nuimmmuimn . n XTbe ipilQnmaoe Series THE HARDY COUNTRY BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY Price 6 SbHliags Some Press Opinmons The H'orld : — "That indefatigable describer of the highways and byways of England, Mr. Charles G. Harper, has been happily inspired in inviting his readers to the appreciative consideration of the dis- tricts of picturesque Ken", to be distinguished as the ' Ingolusby Country." . . . Vividly written and full of evidences of careful and comprehensive research. His charming illustrations, of which there are many, entitle him to no less commendation as an artist than as author, and add greatly to the pleasure derivable from a book which lovers of Inguldsby and of Kent should on no account miss." The Maidstone Journal: — A book that will be of considerable interest to the many thousands who find amusement in the immortal Ittgoldsby Legends. . . , Mr. Harper has done a service to literature in giving a local habitation and a name to the many places mentioned in them." la the Same Series THE SCOTT COUNTRY THE DICKENS COUNTRY THE BURNS COUNTRY THE THACKERAY COUNTRY THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMAGES A. AND C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W. THE HARDY COUNTRY LITERARY LANDMARKS OF THE WESSEX NOVELS BY CHARLES G. HARPER AUTHOR OF " THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY," ETC. ' ' Here shepherds pipe their rustic song, Their flocks and rural nymphs among." ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1904 L Hl PREFACE Dorsetshire, the centre of the " Hardy Country^'' the home of the IVessex Novels^ is a land literally flowing with milk and honey : a land of great dairies, of flowers and bees^ of rural industries^ where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long, and the kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns : a land desirable for its own sweet self, where you may see the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which 1 have spoken^ and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech. You may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every lane. Thatch survives in every village, as nowhere else, and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at all odds, while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be — as they phrase it — " up to date'' It is good, you think, who explore these parts, to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome worries of modernity. Spring is good in Dorset., summer better, autumn — when the kindly fruits of the earth are ingathered and V 3.3G5G5 VI PREFACE the smell of pomace is sweet in the mellow air — best. Winter ? IVell^ frankly^ I dont know. To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy s novels of rural life and character., in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand. The identity of those places is easily resolved ; and, that feat performed, there is that compelling force in his genius which inevitably, sooner or later, magnetically draws those who have read, to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be in real life., from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy, such suave and admirable comedy., have been evolved. I have many a time explored Egdon^ and observed the justness of the novelist's description of that sullen waste: have traversed Blackmoor Vale, where '■^ the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,'"* but where the roads — // is a cyclist's criticism — are always shockingly bad : in fine, have visited every literary landmark of the IVessex Novels. If I have not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in The Return of the Native and other stories — why, J never expected so to find them, for I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter. But — this is in testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women — / know " Bathsheba " ; only she is not a fanner, nor in " Do' set.,'' and I have met " Viviette " and " Fancy." They were called by other names., 'tis true ; but they were, and are, those distracting characters come to life. PREFACE vii A word in conclusion. No attempt has here been made to solemnly ^^ expound"" the novelist. He^ I take it, expounds himself. Nor has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels. These pages are, in shorty just an attempt to record impressions received of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country, and seek merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of an ardent admirer of the novelist, who here has given tongues to trees and a voice to every wind. CHARLES G. HARPER. Petersham, Surrey, July 1904. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE ■ I. preliminaries: the hardy country DEFINED ; FAWLEY MAGNA ; OXFORD . I II. WINCHESTER : THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX 9 III. WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEY- HILL . .16 IV. STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONE- HENGE 26 V. THE OLD COACH-ROAD : SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD 35 VI. THE OLD COACH-ROAD : BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER 47 VII. DORCHESTER 62 VIII. DORCHESTER {continued) .... 74 c CONTENTS CHAP. PAG8 IX. SWANAGE 84 X. SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE 92 XI. CORFE CASTLE IO5 XII. WAREHAM II4 XIII. WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS . ,122 XIV. BERE REGIS 1 33 XV. THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY . 148 XVI. DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MEL- BURY, AND YEOVIL . . . . 168 XVIL SHERBORNE 178 XVIII. SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH 191 XIX. SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH {continued) . . . 205 XX. WEYMOUTH 214 XXI. THE ISLE OF PORTLAND . . . 222 XXII. WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMIN- STER 232 XXIII. WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE . 246 CHAP. CONTENTS xi PAGE XXIV. BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE . . -257 XXV. WIMBORNE MINSTER .... 270 XXVI. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY . 2// XXVII. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY {continued) ...... 288 XXVIII. WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH 297 XXIX. OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAIN- BOW 302 INDEX 313 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weymouth : St. Mary Street and Statue of George III. . Frontispiece PAGE Fawley Magna 3 High Street, Oxford . Facing 4 High Street, Winchester II Winchester Cathedral . Facing 14 Weyhill Fair jj 24 SaHsbury Cathedral jj 30 Stonehenge . >» 32 Pentridge 56 Eastbury 41 Blandford Forum . 45 The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew 49 Weatherbury Castle . 50 The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle SI Piddletown . ■ 55 A Quaint Corner in Piddletown . 57 Lower Walterstone Farm ; Original of " Bathsheba's Farm " in Far from the Madding Crowd . 59 Ten Hatches, Dorchester . . 69 Dorchester Gaol . . . 75 The Hangman's Cottage, Dorchester . . 77 XIV LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Colyton House, Dorchester . lAGK 79 The Old Church, Swanage . 89 Encombc 95 Corfe Castle 99 Corfe Castle Facing 106 Approach to Warehani : The \Valls of Warehait ' " )! 116 Wareham 119 The Abbot's Coffin, Bindon Abbey 123 Woolbridge House .... 125 Woolbridge House : Entrance Front 127 Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath . Facing 128 Chamberlain's Bridge .... 130 Rye Hill, Bere Regis .... 131 Bere Regis 135 Bere Regis 137 Bere Regis : Interior of Church . 141 "Toothache," Bere Regis . 143 "Headache," Bere Regis . 143 Bere Regis : The Turberville Window . 145 Stinsford Church; the " Mellstock " of Under the Greenwood Tree . . . . . 149 Birthplace of Thomas Hardy 158 Birthplace of Thomas Hardy 159 The Duck Inn, Original of the " Quiet Woman " Inn in The Return of the Native 161 Tincleton 163 An Egdon P'armstead 165 A Farm on Egdon 166 Cross-in-Hand Facing 170 Batcombe 171 Tomb of "Conjuring Minterne" 173 Melbury House Facing 174 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XV Sherborne Abbey Church .... Facing Long Burton ..... Hoi nest : the Drax Mausoleum . Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore Cerne Abbas The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey . . . Facing The Cerne Giant Cerne Abbas ..... Wolveton House ..... Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway The Wishing Well, Upwey . Weymouth Harbour .... Sandsfoot Castle ..... Bow and Arrow Castle Portisham ...... The Road out of Abbotsbury Sheep- Shearing in Wessex .... Facing West Bay, Bridport .... High Street and Town Hall, Bridport Sutton Poyntz : the " Overcombe " of The Trumpet Major ...... Bincombe ...... Poxwell Manor ..... Owermoigne : the Smugglers' Haunt in The Distracted Preacher ..... Lulworth Cove ..... Lulworth Cove ..... Lytchett Heath : The Equestrian Effigy of George HI. : Entrance to Charborough Park . . .... Facing Bournemouth : The Invalids' Walk . . ,, Poole Quay . 267 PAGE 184 192 194 201 202 203 206 207 209 211 219 223 229 235 236 239 243 247 249 251 253 254 255 256 258 XVI LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Sturminster Marshall : Anthony Etricke's Tomb, Wimborne Minster . . . Facing The Wiml)orne Clock Jack . Wimborne Minster : the Minster and the Grammar School .... The Tower, Charborough Park Weather-vane at Shapwick : the " The Maypole, Shillingstone . Sturminster Newton : The W'hite MarnhuU .... Gold Hill, Shaftesbury. The Observatory, Horton Horton Inn : the " Lorton Inn House of Grebe Monmouth Ash . Bingham's Melcombe . Milton Abbas Milton Abbas, an Early " Model " Village Abbot Milton's Rebus, Milton Abbey . Milton Abbey Turnworth House .... Facing Shapwick Monster " Hart Inn . Facing of Barbara of the Facing 270 273 274 281 283 285 286 289 295 298 299 300 303 306 307 309 310 ^11 THE HARDY COUNTRY CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES : THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED ; FAWLEY MAGNA ; OXFORD In the literary partition of England, wherein the pilgrim may discover tracts definitely and indis- solubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to Ingoldsby, and many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed or so effectively occu- pied as that associated with the Wessex novels written by Mr, Thomas Hardy. He holds Wessex in fee-simple, to the exclusion of all others ; and so richly topographical are all those romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his literary occupancy of it were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works, there were those to whom the identity of most of his scenes off^ered no manner of doubt. By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the '* Wessex " of the novels has come to denote chiefly his native county of Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of Dorchester, the county town ; but Mr. Hardy was early an expansionist, and his outposts were long ago thrown forward, to at last make his 2 THE HARDY COUNTRY Wessex in the domain of letters almost coterminous with that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which included all England south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the exception of Cornwall. The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the de- finitive edition of Mr. Hardy's works very clearly shows the comparative density of the literary settle- ments he has made. Glancing at it, you at once perceive that what he chooses to term " South Wessex" — named in merely matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire — is thickly studded with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of Upper, North, Mid, Outer, and Lower "Wessex — as who should say Hampshire, Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon — are, to follow the simile already adopted, barely colonised. His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to be identified with none other than Windsor ; while near by are Gaymead (Theale), Ald- brickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge (Newbury). In the midst of that same division of North Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked Alfredston and Marygreen, respectively the little town of Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna, placed on the draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs. Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot, or Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by which name Basing- stoke and the unclothed uplands partly surrounding it are indicated. Its " gaunt, unattractive, ancient church " is accurately imaged in a phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object ot the STOKE-BAREHILLS place Is " its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway " ; for indeed Basingstoke cemetery and the fine ruins of the chapel once belonging to the religious who, piously by intent, but rather blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the " Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost," stand immediately without FAWLEY MAGNA. " As old-fashioned as it was stnall.' the railway station. At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and Sue, visiting the Agricultural Show, were observed by Arabella, Jude's sometime wife, with some jealousy. Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer landmarks, is Christminster, the university town and city of Oxford, whose literary name in these pages derives from the cathedral of Christ 4 THE HARDY COUNTRY there. This remote corner of his kingdom is especially and solely devoted to the grievous story of Judc the Obscure^ a pitiful tale of frustrated ambition, originally published serially in Harper s Magazine^ under the much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of Hearts Insurgent. The story opens at F'awley Magna, to whose identity a clue is found in the name of Fawley given the unhappy Jude. The village, we are told, was " as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an upland adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the well- shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. . . . Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty walls, garden-seats, guard- stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day." Who was that obliterator thus held up to satire } Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in 1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E. Street, R.A., than whom the middle Victorian period had no more accomplished architect. Truly enough, its design is something alien, but candour compels the admission that, however detached from local traditions, it is really a very fine building, and its designer quite un- deserving of so slighting a notice. O 5 CHRISTMINSTER 5 From Fawley the scene of Jude's tragedy changes to Christminster, the Oxford of everyday commerce. Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at night, twenty miles away. His anticipa- tions and disillusionments, his strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low, like Samson by Delilah — cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by early opportunity. Take Jude the Obscure as you will, it forms a somewhat serious indictment of university procedure : " They raise pa'sons there, like radishes in a bed. 'Tis all learning there — nothing but learning, except religion." Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders, but never rose beyond his trade of stone- mason, and, after many fitful wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford. Since Jude the Obscure was written Oxford has gained another historic personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who have trodden the pavements of its High Street. You may follow all the innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully exposed the springs that produce his actions ; and thus he is made seem more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings, smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath their own subterfuges and the dark imaginings of historians with little but ancient verbiage to rely upon, seem only the spasmodic, involuntary capers of so many irresponsible jumping-jacks. Nowadays, when I 6 THE HARDY COUNTRY think of Oxford, it is to recall poor Jtide Fawley's fascination by it, like the desire of the moth for the star, or for the candle that eventually scorches its wings and leaves it maimed and dying. " It is a city of light," he exclaimed, not knowing (as how should he have known ? ) that the light it emits is but the phosphorescent glow of decay. And when I walk the High Street, " the main street — that ha'n't another like it in the world," it is not of Newman or his fellow Tractarians I think, but of Jude the stone- mason, feeling with appreciative technical fingers the mouldings and crumbling stones of its architecture. In one novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes^ Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far beyond the confines of his Wessex. Away beyond " Lower Wessex," or Devonshire — itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole course of his writings — he takes the reader to the north coast of Cornwall, the " furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and passions ; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and un- certain." " Castle Boterel " he styles the stage of his tragical story of A Pair of Blue Eyes ; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of Boscastle. That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions. Originally the site of a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, CASTLE BOTEREL 7 Its name has in the course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it now bears. Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as ** a very filthy Toun and il kept," and probably had still in mind and in nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the smaller Cornish fishing-ports. Still, as in Leland's time, goes the little brook, running down from the tremendously hilly back- ground " into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles," and still the harbour remains, from the mariner's point of view, " a pore Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde," winding, as it does, in the shape of a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of approach or exit. It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that, although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding picturesqueness. Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another distinction. In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is " pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision." But it is not always like that at Boscastle. There are days of bright sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of Trebarwith — the " Barwith Strand " of the novel — shine golden, in contrast with the dark 8 THE HARDY COUNTRY slaty headland of High Cliff — the " cliff without a name" where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig, Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the Wessex novels would have conceived. The average reader may perhaps be allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on the cliff's edge into the sea below waiting for him. The town of " St. Launce's " mentioned in the book is of course Launceston, and '*Endelstow' is the village of St. Juliot's. CHAPTER II WINCHESTER : THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX But, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the Hardy Country, let us con- sider in what way the Londoner may best come to a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts — by force of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance — Winchester is indicated. " The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore- time capital of Wessex," stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is itself modern in but little" measure, and loves to linger upon memories of the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty game of history was played ; but do, by the presence of their works, make the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations ; groping darkly in superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim, and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had lo THE HARDY COUNTRY done for paganism, and were not — it really seems necessary to insist upon it — creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed ; but lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness, than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed, to be in their turn ousted in govern- ance by the Norman-French ; and still, although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies, survives. Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report, swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of " progress," but for content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in a.d. 901, and buried here in a spot still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble, heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with Winchester's ancient dignity. 12 THE HARDY COUNTRY Near by, where its imposing bulk is reared up against the giant background of St. Giles's Hill, you may still see and hear the Itchen rushing furiously under the old City Mill by Soke Bridge, where dusty millers have ground corn for a thousand years. Released from the mill-leat, the stream regains its placid temper and wanders suavely along daisy- dappled meads to St. Cross, and so at last to lose itself in Southampton Water ; still fishful all the way, as in the days of old Izaak Walton himself, who lies in the south transept of the cathedral yonder, and has a sanctified place in these liberal- minded times in a tabernacle of the restored reredos, in the glorious company of the apostles, the saints, kings and bishops, who form a very mixed concourse in that remarkable structure. I fear that if they were all brought to life and introduced to one another, they would not form the happiest of families. But that's as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred's statue — or " i?^lfred," as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the unscholarly — you may see, as described in Tess, " the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from the mediaeval cross to the bridge " ; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way of that aforesaid mediseval cross in the High Street, hard by the curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry, DEATH OF RUFUS 13 which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some sixty per cent, of the famous men whose careers are included in the Dictionary of National Biography were the sons of clergy- men. No wonder at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature's compensating swing of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too, have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church. That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its squatness — a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave of the Red Kingr in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained ; but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king's death at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem that the clergy were more intimately connected with that " accident " than was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church and the Church's high dignitaries with a thorough and 14 THE HARDY COUNTRY comprehensive spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to those who had prepared the ful- filment of their boding prophecies. "Even now," said one, " the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is stretched." This was not metaphor, merely : they prophesied who had with certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received the last rites of the Church. If indeed that be so, the mills of God certainly do grind slowly. For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England. Longer than Ely, longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556 feet. As we read in the story of Lady Mottisfont^ Wintoncester, among all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason " probably the most con- venient for meditative people to live in ; since there you have a cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those magnificent tombs, you can, CURFEW 15 for instance, compare in the most leisurely way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors. Then, if you arc in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer and fairer tincture." In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every evening at eight o'clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very real and earnest ordinance ; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by the fragments of the royal castle ; down in the lower extremity of the city the bishop's palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered, ivy- covered walls : much in fine remains of Winchester's ancient state. But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury. CHAPTER III WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL From Wintoncester to Melchester — that is to say, from Winchester to Salisbury — is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and Winterslow ; if by the windings of the valley roads by King's Sombourne and Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious route and a puzzling. We will therefore take the highway and for the present leave the byways severely alone. The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs re- lieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside varied at infrequent- intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or absolute silences. But before the traveller comes thus out into the country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through the recent suburb of Fulflood ; for " Winton" as its natives lovingly name it, and as the old mile- stones on this very road agree to style it, has after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing. It is not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester's ancient kirtle, 16 THE LAST OF "TESS" 17 and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of Roebuck Hill. Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison, with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the horizon : an unlovely palimpsest set above the mediaeval graciousness of the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the last scene of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In the last chapter of that strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city two persons' walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of grief. They were Angel Clare, the husband, and 'Liza-Lu, the sister of poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower of that inimical building. They witnessed this proof that " 'Justice ' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in i^schylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess," not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen " as in an isometric drawing" set down in its vale of Itchen, *' the broad cathedral tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St. Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St. Catherine's Hill ; further off, landscape beyond land- scape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it." Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the crest of Roebuck Hill 2 1 8 THE HARDY COUNTRY and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic mediasvalism, spelled " Wyke." For myself, did I reside there, I would certainly have my notepaper stamped " Wyke next Winchester," and find much satisfaction therein. Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a charac- teristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road. And then ? Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than they possess : every circumstance of their feature- less rotundity disclosed from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the bill- hook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the preservation of a boundary. Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone, as the winds roam free across Worthy downs. Such is the way up Harestock Hill ; not so grim as perhaps this description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and Crawley, and where the white- topped equatorial of an observatory serves to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky. It is only from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue and the bees are busy wherever HISTORIC ROMANCE 19 the farmer has left nooks for the wild-flowers to grow. On such days the dark woods of Lalnston, crowning the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade. Fortunately they are easy of access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues with which the place is criss-crossed. A slightly marked footpath through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of last year's beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees. The spot would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life. That tale is now historic — how Walpole's " ^lia Laslia Chudleigh " was in 1745 privately married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol. " Miss Chudleigh," how- ever, she still continued to be at Court. Twenty- five years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. This was that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, " went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia, but as naked as Andromeda." 20 THE HARDY COUNTRY The ruined chapel has long been in that con- dition. Its font lies, broken and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor, are cracked and defaced. The " living " of Lainston is worth £60 per annum, and goes with that of the neighbour- ing village of Sparsholt, the vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year. Stress of weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws. But their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald. One emerges from Lainston woods only to per- ceive this to be a district of many woodlands. Across the road is Northwood, where, close by Eastman's great school, are thick coppices of hazels and under- growths that the primroses and bluebells love. In another direction lies Sparsholt. None may tell what the " Spar " in the place-name of this or the other Sparsholt in Berkshire means, but "holt" signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive that the surroundings must still wear very much the aspect they owned when the name was conferred. Spars- holt has no guidebook attractions — nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet surroundings to recommend it. But the fragrant scent of the wood- smoke from cottage hearths is over all. You may see its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards on still days, against the dark background of foliage. It is a rustic fragrance never forgotten, an aroma which, A HILL-TOP MONUMENT 21 go whithersoever you will, brings back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a well-remembered song, or the scent of a rose. They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district, but hillside tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where the wild-flowers make a continual glory in early spring. There are the labyrinths of No Man's Land, the intricacies of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run the long- deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about. Away on the horizon you may perceive a monument, capping a hill. It is no memorial of gallantries in war, but is the obelisk erected on Farley Mount to the horse of a certain " Paulet St. John," which jumped with him into a chalk- pit twenty-five feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt. That was in 1733. An inscription tells how that wonderful animal was afterwards entered for the Hunters' Plate, under the name of " Beware Chalk Pit," at the races on Worthy downs, and won it. Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently been abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman grimness characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down country. The road is long, and at times, when the sun is setting and the landscape fades away in purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream and the distant ages come back again. To this bareness the pleasant little town of Stock- bridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the 22 THE HARDY COUNTRY Anton, is a gracious interlude. In its old church- yard the curious may still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the " King's Head " inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802 : And is, alas ! poor Bucket gone ? Farewell, convivial honest John. Oft at the well, by fatal stroke Buckets like pitchers must be broke. In this same motley shifting scene, How various have thy fortunes been. Now lifting high, now sinking low, To-day the brim would overflow. Thy bounty then would all supply To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry. To-morrow sunk as in a well. Content unseen with Truth to dwell. But high or low, or wet or dry. No rotten stave could malice spy. Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise And claim thy station in the skies ; Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine. Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign. In 171 5, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed account of his journey - for the Earl of Burlington, he described Stockbridge in doleful dumps. Why ? Because for seven years there had been no election : Sad melancholy ev'ry visage wears ; What ! no election come in seven long years ! Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone Be by Sir Richard's dedication known ? Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float ! Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote. Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet entitled STOCKBRIDGE 23 The Importance of 'Dunkirk considered . . . in a letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, whose name was John Snow. The number of voters at Stock- bridge was then about seventy, and its popu- lation chiefly cobblers. To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might be said of almost every one at that time ; but it seems to have been especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary chronicler is found writing : " It is a very wet town and the voters are wet too." He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of securities, " The ordinary price of a vote is _^6o, but better times may come." But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an unconscionable while. Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale. The Mayor of Casterbridge^ described in its sub-title as " The Life and Death of a Man of Character." It is a pleasant country of soft riverain features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine names to their baptismal river, the Anton. There you shall find Abbot's Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann also. Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a place — although to look at it, you might not 24 THE HARDY COUNTRY suspect so — of hoary antiquity, and its Fair — still famous, and still the largest in England — old enough to be the subject of comment in Piers Plowman's Vision^ in the line : At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair. Alas that such things should be ! this old- time six-days' annual market is now reduced to four. It is held between October loth and 13th, and divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and Pleasure Fairs. On each of these days the three miles' stretch of road from Andover is thronged with innumerable way- farers and made unutterably dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on their way to the Fair ground. There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair. An umbrella-seller may still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the days of Jonas Hanway, who in- troduced the use of such things in the eighteenth century ; and unheard-of village industries display their produce to the astonished gaze. Here, for example, you see an exhibit of modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the " W. Choules from Penton " whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner ; and although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living industry. Greatly to the stranger's surprise, Weyhill, al- though in fact situated above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill at mwl^^'' WEYHILL 25 all. The road to " Weydon Priors," by which name it figures in The Mayor of Casterhridge^ is in- deed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of no very marked features. It is " a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly," and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a country road — for a high road — as you shall meet ; and, except for that one week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village. There, on a grassy tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two, the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view. Even now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow : " Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon." It is on the last day of the old six-days' Fair, in 1829, that the story opens, with a man and woman — the woman carrying a child — walking along this dusty road. That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist's sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a " stale familiarity, like a nimbus." The man was the hay-trusser, Michael Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final fall are chronicled in the story. This opening scene is merely in the nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work, coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the only bidder, a sailor — the second chapter re- suming the march of events eighteen years later. CHAPTER IV STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE Returning to Stockbrldge, en route for Salisbury, eight miles more of roads of the same unchanging characteristics, but growing more plentifully carpeted with crushed flints as we advance, bring us to Wiltshire and to a junction with the Exeter Road from Andover at Lobcombe Corner. In the neigh- bourhood are "the Wallops," as local parlance refers to a group of three villages, Over and Nether Wallop, with the wayside settlement of Little (or Middle) Wallop in between. It is this last-named to which Mr. Hardy refers when he tells how the ruined and broken-hearted Mayor of Casterbridge, fleeing from the scene of his vanished greatness and resuming his early occupation of hay-trusser, became employed at a " pastoral farm near the old western highway. . . . He had chosen the neigh- bourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was vitually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote." Dorchester, otherwise Casterbridge, is in fact just forty-nine and a half miles distant, down this old Exeter Road. In less than another mile on our westward way 96 WINTERSLOW HUT 27 the sight of a solitary house in all this apparently uninhabited wilderness arouses speculations in the pilgrim's mind— speculations resolved on approach, when the sight of the recently restored picture-sign of the *' Pheasant," reared up on its posts on the short grass of the open down, opposite its door, proclaims this to be the old coaching inn once famed as " Wintcrslow Hut." None ever spoke of the inn in those days as the " Pheasant," although that was the sign of it, plainly to be seen ; as " Winterslow Hut " it was always known, and a more lonely, forbidding place of seclusion from the haunts of man it would be difficult to find. It was once, appropriately enough, the