When I did my IMCr lessons I agreed with my instructor that we would not fly with cloud below 1500' aal. This gave us a reasonable amount of time to select a safe landing site should the engine fail.
As a low hours PPL, 1700' cloud would have me seriously asking whether I needed to continue my journey. Given you were just on a training exercise I fully support your decision to return to your home field.
Someone somewhere (possibly on here) said than on average 50% of winter flights and 33% of summer flights get canned due to weather - just something we have to live with in the UK.
