x measuring distance along the plane. Far away from y = 0 the flow is irrotational with velocity potential ½l(x2 – y2), where l is a positive constant. When the boundary layer is ignored the equation governing the distribution of concentration can be solved exactly. Consequences of this solution are that for large times the centre of mass moves parallel to the body at a speed proportional to exp (lt) while the cloud spreads out along the body symmetrically about the centre of mass with the magnitude of the spread also proportional to exp (lt). However, this solution is unrealistic because most of the contaminant is confined to a layer adjoining the body of thickness of order (k/l)½, where k is the molecular diffusivity, and this layer normally lies within the boundary layer, which is of thickness of order (v/l)½, where v is the kinematic viscosity. An approximate analysis, based on ideas similar to those supporting the Pohlhausen method in boundary-layer theory, suggests that when the boundary layer is taken into account the conclusions above remain true provided that exp (lt) is replaced by exp (βlt), where β is a constant depending on v/k. Calculations give values of β ranging from 0·73 when v/k = 0·5 to 0·10 when v/k = 103.