retreat of a lonely, forbidding person — the self-selected place of exile from society of Hazlitt, the essayist, who, parting from his wife at the village of West Winter- slow (whence the inn takes its name of " Winterslow Hut") two miles away, lived here from 18 19 to 1828. Here he wrote the essays on "Persons one would wish to have seen," and the much less sociable essay, " On Living to One's Self" — an art he practised here to his own satisfaction and the cheerful resignation of the many persons with whom he quarrelled. And here he saw the Exeter Mail and the stage-coaches go by, and must have found the place even lonelier, in the intervals after their passing, than it seems now that the Road, as an institution, is dead and the Rail conveys the traffic to and from Salisbury and the west, some two miles distant, across country hidden from view from this point beneath the swelling shoulders of the unchanging downs. Salisbury spire is soon seen, when the long drop 28 THE HARDY COUNTRY into the valley of the Wiltshire Avon, down Three Mile Hill, begins ; its slender spire, the tallest in England, thrusting its long needle-point 404 feet into the blue, and oddly peering out from the swooping sides of the downs, long before any suspicion of Sarum itself — as the mile- stones style it — has occupied the mind of the literary pilgrim. Salisbury, like some bland and contented elderly spinster, does not look its age. When you are told how Old Sarum was abandoned, New Sarum founded, and everything recreated ad hoc at the command of Bishop Poore, impelled thereto by a vision, in the then customary way, you are so impressed with what we are used to regard as such thoroughly "American" proceedings that you forget, in the apparent modernity of such a method, how very long ago all this was done. This great change of site took place about 1220, and sixty years later the great cathedral, remarkable and indeed unique among all our cathedrals for being designed and built, from the laying of the foundation stone to the roofing-in of the building, in one — the Early English — style, was completed. It w^as actually a century later that the spire itself was finished. Much of this seeming youthfulness of Salisbury is due to the regularity of plan upon which the city is laid out, and to the comparative breadth of its streets. To that phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, whose like certainly could never have been met with outside the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit^ Salisbury seemed " a very desperate sort of place ; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city." Here we smile superior, although it is true MELCHESTER 29 that in his short story, On the IVestern Circuity Mr. Hardy presents Mclchcster, as he names this fair city, as given over to blazing orgies in the progress of Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting merry- go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he should have been. Granting the truth of this picture of Melchester Fair, it is to be observed that this is but an interlude in a twelvemonth's programme of polished, decorous, and well-ordered urbanity. Its character is more truly portrayed in Jude the Obscure, where Sue Bridehead having gone to the city, to enter the Training College in the Close, her cousin Jude follows her. He found it " a quiet and soothing place, almost entirely ecclesiastical in its tone ; a spot where worldly learning and intellectual smartness had no establishment." It was here he obtained work at his trade of stone- mason, labouring on the restoration of the cathedral ; here that Sue shocked his ecclesiastical and mediasval bent, meeting his suggestion that they should sit for a talk in the cathedral by the proposal that she would rather wait in the railway station : " That's the centre of town life now — the cathedral has had its day ! " To his shocked interjection, " How modern you are ! " she replied defensively, " I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediaevalism, if you only knew " ; meaning thereby that she was enamoured of classicism and the old pagans. To Sue the cathedral was not unsympathetic merely by force of that clear-cut regularity which impresses most beholders with a sense of a splendid. 30 THE HARDY COUNTRY but cold, perfection. There are those who compare this great fane with Tennyson's Lady Clara Vere de Vere : Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null. Dead perfection, no more ; but while those critics are critics only of design and carved stones, who would welcome something in its regular features paralleled by a tip-tilted nose in a human face, Sue was obviously preoccupied by the sense that it, not alone among cathedrals, has outlived the devotional needs that produced it, and is little more than a magnificent museum of architectural antiquities. That magnificence would be even more complete and pronounced had not the egregious James Wyatt been let loose upon the " restoration " of it, towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he cast out and destroyed most of its internal adornments, and pulled down and utterly obliterated the beautiful detached bell tower, coeval with the cathedral itself, which stood, away from it, on the north side. It is perhaps worthy of remark that there may be noticed in the cathedral the tomb, with somewhat bombastic inscription, of Dr. D'Albigny Turberville, the seventeenth-century oculist, who died, aged 85, in 1696. The flagrant Latin, which tells us that his fame shall perish no sooner than this marble, does not allow for human forgetfulness, nor for the advances of science. The Normal School in the Close, whence Sue escaped, after being confined to her room as a punishment for her night's escapade with Jude, is a prominent building, described as " an ancient STONEHENGE 31 edifice of the fifteenth century, once a palace . . . with mullioned and transomed windows, and a courtyard in front shut in from the road by a wall." From the ever-impending tragedy of Jude's ambitions it is a relief to turn to the pure comedy of Betty Dornell, the first Countess of Wessex, in that collection of diverting short stories, A Group of Noble Dames. Looking upon those two old inns, the " Red Lion " in the High Street and the " White Hart," we are reminded that it was to the first-named that Betty resorted with that husband with whom, although married at an early age, she had not lived. " * Twice we met by accident,' pleaded Betty to her mother. ' Once at Abbot's Cernel and another time at the " Red Lion," Melchester.' " ' O. thou deceitful girl ! ' cried Mrs. Dornell. ' An accident took you to the " Red Lion " whilst I was staying at the "White Hart" ! 1 remember — you came in at twelve o'clock at night and said you'd been to see the cathedral by the light o' the moon ! ' " * My ever-honoured mamma, so I had ! I only went to the " Red Lion " with him afterwards.' " Nine miles to the north of Melchester stands Stonehenge, reached after their flight through the deserted midnight streets of the city by Tess and Angel Clare, vainly endeavouring to elude justice after the murder of the sham D'Urberville at Sandbourne. The night was " as dark as a cave," and a stiff breeze blew as they came out upon the black solitudes of Salisbury Plain. For some miles they had proceeded thus, when " on a sudden 32 THE HARDY COUNTRY Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it. " ' What monstrous place is this ? ' said Angel. '* ' It hums,' said she. ' Hearken ! ' "The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one- stringed harp." It was indeed Stonehenge, '* a very Temple of the Winds." And here, as the night wore away, and Tess lay sleeping on the Altar Stone, and the great trilithons began to show up blackly against the coming dawn, the figure of a man advancing towards them appeared rising out of the hollows of the great plain. At the same time Clare heard the brush of feet behind him : they were surrounded. Thoughts of resistance came to him ; but " ' It's no use, sir,' said the foremost plain-clothes man : ' There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.' " And so they stood watching while Tess finished her sleep. Stonehenge sadly requires such romantic passages as this to renew its interest, for, truth to tell, the first glimpse of this mysterious monument of prehistoric ages is wofully disappointing. No use to strive against that disappointment as you come up the long rises from Amesbury under the midday sun and see its every time-worn cranny displayed mercilessly in the impudent eye of day : the interval between anticipation and realisation is too wide, and the apparent smallness and insignificance of the great stone circles must, although unwillingly, be allowed. This comparative insignificance is, how- ever, largely the effect of their almost boundless DECREPIT STONEHENGE 33 environment of vast downs, tumid with the attendant circles of prehistoric tumuli, each tumulus or barrow crowned with its ckimp of trees, like the tufted plumes of a hearse. Mystery continues to shroud the origin of Stone- henge, which Wvas probably standing when the Romans first overran Britain, and seems by the most reasoned theories to have really been a Temple of the Sun. Its name is only the comparatively modern one of " Stanenges," or " the hanging stones," given by the Saxons, who discovered it with as much astonishment as exhibited by any one of a later age, and so named it, not from any reference to the capital punishment of sus. per coll., but from the great lintel-stones that are laid flat upon the tall rude columns, and may fancifully be said to hang in mid-air, at a height of twenty-five feet. Those who speak of Stonehenge remaining a " monument to all time," speak not according to knowledge, for the poor old relic is becoming sadly weatherworn and decrepit, and has aged rapidly of late years. No good has been wrought it by the fussy interferences and impertinences of " scientific " men, who, taking advantage of an alleged necessity for shoring up one the largest stones, dug about the soil and strove to wrest its secret by the method of sifting the spadesful of earth and stone chippings. Then a last indignity befell it. Sir Edward Antrobus, of Amesbury, lord of the manor, claimed Stonehenge as his manorial property, and, erecting a barbed- wire fence around it, levied a fee of a shilling a head for admission through the turnstiles that click you through, for all the world as though 3 34 THE HARDY COUNTRY you were entering some Earl's Court l^xhibi- tion. The impudence that has found it possible to do these things, in defiance of undoubted public rights of way, bulks majestically — much larger than Stonehenge itself, whose grey pile it indeed belittles and vulgarises. CHAPTER V THE OLD coach-road: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD It is thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the " Casterbridge " of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter. Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during summer and autumn. It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed, and very trying in its long rises. One charming interlude there is, three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the Wiltshire Avon ; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up the inclines of Crowden Down. At eight miles' distance from Salisbury the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the '* Shaftesbury Arms," stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for bygone coaching days. Its old name, deriving from " wood-gates," indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded district of Cranborne Chase. When railways disestablished coaches and the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of William Day's 35 36 THE HARDY COUNTRY training establishment for racehorses. He tells, in his recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in general, and of two in parti- cular, who used to call at Woodyates when on their way to or from Salisbury. They would talk, over the fire and their glasses of grog, some- what in this flishion of their drunken exploits when riding home horseback : " Well, John, I fell off ten times." " Yes, Thomas, and I fell off a dozen times : you see, 1 rode the old black horse, and ■■■'■■' 'k -ife; / ■■ iW M> ;^. PENTRIUGE. The " Trantridge " of" Tess of the D' Urbervillcs." he always jerks me about so." It was said that there was scarcely a yard of ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from their horses. At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of " Trant- ridge," to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set down on the map. It was to Trant- ridge that Tess came early in her career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take service with Mrs. Stoke-D'Urberville of The PENTRIDGE 37 Slopes, relict of Mr, Simon Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name, the crest, and arms of the knightly D'Urber- villes — dead and gone and powerless to resent the affront. It would be useless to seek The Slopes, rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick " like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around " ; but plain to see, not far away, is the " soft azure landscape of the Chase — a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted primaeval date." It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by Alec D'Urberville. The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a long, partly wooded hill, probably the " ridge " referred to in the place-name. In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was erected, the plain white marble tablet : To THE Memory of ROBERT BROWNING, of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746, and is the first known forefather ot Robert Browning, the poet. He was formerly footman and butler in the Bankes family. " All service ranks the same with God." Browning. This Tablet was erected by some of the poet's friends and admirers 1902. Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to " the Bankes family " from this tablet, which owes its being 38 THE HARDY COUNTRY to the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall. It seems that the poet's ancestor, after severing his connection with the Bankes, became landlord of the Wood- yates Inn, and churchwarden here. This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the earth is alluvial — rich, deep, and sticky. Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down ; chalky, and producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze — a sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district. Dorset is indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils. The sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border, and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to Beaminster. In between these are the valleys of the River Frome — the " Vale of Great Dairies " of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the "Vale of Little Dairies" in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale. A glance at the map will show the River Frome flowing in its "green trough of sappiness and humidity " from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, and DAIRYLAND 39 Wareham, whence it pours Its enriching waters into Poole Harbour ; and another glance will discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmorc, bounded by Blandford and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north ; including within its compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small villages. The natural outlet of this last district — ■ which, despite the name of " Little Dairies," given to it in the pages of the novels, is a larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the aggregation more — is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore. Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is, to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry. Despite a very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable numbers of these families. The farmer and his wife have largely grown out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters — the daughters especially, the adaptive dears ! — have got culture for leisure moments, but they are none the less practical for that. A generation ago, perhaps, things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on farming and obtain a living by it. Such as those came to grief, and 40 THE HARDY COUNTRY were rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their own class. A thorough- going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters of his neighbour going on the way to their music- lesson, reported his feelings and sayings as follows : " While I and an' my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an' I zaid to her, ' Where be they maidens a-gwoin' ? ' an' she zaid, ' Oh ! they be a-gwoin' to their music' An' I zaid, ' Oh ! a-gwoin' to their music at milken-time ! That 'ull come to zom'ehat, that wulL' " And it doubtless did come to a pretty considerable deal, if — as a doctor might say — the course of the disease was normal. Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond W^oodyates is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings. It is known locally as the Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds. Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come — in fifteen miles from Coombe Bissett — to a village, the first on this lonely main road. Tarrant Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream, without doubt the " tarrant," or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name. There are Tarrant Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford ; and then, as below the last-named place ROMANTIC EASTBURY 41 the little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants. To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and romantic aspect ; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories. It has, to be sure, a story of its own — a tale of vault- ing ambition which fell on t'other side. Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous and over- EASTBUKY. grown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a patron of the arts and a friend of literature. But before his huge house could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew, George Bubb 42 THE HARDY COUNTRY Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished ^140,000 on the completion of the works. Here he too became a patron, and entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of maintaining the immense place, actually offered — and offered in vain — an income of _^200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it in repair. As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, ^^^^Y ^^^ wing remaining to attest its former grandeur. But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings, stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park ; and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or loggia, some- thing of Vanbrugh's design, Eastbury, of course, is haunted — so much is to be expected of such a place ; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly four-in- hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain credence. So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e'en on through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified classic architectural presence, the coach- road enters in a timid back-doors manner, down a narrow byway. Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very marked in many Dorsetshire place-names. In this manner it is made to figure BLANDFORD 43 as " Blandford Forum," a rendering of " Blandford Market." In Mr. Thomas Hardy's pages it is *' Shottsford Forum," and so appears in his story of Barbara of the House of Grebe^ in Far from the Madding Crowd, and again in The Woodlanders, wherein it is stated, from the mouth of a rustic character, that " Shottsford is Shottsford still : you can't victual your carcass there unless you've got money, and you can't buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no " ; this last a sad drawback from the amenities of a delightful town. But there is a very excellent pump, and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a " considerable sharer " in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, "humbly erected this monu- ment, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy, That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its present flourishing and beautiful State." That, it will be allowed, is rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it. A rider to this inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the water. The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine, essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of urchins. Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed upon 44 THE HARDY COUNTRY it when, pressing hard the obstinate knob that re- leases the fount, the thing suddenly gives way and squirts halt a pint or so up his sleeve. This is a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a cheap one. Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire. It owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs, and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned wisdom. This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in architecture was flourish- ing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford's High Street is wholly of that character. Classicism does not often make for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable, and although the stone of the fine church-tower — designed in the same taste — is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature. Blandford's natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local fame ; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned. Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the antiquary, who says : " Before the Reformation, I believe there was no country or great town in England but had glasse painters. Old Harding of Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country glasse painter that ever I knew. Upon play daies 1 was wont to visit 46 THE HARDY COUNTRY his shop and furnaces. He dyed about 1 643, aged about 83 or more." That craft has long since died out from the town. A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, Jily-grown Stour, at the entrance to Lord Portman's noble park of Bryanstone. Here a dense overarching canopy of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant pros- pect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises. The entrance-gates to the domain of Bryan- stone are jealously kept locked and guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclu- siveness and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the present writer has by chance discovered for himself. You, at the cost of some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and be rid of you. But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge. A former Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who de- molished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw, R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone. CHAPTER VI THE OLD COACH-ROAD : BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER From this point the old coach-road becomes as- tonishingly hilly, so that mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the eloquent armoury of the printer's case to set it forth in any truly convincing manner. The series of semi- circular dumpling hills is not adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets — we must picture them thus : w v_^ w Vy v^ vy Kj and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep. Such is the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of summer. Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch, anciently referred to as " Album Monasterium " or " Blaunch Minster," situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road. John Wesley, grandfather of the 47 48 THE HARDY COUNTRY more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was tlisposscssed, when he took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated grandson. Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet. To this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on the less dried up Mill Bourne, This, the " Millpond St. Jude's " alluded to in Far from the Madding Crowd^ is a pretty place, of an old-world coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched " Royal Oak " inn and the post office, once the " White Hart," with the imposing effigy of a white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two foxes and a row of miniature cannon. Up along a byroad, past the feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village, is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming. The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain — partly ruined and standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once went between them — on the grass, sur- mounted still with sculptured displays of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton. It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually — and somewhat foreign-looking — high-pitched roof. Grand old trees lead up to it, and in the distance TWO ON A TOWER 49 one perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyHne. The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now, however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge. We can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night THE OLD MANOR-HOUSE, MILBORNE ST. ANDREW. One of the originals of the " Welland House" in " Two on a Tower'' over this bridge, to visit Swithin St. Cleeve, star- gazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop. In the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box- edged flower-beds and shady arbours. Foundations of many demolished buildings are traceable in the meadows. The scene of Two on a Tower is a selection from various places. " The tower," Mr. Hardy writes 4 so THE HARDY COUNTRY to mc, " had two or three originals — Horton, Charborough, etc." Those other places are duly described in these pages, but the " etc." covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor- house of Milborne St. Andrew, and called Weather- bury Castle. Standing on this " fir-shrouded hilltop," one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among the furze on Bjre Heath, WEATHERBURY CASTI.E " Lttlle can in these limes be seen of the obelisk Jrom withotil." the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin's observa- tory, and, near at hand, below, this old manor-house, the " Welland House " of the story. From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale. It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the descrip- tion of this hill. It " was (according to some £:he scene, and then, plunging into a final mass of tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house is seen, ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and drawn blinds looking less like the home of some fairy princess than the residence of a misanthrope, who has retired beyond the reach of the world and drawn his blinds, with the hope of persuading any who may possibly find their way here that he is not at home. " Enkworth Court " was, we are told, " a house in which Pugin would have torn his hair," and Encombe certainly can possess no charms for amateurs of Gothic. Nor can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and Roman orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being classical, and heaviness without dignity. But its interior, if it likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters connected with the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally comfortable. Here the old Chancellor, over eighty years of age, spent most of his declining days. " His sporting days were over ; he had but little interest in gardening or farming ; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a chapter in the Bible. His mornings he spent in an elbow-chair by the fireside in his study — called his shop — which was ornamented SITUATION OF CORFE 97 by portraits of his deceased master, George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle dog." From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable summer visitors, is two miles. The first glimpse of town and castle is one which clearly shows how aptly the site of them obtained its original name of Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxon ceorfan^ to cut. The site was so named long before castle or town were erected here, and referred to the passages cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little river Corfe and its tributaries. Those clefts are clearly distinguished from here and from the main road between Corfe and Swanage, and are notched twice, so deeply into the stony range, that the eminence on which the castle stands is less like a part of one continuous chain of hills than an isolated conical hill neighboured by lengthy ridges. On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neigh- bours, the castle was built, because at this point it so effectually guarded these passes from the shores of Purbeck to the inland regions. The position in these days seems a singular one, for from the upper slopes of those neighbours it is possible to look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but such things mattered little in days before artillery. A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression of dazzling whiteness ; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the pure white of the road and of the occasional repairs and restorations of the stone-built streets, the grey white of buildings past their first novelty, and the dead greyness of the roofing slabs of stone. There is little colour in Corfe when June has gone. The golden-green 7 98 THE HARDY COUNTRY lichens and housclccks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and turned to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the pyramidical hill on which the castle keep is reared has little more than an exhausted sage-green hue. " Corvsgate Castle," as we find it styled in The Hand of Kihelherta^ is frequently the scene, at such a time of year, of meetings like that of the " Imperial Association " in that story. All that is to be known respecting these ruins, " the meagre stumps remaining from flourishing bygone centuries," is the common property of all interested in historical antiquities, but there is something, it m.ay be supposed, in revisiting the oft-visited and in retelling the old tale, which bids defiance to ennui and pre- cludes satiety, even although the President's address be a paraphrase of the last archaeological paper, and that the echo of its predecessor, and so forth, in endless diminuendo : And smaller fleas have lesser fleas, And so ad infinittun. " Carfe," as any Wessex man of the soil will name it, just as horses are ' harscs ' and hornets become ' harnets ' in his ancient and untutored pronunciation, is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where brick, although not unknown, is remarkable. Stone from foundation to roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs themselves. In a place where building-stone is and has been so readily found it is, of course, in the nature of things to find the remains of a castle that must have been exceptionally large and strong, and here 5« loo THE HARDY COUNTRY they are, peering over the rooftops of the town from whatever point of view you choose. The castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it is in history ; and rightly too, for had it not been for that fortress there would have been no town. It is a town by courtesy and ancient estate, and a village by size ; a village that does not grow and has so far escaped the desecration of modern streets. The market cross, recently restored to perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both declare it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a mayor, but such things have long become vanities. The return of two members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed until reform put an end to it in 1832, proved nothing, for Parliamentary representation was no more fixed on the principle of comparative electorates than the representation of Ireland is now in the House of Commons. The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is said that the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the castle, is its inn. The church does not count ; for the body of it has been uninterestingly rebuilt, and only the fine tower, of Perpendicular date, remains. The inns, however, combine picturesqueness with the solid British com- forts of old times and the less substantial amenities of the new. Here, looking upon the " Bankes Arms," with its highly elaborate heraldic sign, you can have no manner of doubt as to what family is still paramount in Corfe, and I think, perhaps, that to shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement even reflects a halo upon the guest ; while if the " Greyhound " can confer no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness. THE WAYS OF CORFE loi with that charming feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and owning a capacious room poised above the comings and goings, the com- merce and gossipings of the people, can at least give a visitor the charm of what, although an ancient feature of the place, is at least a novelty to him. The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which support this porch and its room are more generally useful than the architect who placed them here, some two hundred and eighty years ago, probably ever imagined they would be. He devised them for the support of his gazebo above, but more than twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them convenient for leaning stocks, and the comfortable support they give has further lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that carry the bodily super- structure, would have been earlier concluded. The progress of an argument, discussion, narration, or negotiation under such unequal conditions is to be watched with interest. Time probably will forbid one being followed from beginning to end ; but to be a spectator of one of these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient. The length it has already been played may generally be pretty accurately estimated by the state of weariness or impatience exhibited by that party to it who is not supported by the pillar. The " well, as I was saying " of the one enjoying the leaning-stock, dis- closes, Hke the parson's " secondly. Dear brethren," the fact that the discourse is well on the way, but the same thing may be gathered by those out 102 THE HARDY COUNTRY of earshot, in the manoeuvres of the less fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own bulk. He stands upright, hands behind his back, while swaying his walking stick ; then he leans his weight to one side upon it, first (if he be a stout man, whom it behoves to exercise caution) carefully selecting a safe crevice in the jointing of the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of his ash-plant ; then, growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the process on the other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a sideways stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick horizontally against the wall. Then, having ex- hausted all possible movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his pocket, and affects to find time unexpectedly ahead of him ; and when this resort is reached the spectacle generally comes to a conclusion. But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the castle : — " Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the first archway into the outer ward. As she had expected, not a soul was here. The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a visit to the spot. Ascending the green incline and through another arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass was unable to clamber an inch further. Here she dis- mounted, and tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot. Once among the towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors, mildewed dungeons, and the tribe HISTORY OF CORFE 103 of daws peering invidiously upon her from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time." The ruins that Ethelberta and the " Imperial Association " had come to inspect owe their heaped and toppHng ruination to that last great armed convulsion in our insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest personalities were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell. Until that time the proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in Norman times. The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and no one has yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in it took place at a mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a fortress. That incident, the first and most atrocious of all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought at Corfe, was the murder of King Edward " the Martyr," in a.d. 978, by his stepmother. Queen Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son. The boy — he was only in his nineteenth year — had drawn rein here, on his return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the door from a goblet handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed him to the heart. His horse, startled at the attack, darted away, dragging the body by the stirrups, and thus, battered and lifeless, it was found. Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle was early besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of itself and justified its existence, for King Stephen failed to take it by force or to starve the garrison out. How long he may have been pleased to sit down before it we do not know, for the approach of a relieving force 104 THE HARDY COUNTRY caused him to pack his baggage and be off. Strong, however, as it was even then, it was continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry III., and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast of being impregnable than most other fortresses. CHAPTER XI CORFE CASTLE Like some cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of blood. Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at arm's length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered " God help him ! " of some compassionate warder. Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more mercifully ended by the assassin's dagger. Twenty-four knights captured in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur, were imprisoned here, in 1 202, and twenty-two of them met death by starvation in some foul underground hold. Prince Arthur, as every one knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur's sister, Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol, where, after forty years, she died. Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals, and those who aided them, in the '* good old days," and other monarchs, 105 io6 THE HARDY COUNTRY not so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle. Sympathies go out to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and the positions been reversed. This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King's deer-forest of Purbeck ; and many others immured for mere caprice. The place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a hyasna's lair. So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle. Its last great appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges ; falling in the second solely by treachery. It had by that time passed through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it is still owned. It was only eight years before the first siege in this war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of " Coke upon Littleton." When the civil war broke out. Sir John Bankes, called to the King's side at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from the CORFE CASTLE. " Ttie fust glimpse oflozvu and castle clearly sliozvs tlic clefts in the range of hills betzvccn K'hich the place is built." COKFE CASTLE. The ravine in zi'hich runs the road to ll'auhain.' SIEGE OF CORFE 107 covert sneers and petty annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested. Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have anticipated being besieged ; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of anti- quarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the sequel was presently to show. The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge, ingenious and plausible enough. The Mayor of Corfe had from time immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the thing would be done with ease. So probably it would, but for the keen feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once denied admission, and effectually unmasked. The revolutionary committee sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to de- spatch a body of sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was armed. " But," says the Mercurius Rusticus, a contemporary news-sheet, " instead of delivering them, though at the time there were but io8 THE HARDY COUNTRY five men in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their ladies' Command, mount these pecces on their carriages againe, and lading one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men that they all quitted the place and ran away." Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and resourceful general. By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends, who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters, and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble home again. We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them. Lady Bankes, however, did not despair. A born strategist, she perceived how vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of provisions ; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm. The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle alone for a while ; thinking its defences weak enough. But it was soon thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole next turned their attention to Corfe, behold ! it was bristling like a porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done to death STRENUOUS FIGHTING 109 — when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and hit anybody. The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole made their ap- pearance. They numbered between two and three hundred horse and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle from the neighbouring hills, with little effect. Then came an interkide, ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erie with between five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers. They brought with them a " Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres," and with these fired a hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either hand. The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then determined to attempt a storming of the castle. This grand advance, made on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even sallied out and slaughtered some of the fore- most, who were approaching cautiously under cover of strange engines named the "Sow" and the "Boar." The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower, " which," we are told, " they, without fears of prophanation used," and breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases. The ammunition included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off" the roof and rolled up. All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards and no THE HARDY COUNTRY grenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the enterprise in a fair way of being ended. The sailors, nothing loth, were made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of twenty pounds was offered to the first man up. With preparations so generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by antiquaries " garderobes," against such a contingency as this. One sailor has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another's courage is dowsed with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battle- ments, and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another's heels, are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in the bastioned walls. Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprison- ment ; and a more than ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent, is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead. " The knocks are too hot," as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to bury their dead, to tend one another's hurts, and those most fortunate to cleanse themselves. That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erie, hearing a rumour of the King's forces approaching, hurriedly raised TREACHERY 1 1 1 the siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe Castle again molested. This time it was beset to more purpose. Lady Bankes, now a widow, for her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe, vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between Roundhead garrisons. Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a hotbed of disaffec- tion, and Swanage watched by land and sea. A gallant deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no avail. He with his troops burst through the enemy's lines at Wareham and on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he captured and brought to Corfe. This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused, for on the way back the little party were captured. The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment. In the meanwhile, Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the imprisoned governor of Wareham. Every one knew the King's cause here and in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge of fighting for a losing side un- nerved all. Seeing the inevitable course of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders' officers, secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and, succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshire 112 THE HARDY COUNTRY was expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fitty Parliamentary troops into the keep. When morning dawned the garrison found them- selves betrayed ; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners, they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender. And then, when all the defenders marched out, kegs of gun- powder were laid in keep and curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied. When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe had gone up in ruin. Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical complete- ness of the fulfilled prophecies of " not one stone upon another," concerning Nineveh, and the Cities of the Plain ; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still represent the keep and gateway, and curtain- towers remain in recognisable shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their foundations are set. Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as fairly plumb as it was it its original position : there another has been torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased ; floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second, third and fourth floors turned to mouth- pieces for the winds. And yet, although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almost im- A GRAND RUIN 113 possible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is still a fine and an impressive ruin. It is grand when seen from afar, and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which runs the road to Wareham. CHAPTER XII WAREHAM That is a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as unspoilt as those of " Egdon," but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect. The Return of the Native, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this heart- lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their brooding neighbours. They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer still digs, and runs his truck) oads on crazy tramways down to the quays upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn. Fragments of Roman pottery, made from this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found, but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad. Much of Poole's prosperity is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of that "4 CHINA CLAY 115 port, which receive it from barges crossing the harbour. It was early used for tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh's first experi- ments were made from the clay found here. So far back as 1760 the export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually. It has now risen to about sixty thousand. This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe. It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the blinding whiteness characterising those of Purbeck Pelr^a, as it may be named. Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour. Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come, past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic bridge spanning the Frome itself. Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary's, one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight. Five of the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a school. Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes. Wareham, " the oldest arnshuntest place in Do'set, where ye turn up housen underneath yer 'tater-patch," as described to the present historian by a rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, in Two on a Tower^ is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of the compass, do not perhaps afford the best ii6 THE HARDY COUNTRY evidences of that age, for they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth century. For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762. To the ordinary traveller — and certainly to the commercial traveller — without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence, manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle. Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks ; but while Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and vanished streets once stood. That " once," however, was so long ago that the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things, as upon the luxuriance ot the gardens themselves and the prettiness of the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses. Wareham — " Anglebury " Mr. Hardy calls it — is, or was when the latest census returns were published, a town of two thousand and three in- habitants. Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more than those odd three, thus ,'■/: .A^Y"^" - tlr APPROACH TO WAREHAM. ' Acioss a long causeway over the Frame marshes! "^iTM IHK WALLS OF WARKllAM. FORTIFIED WAREHAM 117 coming within the fatal definition given somewhere, by some one, of a village. Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of a good many modern strokes. One, which hurt its pride not a little, was when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its representation and became merged in a county division. Another — but why enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns ? In one respect Wareham keeps an urban character. It has two inns — the *' Black Bear " and the " Red Lion " — that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses where, if you cannot obtain a desirable " cup of genuine," why, " 'tis a sad thing and an oncivilised ? " It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style Wareham " Anglebury," for that story is greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those original town-builders — who were probably much earlier than the invading Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe — heaped up and dug out those famous " walls of Wareham," which surround the town to this day, and are not walls in the common acceptation of ii8 THE HARDY COUNTRY the term, but ditches so deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick or masonry would be, and with an " angle of repose " sufficiently acute to astonish any modern railway engineer. Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earth- works, was a place of strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody tangle of its long history. Strong defences require deter- mined attacks. That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast, but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays, repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by only a few dispirited defenders. In a.d, 876 these Northmen captured the place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the greater part of Wessex. Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when the Conqueror came ; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four years UNHAPPY WAREHAM 119 later, in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning, recaptured the town after a three-weeks' siege. At length the treaty of peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk — those few of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough C^^^f^ WAREHAM, " Tht church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a terrace above the road" to survive — an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking around and reviewing their position. " Hope springs eternal," and these remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town was again besieged and taken. That event was an 120 THE HARDY COUNTRY incident in the contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt. That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of mediasval partisans ; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on : most took an active part, and the rector himself, " a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good things," was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The Parliamentary commander. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the " dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness " by the Wareham people, and advised that the place be " plucked down and made no town " ; but this course was not adopted. Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds. In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to death in 1 1 14, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit and prophet, one Peter oi THE WALLS OF WAREHAM 121 Pomfret, who had prophesied that the King should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 12 13, after having been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of Corfe. For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster ; and his way, it will be allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity. Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called " Bloody Bank," three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town. Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the Frome, the " Black Bear " is passed, prominent with its porch and the great chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet, handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle, may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled " walls," heaped up with magnificent emphasis. They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act, two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently recall its dragonadoes and blood- boltered episodes. CHAPTER XIII WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS Leaving Wareham by West Street, where there is a " Pure Drop " inn, perhaps suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of Bindon Abbey. The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in tree-grown and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant moat surrounds a curious circular mound. Those who demolished Bindon Abbey did their work thoroughly, for little is left of it save the bases of columns and the foundations of walls, in which archaeological societies see darkly the ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery. A few stone slabs and coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a vanished life-sized brass to an abbot. The inscription survives, in bold Lombardic characters — ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR APPGENAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANS TUEATUR. Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare, sleep-walking from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the story as being much nearer to this spot than it really is), laid Tess. WOOLBRIDGE HOUSE 123 Near the ruin, beside the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill, where Angel Clare proposed to learn milling. Here that thing not greatly in accord with monastic remains and hallowed vestiges of the olden times — a railway station — comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool village. Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business, mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk- churns, driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of London's great populations, stands the great, mel- lowed, Elizabethan, red brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on the borders of the rushy river Frome. The property at one time belonged to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which it came to Sir Thomas Poynings, and then to John Turberville. Garrisoned as a strategic point during the Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and stagnant one. Long since passed from Turberville hands, it now belongs to the Erle-Drax family of Char- borough Park and Holnest. The air of bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps the place and has ^,-; H 2IO THE HARDY COUNTRY the observer's eye on a higher level than the roof- top. Village there is none, and the clergyman who on Sundays conducts services here must do so — between the peals of the organ, and in midst of the quieter-spoken passages of morning and evening prayers — to the commentatory lowing of cattle or the grunts of pigs, sounding like the observations of grudging critics. There was once a saint who, like a broody hen that will nurse strange things, preached to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and the spiritual shepherd of Winterborne Monkton not infrequently has among his congrega- tion a barn owl, and a cheerful concourse of sparrows in the roof, much given to brawling in church. Roman directness was all very well, but later races found it much too trying for their horses, and thus we find, nearing the summit, that the straight ancient road across the ridgeway has long been abandoned, except by the telegraph-poles, for a cutting through the crest and an S curve down the southern and much steeper side. This expedient certainly eases both ascent and descent, but it does not suffice to render the way less than extremely fatiguing to climb and nerve-shaking to descend. As a view-point it has remarkable features, for the whole expanse of Portland Roads, the Isle of Portland, and the site on which Weymouth and Melcombe Regis are built are exposed to gaze, very much as though the spectator looking down upon them were bendine in an examination of some modelled map of physical geography. White spires at Weymouth and equally white groups of houses at Portland gain striking effects from backgrounds of grey rock or the dark green ot trees, massed by DISTANT WEYMOUTH 211 distance to the likeness of dense forests ; and the mile-lengths of harbour walls and breakwaters, punctuated with forts, out in the roadstead are shrunken by distance to the likeness of a cast seine- net supported by cork floats. On a ridge inland THE WISHING WELL, UPWEY. "A pretty spot, overhung with trees.' a row of circular ricks with peaked roofs showing against the sea looks absurdly like beehives, and down there in the middle distance is the curving line of embankment where the railway from Dor- chester goes, after piercing the hill on which we stand by the Bincombe Tunnel. 2 12 THE HARDY COUNTRY Descending the hill, wc come to the valley of the Wey. The older part of the village of Upwey marks the source of that little stream to the right, and the newer part, with the village of Broadwey, are scarcely to be distinguished from one another, ahead. The original Upwey, the Upwey of the " Wishing Well," lies under the flanks of a great down, where, if you climb and climb and continue climbing, you will presently discover the poppy-like scarlet buildings of the Weymouth water- works. But there is no need to seek them while the Wishing Well, nearer to hand, calls. The " Wishing Well " is a pretty spot, over- hung with trees and still a place resorted to by tourists, who either shamefacedly, with an implied half-belief in its virtues, drink its waters, or else with the quip and jest of unbelief, defer the slaking of their thirst until the nearest inn is reached, where liquors more palatable to the sophisticated taste — or what Mr. Hardy's rustics would term " a cup of genuine " — are obtainable. Once the haunt ot gipsies, who used the well as a convenient pitch, and, when you crossed their palms with silver in the approved style, prophesied fulfilment of the nicest things you could possibly wish yourself — and a good many other things that would never occur to you at all — it is now quite unexploited, save perhaps by a little village girl, who, with a glass tumbler, will save the devotee from stooping on hands and knees and lapping up the magic water, like a dog. The gipsies have been all frightened away by the Vagrants Act, and no great loss to the community in general. The inquisitive stranger, curious to know whether the villagers themselves SCEPTICS 213 resort to their famous Fount of Heart's Desire, receives a rude shock when he is told by one of them that, " Bless 'ee, there baint a varden's wuth o' good in 'en, at arl. Mebbe 'tis good ver a whist (a stye) but arl them 'ere magicky tales be done away wi'." The Age of Faith is dead. And so into Weymouth, down a road lined with long rows of suburbs. Radipole is come to this complexion at last, and its spa is, like a service rendered and a benefit conferred, a thing clean forgot. CHAPIER XX WEYMOUTH Well, then, here, reaching a modern church with a tall spire, surrounded by suburban villas, is the beginning of Weymouth. The sea in these miles has dropped gradually down, out of sight as the road comes to the level, and at this point you might, to all intents and purposes, be at North Kensington, which the spot greatly resembles. But turning sharply with the road to the right the derogatory illusion is at once dispelled, for the sea is out there, sparkling, to the left ; and, in the perfect segment of a circle, the Esplanade of Weymouth goes sweeping round to the harbour, with the Nothe Point fort above, and, away out in the distance, that towering knob of limestone, the Isle of Portland. It is a stimulating view, and has generally other and even more stimulating constituents than those of nature, for Weymouth and Portland are places of arms, and the ships of the Navy are usually represented by a squadron of cruisers well in shore, with a brace or two of battleships coming, going, or anchored easily in sight, and numbers of those ugly, imp-like craft, torpedo-boats, flying hither and thither. 214 "BUDMOUTH" 215 Weymouth styles itself — or others style it — *' the Naples of England," but no one has ever yet found Naples returning the compliment and calling itself " the Weymouth of Italy." There is really no reason why Weymouth, instead of seeking some fanciful resemblance based solely, it may be supposed on the configuration of its widely curving bay, should not stand or fall by the sufficing attractions of its own charming self. For one thing, it would be impossible to persuade the public that Weymouth owns a Vesuvius somewhere away in its hinterland^ and, although the country is rich in Roman camps, no antiquary has yet discovered a Pompeii midway between iMelcombe Regis and Dorchester. The town is still in essentials the Weymouth of George III., the " Budmouth " of Thomas Hardy. They are, it is true, the battleships of Edward VII. wallowing out there, like fat pigs, where of yore the wooden men-o'-war swam the waters like swans ; but the houses at least, that face the Esplanade in one almost unbroken row, each one like its neighbour and all absolutely inno- cent either of taste or pretension, are characteris- tically Georgian. Taken individually and examined, one might go greater lengths, and say such a house was more than insipid and commonplace — was, in- deed, downright ugly — but in a long curving row the effect is a comprehensive one of dignified restraint. At any rate, they are constructed of good honest dull red brick, and not plastered and made to look like stone. This bluff honesty in these days of shams and of restless, worried-looking designs, when every new building must have its own ready- made picturesqueness, and this total absence of 2i6 THE HARDY COUNTRY anything and everything that by remotest chance could be thought an ornament, is grateful. We speak of this as "Weymouth," but it is rather, to speak by the card, Melcombe Regis, and although the interests of both this and of Weymouth proper, on the other side of the narrow neck of harbour, are now pooled, it was once a sign of ignorance and a certain offence not to carefully distinguish between the two. Their rivalries and jealousies were of old so bitter that the river-mouth and harbour, long since bridged to make a con- tinuous street, was like a stream set between two alien states. The passage was then " by a bote and a rope bent over ye haven, so y* in ye fery bote they use no ores." These disputes and contentions had risen almost to the condition of a smouldering petty local warfare in the time of Queen Elizabeth, when means were taken to put an end to it. Thus in 1571 they were compelled to unite, and in the familiar phrase of fairy tales have "lived happily ever after." Says Camden : " These stood both some time proudlie upon their owne severall priviledges, and were in emulation one of the other, but now, tho' (God turne it to the good of both !) many, they are, by authoritie of Parliament, incorporated into one bodie, conjoyned by late by a bridge, and growne very much greater and goodlier in buildings and by sea adventures than heretofore." But things widely different from trade have in later times made the fortune of the conjoined towns of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. I suppose the one or the other of them was bound in the course of time to be " discovered " as a bathing-resort, RISE OF WEYMOUTH 217 but it Is to George III. that Weymouth owes a deep debt of gratitude. His son had already " dis- covered " Brighthehnstone, or rather, had placed the seal of his approval upon Dr. Russel's earlier discovery of it ; and likewise Weymouth was already on the road to recognition when George III. came here first, In 1789. Thirty years or so earlier, when people had begun as a strange new experience, to bathe, the sands of Weymouth — or to adopt an attitude of strict correctitude, the sands of Mel- combe Regis — were on the way to appreciation. Then greater folks lending their august patronage where that of meaner people had little weight, the place was resorted to by the famous Ralph Allen of Bath, for whom In 1763 the first bathing-machine was constructed, and by a stream of visitors gradually ascending In the social scale. The place long found favour with the Duke of Gloucester, by whose recommendation the king was induced to make a visit and then a lengthy stay, placing the apex at last upon this imposing pyramid of good fortune. It was no fleeting glimpse of royal favour thus accorded, for with the coming of summer the king for many years resided here at Gloucester Lodge, the mansion facing the sea built by his brother the Duke of Gloucester, and now the staid and grave Gloucester Hotel. Weymouth basked happily in the splendours of that time. They were splendours of the respectable domestic sort generally associated with that homely monarch, who bathed from his machine In full view of his loyal lieges and then went home to boiled mutton and turnips. He made sober holiday on the Dorset coast while his graceless son was on the coast of Sussex rearing a 21 8 THE HARDY COUNTRY fantastical palace and playing pranks fully matching it in extravagance of design and purse, Weymouth's return for all these favours is still to be seen, in the bronze group erected by the townsfolk in 1809, to celebrate the generally joyful occasion of his Jubilee, to perpetuate the especial gratitude of the people for favours received, and in hopes of more to come. Weymouth very closely reflects the prosperity of that great era, in the Georgian streets, the quaintly bowed windows of private houses and the now old- world shop-fronts, many of them exquisite examples of the restrained taste and aptitude for just proportion in design characteristic of that age, and only now beginning to be appreciated at their true worth. It was the age of the Adams brothers, of Chippendale and Sheraton ; an age rightly come to be regarded in our time as classic in all things in the domain of architecture and decoration. In its unaltered purlieus Weymouth is thus singularly like the older parts of Brighton, but now richer in vestiges of the Georgian period than the larger and more changeful town. That, doubtless, was a period of inflated prices in Weymouth. King, queen, and princesses, fashionables and many soldiers sent up the ideas of tradesfolk just as the sun expands the mercury of a thermometer. Uncle Benjy, in 'The Tnanpet MajoTy found Budmouth a place where money flew away doubly as quick as it did when the famous Scot visited London and " hadna' been there a day when bang went saxpence." At Budmouth in the time of Farmer George, it was a " shilling for this and a shilling tor that ; it you only eat one egg or even a poor windfall of an apple, you've got to pay ; and 220 THE HARDY COUNTRY a bunch o' radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o' cider a good tuppence three-farthings at lowest reckoning. Nothing without paying ! " Ay ! but if prices were no higher than these, 'twas no such ruinous place, after all. Poor Uncle Benjy ! The most striking differences in physical geography between the constituent parts of Weymouth are that Melcombe Regis, here on the shore is flat as a pancake, and Weymouth, there on 't'other side of the harbour, is as hilly as a house-roof. You could have no greater dissimilarity than that between the prudish formality which stands for the Melcombe front and the heaped-up terraces of houses of every description at Weymouth, which has no front at all ; unless indeed the lowest tier of houses skirting the harbour and its quays, and looking into the back alleys and quays of Melcombe may so be styled. In those old days, to which Weymouth dates back, no seaside town could afford so assailable a luxury as a " front," and the older quarters of nearly all such are generally found, as here, folded away under the lee of a bluff, or thinly lining the shores of an estuarial harbour. Here the Nothe Point, with its fort mounted with heavy guns, is the rocky bluff behind which the old town cowered from elemental and human foes, and that estuary, both by reason of its narrow entrance, and those great forts of the Nothe and Portland, has never been one sought by an enemy's ship. The harbour is not uninteresting : what harbour ever is .'' The comings and goings of ships have their own romance, and bring rumours of all kinds of outer worlds and strange peoples. You look across from the quays of Weymouth to the quays RECOVERY OF WEYMOUTH 221 of Melcombe, and there, beside the walls and the old warehouses, lie the ships from many home and foreign ports, their names duly to be read under their counters. Whence they individually come, I do not greatly care to know. This one may only have come from the Channel Islands with a con- signment of early potatoes : and, on the other hand, it may have won home again after who knows what romantic doings at the Equator or within the Arctic Zone. It may have brought treasure-trove, or on the other hand be merely carrying ordinary commercial freights, at so low a figure that the owners are dissatisfied and the skipper gloomy. It is well, you see, to leave a little margin for fancy when the good ship has come to port once more and within sight and the easiest reach of those two great features of a Christian and a civilised land : the Church and the Public House. In these days the town is recovering at last from the undeserved neglect into which it fell after the illness and death of George III. and from later disasters and indifferences ; and, what with improved railway travelling, and the added interest it obtains from being selected as the site of a new great national harbour where more than ever the ships of the Navy will come and go, has a great future before it. CHAPTER XXI THE ISLE OF PORTLAND To the generality of untravelled folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry and a prison. It is both and more. It is, for one additional thing, a fortress, in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles, the Chesil Beach. As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of "The 'Trumpet Major ^ so Portland, the " Isle of Slingers," as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially, though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district of The Well Beloved. There is a choice of ways to Portland. You may go by the high road — and a very steep up and down road it is, too — past Wyke, or may proceed by the crumbling clifflets past Sandsfoot Castle, one of those blockhouse coastward fortresses stretch- ing from Deal and Sandown Castles, in Kent, along the whole of the south coast, to this point, whose building we owe to the panic that possessed the nation in the time of Henry VIII. : one of those periodic fears of a French invasion that from time to time have troubled the powers that be. Two of the long series were placed in this neighbourhood ; POOR LETTER H I 223 the so-styled " Portland Castle " at the base of the Isle of Portland itself, and this craggy ruin of Sandsfoot, roofless and rough and more cliff-like than the cliffs themselves, at the mainland extremity of this sheltered inlet, wherein, in days of yore, an enemy might conceivably have effected a lodgment. For the defence of this fort, when new-builded SANDSFOOT CASTLE. " This craggy ruin 0/ Sattdsfoot, roofless and rough, and more clifflikc than the cliffs thctnsclves." in the Eighth Harry's time, there were to be provided " the nombrc of xv hable footmen, well furneyshed for the warres, as appertayneth," together with some " harchers " duly furnished, or " harmed " as the summons might have put it, with their " bows and harrowes." Alas ! poor overworked letter H! 224 THE HARDY COUNTRY It is here, in the story of The Well Beloved^ that Jocelyn Pierston, the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance, elects to bid farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland went on her way to Portland Bill, " along the coast road to Portland." When she had reached the waters of the Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over, and from thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the summer sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow pebbles of the Chesil Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of eternity. It is but a flat road, less than two miles long, but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far ofi^ as ever, and the way is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing amid the pebbles is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a landmark, and a chance boat or capstan a monument. But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches Portland and Fortune's Well, referred to in that story of the Portlanders as " the Street of Wells." The well — a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old sort, where you wished for your heart's desire, and perhaps obtained the boon in the course of a lifetime — by striving and labouring for it — is behind that substantial inn, the Portland Arms, and it is a cynical commentary upon this and all such legends of faery that, while the Port- landers in general, and the people of Fortune's Well in particular, can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like enough not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know anything at all of the magic spring, of where it is, or that the PORTLAND 225 place took its name from the existence of such a thing. One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting circumstances of this so-called " Isle " of Portland, is calculated to impress the stranger with astonishment. Its giant forts ; its great convict establishment, " the retreat, at their country's expense, of geniuses from a distance," the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble beach that tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of " Isle " a misnomer, are all fitting things for amazement ; but no one previously uninformed on the point is at all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages and hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim, forbidding, " solid and single block of limestone four miles long." Eleven thousand souls live and move and have their being on what the uninstructed, gazing across the Roads from Wey- mouth, might be excused for thinking a penitential rock, reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for convicts and those whose business it is to keep them in order. The number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a surprise. Entering upon this happily styled " Gibraltar of Wessex," there is in the foreground, by the railway- station, Chesilton ; succeeded by Fortune's Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great elevated, treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle, Reforne. Beyond the prison and the prison quarries, come Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and Southwell ; all stony and hard-featured and like nothing else but each other. To-day an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs 15 2 26 THE HARDY COUNTRY from Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself ; but otherwise, all the circumstances of the place still fully show how the Portlanders came to be that oddly different race from the mainlanders they are shown to be in the pages of The Well Beloved^ and in the writings of innumerable authors. Portland was to the ancients the Isle of Vindilis, the " Vindelia " of Richard of Cirencester ; and Roman roads are surviving on it to this day, not- withstanding the blasting and quarrying activities of this vast bed of building-stone, whence much of the material for Sir Christopher Wren's City of London churches came, and despite the business of fortification that has abolished many merely antiquarian interests. You, indeed, cannot get away from stone, here on Portland ; physically, in historic allusions, and in matters of present-day business. The story of the Isle begins with it, with those ancient inhabitants, the Baleares^ slingers of stones, who made excellent defence of their unfertile home with the inexhaustible natural ammunition ; and quarrying is now, after the passing of many centuries, its one industry. It is to be supposed, without any ex- travagance of assumption, that the Portlanders of to-day are the descendants of those ancient Baleares, and, certainly until quite recent times, they maintained the aloofness and marked individuality to be expected from such an ancestry. To them the mainlanders were foreigners, or, as themselves would say, " kimberlins " ; a flighty, mercurial and none too scrupulous people, calling themselves Englishmen, who hved on the adjacent island of Great Britain and THE PRISON 227 were only to be dealt with cautiously, and then solely on matters of business connected with the selling of stone, or maybe of fish, caught in Deadman's Bay. For the true Portlanders, like their home, are grey and unsmiling, and reflect their surround- ings, even as do those inhabitants of more sheltered and fertile places ; and still, although things be in these later days of railway communication and a kind of quick-change and " general-post " all over the country somewhat altered, a stranger, who by force of circumstances — pleasure is out of the question — comes to live here, will find himself as uncongenial as oil is to water. The outlook of the old Portlanders upon strangers was justified to them, in a way, when the great prison was built and the gangs of convicts began to be a feature of the Isle. 'They^ who thus by force of circumstances over which they had no control, took up a hard-working and frugal existence upon the Isle, were specimens of the " kimberlins " ; and the prejudices, if not quite the ignorance, of the islanders saw in them representative specimens of all " Outlanders." When you come toilsomely uphill from Fortune's Well, out upon the stony plateau that is Portland, you presently become conscious of the contiguity of that great convict establishment, in the appear- ance of notice-boards, warning all and sundry of the penalties awaiting those who aid prisoners to escape. Such an offence, you learn, " shall be treated as a felony, not subject to any bail or mainprize " (whatever that may be). But any " free person " finding money, letters, or clothing, or anything that may be supposed to have been left to facilitate 228 THE HARDY COUNTRY the escape of prisoners shall be rewarded, unless such person shall be proved to have entered into collusion, etc., etc., and so forth. What, however, one especially desires to call attention to is the delicious expression, " free person." Obviously, to the official minds ruling Portland " free persons " owe their freedom, not to any virtues they possess, but to their luck in not being found out. One, being a " free person," has, therefore, after reading this notice, an uneasy sus- picion that freedom is, in the eye of those authorities, a wholly undeserved accident, and that if every one — saving, of course, officials — had their deserts, they would be cutting and hauling stone out yonder, with the gangs in those yellow jackets and knicker- bockers plentifully decorated with a pleasing design in broad arrows. Being merely a " free person," without prejudice in one's favour in the eyes of the armed warders who abound here, it behoves one to walk circum- spectly on Portland. A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its quarries. It is another " sermon in stones," quite as effective as the sermons preached by those other stones referred to in the lines . . . books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything, and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly sophisticated one : " Thou shalt not steal — or, if you must, do it outside the cognisance of the criminal laws ! " But this only in passing. Literary landmarks have fortunately, no points of contact with burglars. PENNSYLVANIA CASTLE 229 fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of companies. We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised in The Well Beloved as " Sylvania Castle," the residence of Jocelyn Pierston in that story. Coming to it, past the cottage of Avice, down that street innocent of vegetation, the thickets of trees surrounding the Castle (which is BOW AND ARROW CASTLE. not a castle, but only a castellated mansion built in 1800 by Wyatt, in true Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the Isle) are seen, closing in the view. A tree is something more than a tree on stony, wind-swept Portland. Any tree here is a landmark, and a grove of trees a feature ; and thus, in the thickets and cliffside undergrowths of "Sylvania Castle," that justify the name and 230 THE HARDY COUNTRY give the lie to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious. Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to happen here. The first Avice was courted by him in the churchyard down below, where a landslip has swept away the little church that gave to Church Hope Cove its name, and Avice the third eloped with another — that Another who with that capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the scenes in most plays — down the steep lane that runs beneath the archways of " Rufus'," or Bow and Arrow, Castle on to the rocks beside the raging sea. By lengthy clii?^-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill, whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the top- gallants, and at last the admiral's flag of the Victory drop down towards, and into, the watery distance. Offshore is the Shambles lightship that gave a refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre. This " wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory," called Portland Bill, with its two lighthouses looking down upon shoals and rapid currents of extraordinary danger to mariners, obtains its name from the beak-like end of the Isle which " stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel." Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving accounts would have us believe that it derives from this being the site of propitiatory Baal fires in far-off" pagan times ; and, if we like to carry on the fancy, we may draw comparisons between the fires of the shivering superstitious terrors of those old heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams maintained here PORTLAND 231 in modern times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of " they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters." Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to Fortune's Well and Chesilton is made chiefly along high ground disclosing a comprehensive and beautiful view of the whole westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where the many miles of the Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy distance, and the heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport and Lyme Regis, pierce the skies. CHAPTER XXII WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER To leave Weymouth by this route is to obtain some initial impressions of a very striking character : impressions, not slight or fleeting, of hilliness and of Weymouth's modern growth. A specious and illusory flat quayside stretch of road, by the well- known swan-haunted Backwater, ends all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous inclination up through what was once the village, now the suburb, and a very packed and populous suburb, too, of East Chickerell. To this succeeds the Chickerell of the West ; and so, in and out and round about, and up and down — but chiefly up — at last to Portisham, the first place of any Hardyean interest. Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding height of Blackdown — locally " Black'on," just as the name of the village is shortened to " Po'sham "• — rising eight hundred and seventeen feet above the sea, is notable to us both from fiction and in facts. It appears in The Trumpet Major as the village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service under Admiral Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob be a character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical per- 332 NELSON'S HARDY 233 sonage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson's friend and comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in 1769, PORTISHAM. 'A long avenue of poplars atid ashes, with the village church and sowe farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of the rolling downs filling in the background." and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on Blackdown is erected. The house is the first on the left, at the cross-roads as you make for 234 THE HARDY COUNTRY the village. In the garden belonging to it, on the opposite side of the road may still be seen a sundial, bearing the inscription : Joseph Hardy, Esq., Kingston Russell. Lat. 50° 45' 1767 Fugio fuge. It is a lovely perspective along the road approach- ing Portisham, disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with the village church and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of the rolling down, covered in patches with furze, filling in the background. The beautiful old church has, happily, been left very much to itself, with the lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet scraped off. A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes curiosity : " William Weare lies here in dust, As thou and I and all men must. Once plundered by Sabean force, Some cald it war but others worse. With confidence he pleads his cavse, And Kings to be above those laws. September's eygth day died hee •When neare the date of 6^ Anno domini 1670." Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence ot the epitaph to have been the Roundhead party, and " rebellion," or perhaps *' robbery," to have been the worse thing than war some called it. The allusion is probably to some raid in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and were grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, 236 THE HARDY COUNTRY in the passage where he claims " Kings to be above those laws," to have cheerfully borne some other foray on the Royalists' behalf. Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very interest- ing place, remarkable for a hilltop chapel of St. Catherine anciently serving as a seamark, and for the remains of the Abbey ; few, and chiefly worked into farmsteads and cottages, but including a great stone barn of the fifteenth century, as long as a cathedral, and very cathedral-like in its plan. The great barn of Far from the Madding Crowds scene of the sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn of Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with transepts. " It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. . . . The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very sim- plicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been at- tempted. The dusky, filmed chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions the precise requirements, both of beauty and venti- lation. One could say about this barn, what ABBOTSBURY 237 could hardly be said of either the church or the castle akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied." Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet, is the famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some thousands of swans have from ancient times had a home. Once belonging to the Church, in the persons of the old abbots of the Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury, the swans are now the property of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of the " First Countess of Wessex," Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth in A Group of Noble Dames. Though long passed from the hands of any religious establishment, the ownership of the swans still points with the trifling alteration in the position of an apostrophe, to the fact that " the earth is the Lords' and the fulness thereof." Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the left over sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent inland, to the right, lead in staggering drops and rises past Swyre and Puncknowle down to Burton Bradstock, and thence to the " unheard-of harbour " of West Bay. West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in Fellozv Townsmen^ where they are called " Port Bredy," from the little river, the Brit or Bredy, which here flows into the sea. West Bay is one of the oddest places on an odd and original coast. A mile and a half away from Bridport town, which is content to hide, sheltering away from the sea- breezes, it has always been about to become great, either as a commercial harbour or a seaside resort. 238 THE HARDY COUNTRY or both, but has ended in not achieving greatness of any kind. No one who enjoys the sight of a quiet and picturesque place will sorrow at that. Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and un- studied way. It owns a little harbour, with quays and an inn or two, and shipping that, daring greatly, has to be warped in between the narrow timbered pier-heads, where a furious sea is for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay ; and away at one side it is shut in from the outside coast by some saucy-looking cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due to their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded down. The sea- ward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomine. It is an eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that charac- terises the shore of West Bay. A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in being broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny shingle, and are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of modern houses, whose architect is so often on their account pro- fessionally spoken of as a genius, that it becomes a duty to state, however convenient to the residents in them their plan may be, that their appearance in the view is the one pictorial drawback to West Bay. The microscopic shingle — for shingle it is — of West Bay has for centuries been the enemy of the place and has practically strangled it. There are heaped up wastes of it everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily carries some of it away, as a sample, 240 THE HARDY COUNTRY about his person, in his shoes or his hair, or in his pockets. The more of it removed in this, or indeed in any other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes, unasked, into the houses ; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at last you seek repose between the sheets, there it is again. These wastes are part of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset coast, the Chesil Beach, which runs eighteen miles from this point along the perfectly unbroken shores of the Bay to Chesilton and Portland. The " Chesil " is just the " Pebble " beach : that old word for pebbles being found elsewhere in Dorsetshire, and at Chislehurst, among other places. A pecularity of it is that by insensible degrees it grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly direction, ending as very large pebbles at Portland. The fishermen of this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to guide them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the point by handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile of the particular spot. The story of West Bay's struggle against this insidious enemy is an old one. In 1722 the Brid- port authorities procured an Act ot Parliament em- powering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and flourishing state whence it had declined. The preamble stated that by reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants had been swept away and the haven choked. But although the Legislature had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate WEST BAY 241 whence the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged. Mr. Hardy in Fellow Townsmen thus describes West Bay : *' A gap appeared in the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade. Between these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior valley, being a mere layer of blown sand. But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed. There were but few houses here : a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief features of the settlement." The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the corporate town of Bridport, which, after long re- maining, as far as the casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of 16 242 THE HARDY COUNTRY neighbouring residents who, residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed. Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a town keenly interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope industries ; and rope and twine walks, where the old methods are even yet in use, are still features of its less prominent lanes and alleys, but the unobservant and the incurious, who to be sure form the majority of travellers, might pass, and do pass, through Bridport, without thinking it any other than a quiet market town, dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs and weekly village shopping. When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those bustling days when the manu- facturers of the town supplied the King's Navy with ropes, and criminals were suspended by this staple article of the town, the expression " stabbed with a Bridport dagger," was a pretty, or at least a symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged. It was a figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact antiquary, Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to Bridport and stolidly noted down : " At Bridport be made good daggers." One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious error of his, for which he and his memory have been laughed at for more than three hundred and fifty years. How his shade must writhe at the shame of it ! He was, doubtless, tired THE "CASTLE" INN 243 and bored, for some reason or another, when he reached Bridport, and to his undoing, took things on trust. And nowadays, every one who writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has his fling at the poor old fellow ; and I — conscience tells me — in- sincerely do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy ! Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of Fellow HIGH STREET AND TOWN HALL, BRIDPORT. Townsmen^ was descended from the hemp and rope- merchants of Bridport, as the story, in several allusions, tells us. South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and left course of the main street, contains most of the very few buildings of any great age. Among them is the little Gothic, gabled building now a workmen's club, but once the " Castle " inn. Here, too, is the church, ancient enough, but restored 244 THE HARDY COUNTRY in i860, when the two bays were added to the nave ; probably the incident referred to by Mr. Hardy : " The church had had such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be scarce recognisable by its dearest old friends." There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport church, a curious mural tablet to the " Memory of Edward Coker, Gent. Second son of Capt, Robert Coker of Mapowder, Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpur\ June the 14*'' An. Do. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer unde' the late Dvke of Mvnmovt^ in that Rebellion." The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised. It is the original of the " Black Bull " in Fellow Townsmen. Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of Beaminster, the " hill-surrounded little town " of which Angel Clare's father was vicar. " Sweet Be'mi'ster " says Barnes : " Sweet Be'mi'ster, that bist abound By green and woody hills all round," and in truth those hills that surround it are set about this quiet agricultural town in a manner that fairly astounds the traveller. No railway reaches *' Emminster," as it is named in Tess of the D'Urbervilles^ and, looking upon those mighty natural turrets and domes that beset it, the traveller is of opinion that no railway ever will. Nearing Beaminster at cockshut time, when the birds have all gone to bed, when the sky is hot in the west with the burnished copper of the after-glow, and a BEAMINSTER 245 cold blue and green, with pale stars appearing, fills the eastern firmament, the scenery is something awesome and approaching an Alpine sublimity. Then the twilight streets of this quiet place in the basin-like hollow begin to take an hospitable look, and the tall red stone tower of the church, that looks so nobly aloof in day, assumes a welcoming paternal benignancy. It is a toilsome winning to Beaminster, but, when won, worth the trouble of it. CHAPTER XXIII WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE You cannot go far from Weymouth without a good deal of hill-climbing, but the longest stretch of level in this district, where levels are the ex- ception and hills the rule, is by this route. It is not so very long, even then, for when you have passed the curving Esplanade and Lodmoor Marsh, and come to the foot of Jordan Hill, thought to have been the site of the Roman " Clavinium," it is only two and a half miles. Preston stands on the top of a further hill, and is a place of great resort for brake-parties not greatly interested in literature. Turning to the left out of its street, we come to the pretty village — or hamlet, for no church is visible — of Sutton Poyntz, whose features resemble the " Overcombe " of The Trumpet Major. Its thatched stone cottages, charming tree- shaded stream and mill-pond, and old barns, all under the looming shadow of the downs, vividly recall the old-fashioned ways and talk, and the pleasant romance of Mr. Hardy's only semi-historical novel ; and you need not see, if you do not wish, the flagrant Vandalism of the Weymouth water- works, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon the inn that will be interesting and 846 " OVERCOMBE " 247 picturesque some day, but now, rawly new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these old rustic surroundings. Squawking ducks, hurrying across the dusty road and flouncing noisily into the clearly running stream, rooks cawing contentedly from their windy see-saw in the topmost branches of tall trees.; and tired horses SUTTON POYNTZ: THE "OVERCOMBE" OF "THE TRUMPET MAJOR." coming stolidly home from plough are the chief features of this " Overcombe," where John Loveday had his mill, and his sons John and Bob, and Anne Garland and Matilda, and all the lovable, the hateful, or the merely contemptible characters in that sym- pathetic tale came and went. The mill — I am afraid it is not the mill, but one of somewhat later date — still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulking 248 THE HARDY COUNTRY very largely between the trees, " the smooth mill- pond, over-full, and Intruding into the hedge and into the road," as mill-ponds will do, even in these later days of strict local government. But the days of European wars are gone. It is a hundred years since the last call of brave, tender, loyal John Loveday, the Trumpet Major, was silenced on a bloody batdefield in Spain, and well on toward the same tale of years since the press gangs, fellows to that which searched Overcombe Mill for Bob Loveday, impressed likely fellows for service on His Majesty's ships : — the characters of The Trumpet Major belong wholly to a bygone age. To the same age belonged the characters in The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion, a short story associated with Bincombe, a tiny village it requires no little exertion to reach ; but you may win this way to it as easily — or at any rate, not more laboriously — than by any other route. It stands up among the downs, and in what Dorset folk would call an " outspan "—that is to say a remote hollow, recess or shelf amid them, where their sides are so steep that they give the appearance of some theatrical " back-cloth " to a romantic scene. " Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp ; here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the cavalry, and spots where the midden heaps lay are still to be observed. At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid THE OLD CAMP 249 hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and thistles, the old trumpet and bugle- calls, the rattle of the halters ; to help seeing rows of spectral tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery. From within the canvases come guttural BINCOMBE. " // stands up among the downs." syllables of foreign tongues, and broken songs of the fatherland ; for they were mainly regiments of the King's German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that time." The story associated with this out-of-the-way place 250 THE HARDY COUNTRY is one in its chief lines true to facts, for in an un- marked grave within the little churchyard, lie two young German soldiers, shot for desertion from the York Hussars, as quoted at the end of the story from the register : " Matth : Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty's Regiment of York Hussars, and shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born in the town of Sarrbruk, Germany." *'Christop Bless, belonging to His Majesty's Regiment of York Hussars, who was shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born at Lothaargen, Alsatia." Returning from Bincombe and down again through Sutton Poyntz to Preston, we come to Osmington, with views down along on the right to Ringstead Bay ; but, avoiding for the present the coast, strike inland, to Poxwell, the " Oxwell Hall " of The Trumpet Major. It is really three miles from " Overcombe," and therefore not the close neigh- bour to the Lovedays it is made to be, for the purposes of the novel. The church stands beside of the road, the old manor-house, now a farm- stead, the home of " Uncle Benjy," miserly Squire Derriman, close by. In old days, back in 1634, when it was built, this curiously walled-in residence with its outer porter's lodge, the physical and visible sign of an ever-present distrust of strangers, was a seat of the Henning family. That lodge still stands, obsolete as an avant-garde and gazebo for the timely spying out of unwelcome visitors, but very admirable for a summer-house, if the farmer had leisure for such things. But as he has not, but must continually " plough and sow, and reap and POXWELL 251 mow," or see that others do so, the lodge is in every way a derelict. The farmer could perhaps add some testimony of his own respecting all those *' romantic excellencies and practical drawbacks," mentioned in the story, and existing in fact ; but, farmers having a bent towards practicality, although they POXWFXL MANOR. " The Porter's Lodge still stands, but obsolete, as a gazebo for the timely spying out of unwelcome visitors. discuss, rather than practise it, it is to be supposed that he would place a stress upon the drawbacks, to the neglect of the romance.; Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and a half, to the cross-roads at 252 THE HARDY COUNTRY *' Warm'ell Cross," leading on the left to Dorchester, on the right to Wareham, and straight ahead across the remotenesses of " Egdon Heath," to Moreton station. Here we turn to the right, and so miss the village of Warmwell, whence the cross roads take their name. It is not by any means, to the ordinary traveller, a remarkable crossing of the roads, but it has associations for the pilgrim stored with the literary lore of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the story of 7 he Distracted Treacher ^ that Mr. Stockdale, the Wesleyan minister of Nether Mynton, by the aid of their voices, crying " Hoi — hoi — hoi ! Help, help !" discovered Will Latimer and the excise- man tied to the trees by the smuggler friends of his Lizzie. Turning here to the right, Owermoigne itself — the " Nether Mynton " of that tale of smuggled spirits and religious scruples — is reached in another mile ; the church and its tiny village of thatched rusticity standing shyly, as such a smuggler's haunt should do, off the broad high road and down a little stumbly and rutty lane. The body of the church has been rebuilt since Lizzie Newberry and her friends stored *' the stuff" in the tower and the churchyard, but that churchyard remains the same, as also does the tower from whose battlements the *' free traders " spied upon the excisemen, searching for those hidden tubs. From this road there is a better distant view of the great equestrian effigy of George IIL, cut in the chalky southern slopes of the downs, than from any other point. He looks impressive, in the ghostly sort, seen across the bare slopes, where perhaps an occasional farmstead or barton, or a row of wheat-ricks, accentuates the solitude and at EFFIGY OF GEORGE III. '^S?> the same time gives scale to the chalky effigies of His Majesty and that very elegant horse of his, showing how very large this horse and rider really are. The gallant Trumpet Major told about the making of this memorial, as he and Anne Garland walked among the flowering peas, and described what this " huge picture of the king on horseback in the earth of the hill " was to be like : " The King's head is to be as big as our mill-pond, and owermoigne: the smugglers' haunt in "the distracted preacher." his body as big as this garden ; he and the horse will cover more than an acre." And here he is to this day, very spirited and martial, with his cocked hat and marshal's baton. It is, however, a weariful business to arrive in the neighbourhood of him, for those chalk downs are just as inhospitable in the sun as they are in the storms of winter, the only difference lying between being fried on their shelterless sides when the thermometer registers ninety degrees, or frozen when the mercury sinks towards zero. ^54 THE HARDY COUNTRY Some two miles of highway along the verge of Egdon Heath bring us to a right-hand turning, leading past Winfrith Newburgh by a somewhat more shaded route up over the crest of these chalky ranges, and then with several turnings, steeply down, and at length, " by and large " — as sailors say — to the village of West Lulworth, which lies at the LULWORTH COVE. '^ An almost perfect circle, eaten out oj the limestone by the sea." inland end of a coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove. To Lulworth — or as he terms it, Lullstead — Cove, Mr, Hardy returns again and again. It is the '* small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs " where Troy bathed and was supposed to have been drowned ; it is one of the spots where T/ie Distracted Preacher s parishioners landed their smuggled spirit-tubs, and LULWORTH COVE ^55 upon its milk-white shores of limestone pebbles the lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and his com- panion were found. It was the first meeting-place of Cytherea Graye and Edward Springrove ; and was, again, that " three-quarter round Cove " where, " screened from every mortal eye^" save his own, Solomon Selby observed Bonaparte questing along the darkling shore for a suitable place where his LULWORTH COVE. " The Coastgard Station, perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of cliffs." flotilla might land in his projected invasion of England. Lulworth Cove is an almost perfect circle, eaten out of the limestone in the long ago by the sea, in an unusually geometrical manner. Bindon Hill frowns down upon it, and in summer the circle of light-blue water laughs saucily back, in little sparkling ripples, just as though there were no storms in nature and no cruel rock-bound coast 256 THE HARDY COUNTRY outside. The Cove is, if you be classically minded, a Bath of the Naiads ; and, if less imaginative, is at any rate a delightful spot that even in these tidied-up and ordered days, when every little seaside cove has its hair brushed and face scrubbed, and is made always to look its Sunday best, persists in being littered with a longshore fishing and boating medley of anchors and lobster-pots, ropes, chains and windlasses, infinitely more pleasing to right-thinking persons — by whom I indicate those who think with myself — than the neatest of promenades and seats. True, they have rebuilt or enlarged the Cove Hotel and red-brick manifestations of a growing favour with visitors are springing up beside the old thatched cottages ; but Lulworth — Cove or village — is not spoiled yet. The Coastguard Station, perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of cliff, with the wild chasm of Stair Hole to one side of it and the sheer drop into the Cove on the other, is the most striking feature, looking down from landward, of this curious place, which has not its fellow any- where else, and is the sunniest, the ruggedest, and certainly the most treeless place along the Dorset coast. To those who have persevered along the roads into Lulworth, the prospect of again climbing those hills is perhaps a little grim, and they should so contrive to time their arrival and departure that they comfortably fit in with the return to Weymouth of the excursion steamer plying in the tourist season between the two places. I.YTCIIEIT UKATH. " The bla,k hilh hulgiu'^ a^iuns.t the sky" THE EQUESTRIAN EFFIGY OF GEORGE III. " It looks impressive in the ghostly sort." feWVMa;..,,^ ENTRANCE TO CHARBOROUGH PARK. "The 0)1 c feature that breaks the long perspective of the ititdei'iali>'g road." CHAPTER XXIV BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE Bournemouth, the " Sandbourne " o^ Tess of the D'Urbervilles and of minor incidents and passing allusions in others of Mr. Hardy's novels, is one of the principal gates of entrance to his Wessex. Just within the western borders of Hampshire, or what he would call " Upper Wessex," the heart of his literary country is within the easiest reach of its pleasant districts of villa residences, by road or rail, or indeed by sea ; for Swanage, the " Swanwich " of a Hardy gazetteer, and Lulworth Cove, his " Lullstead," that azure pool within " the two projecting spurs of rock which form the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean," are the destinations in summer of many steamboat voyages. " Sandbourne has become a large place, they say." Thus Angel Clare, seeking his wife somewhere within its bounds. Large indeed, and growing yet. Census officials and other statisticians toil after its increase in vain. I find a guide-book of 1887 speaking of its population as " nearly 18,000." I find another, of 1 896, putting it at " about 40,000," and then referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen to forty-seven 257 17 258 THE HARDY COUNTRY thousand souls, and a few over. By now it doubtless numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubri- cated and underscored its description in the last pages of Tess : " This fashionable watering-place with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was to Angel Clare like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Eg-don waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway ; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd ; and had drawn hither Tess." " By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding ways of this new world in an old one, and could discern between the trees and against the stars the lotty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of which the place was composed. It was a city of detached mansions ; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel ; and as seen now by night it seemed even more imposing than it was. " The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive ; it murmured, and he thought it was the pines, the pines murmured in precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea." This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until well on into the nineteenth *' BOURNE" 259 century a lonely waste, whose only frequenters were smugglers, fishermen, rabbits, and seagulls. In the midst of its pine-woods, sands, and heather a little stream, the Bourne, which now gives this great concourse of villa paradises, palatial hotels, and fashionable shops its name, flowed into the sea, just where, in these days, tricked out with cascades, and fountains, and made to wander circuitously at the will of landscape-gardeners amid the neatest of lawns and the gayest of flower-beds, it at last trickles exhaustedly into the sea, under the pier. Its natural course from the neighbourhood of Kinson, down Bourne Bottom, to that smallest of "mouths," is some six miles, but in these days it is made to work hard in the last stretch, through the pubhc gardens, and where it once covered one mile, is now looped here and turned back there upon itself, and exploited generally, until it has become as sophisti- cated a stream as anywhere to be found. The Bourne is, indeed, like the humble parent of some overwhelming social success, made to alter its ways and put aside its rustic manners, to do credit to its offspring. The country folk who live in the background of this oft-styled "City of Pines," still call it merely " Bourne," as it was when, many years ago. Dr. Granville made the fortunes of the hamlet, frequented by a few invaUds and others rejoicing in the spicy odours of the pine-woods, that had grown in a scattered and chance fashion upon the heath. " No situation," said that authority upon spas and watering- places, " possesses so many capabilities of being made the very first sea watering-place in England ; and not only a watering-place, but what is still more 26o THE HARDY COUNTRY important, a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm and sheltered locality at this season of the year." Then follow com- parisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to other seaside resorts. Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty pronouncement, and advan- tage being taken of it. Consumptives came and found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly upon a lonely coast- line ; arising in that residential all-round-the- calendar character it has kept to this day, in spite of those holiday-folk, the excursionists and trippers whom its " residential" stratum discourages as much as possible. But when even so thoroughly ex- clusive a residential health-resort has been so success- ful, and has grown so greatly in that character as Bournemouth has grown, there comes inevitably a time when the workers and tradesfolk, ministrants to the wants of those residents, themselves become an important section of the community. It is a time when suburbs and quarters, invidiously dis- tinguished from one another in the social scale, have established themselves ; when, in short, from being just the resort of a class, a place becomes a microcosm of life, in which all classes and degrees are represented. The seal was set upon the arrival of that time for Bournemouth with its admission to the dignity of a municipal borough, fully equipped with Mayor and Town Council, in the summer of 1890, and again, later, with the opening of electric tramways. Railway-companies urge the attractions of Bournemouth upon holiday-makers, with great success, and nowadays one only perceives the BOURNEMOUTH'S ASSOCIATIONS 261 place in anything like its former characteristic air at such time when the summer has gone and the holiday-maker has returned to his own fireside. Bournemouth has already gathered together some odds and ends of sentimental associations. Mary Wollstonecraft, widow of Shelley, died here in 1853, and lies in the churchyard of St. Peter's, beside Godwin and his wife, whose bodies were brought from the London churchyard of St. Pancras. Keble died here in 1866, and the present St. Peter's is his memorial. Robert Louis Stevenson, Bournemouth's most distinguished con- sumptive, resided at " Skerryvore," in Alum Chine Road, before he took flight to the South Seas. But — singular and ungrateful omission — one looks in vain for a statute to Dr. Granville, who, by his powerful advocacy, made Bournemouth, just as Dr. Russel made Brighton a century earlier. In this it is not difficult to find another instance of *' benefits forgot." The juxtaposition of a place so new as Bourne- mouth with one so ancient as Poole is a piquant circumstance. When Bournemouth rose, not like Britannia, from the azure main, but from beside it, there was a considerable interval of open country between the hoary seaport and the mint- new pleasure -town. That interval has now shrunk to vanishing-point ; for, what with Bournemouth's expansion, growing Parkstone's position midway, and Poole's own attempt to sprout in an eastwardly direction, to meet those manifestations, the green country has been abolished beneath an irruption of bricks and mortar. The piquancy of Poole's ancient repose being 262 THE HARDY COUNTRY neighboured by Bournemouth's wide-awake life is italicised when that port — the " Havenpool " of To Please his Wife — is entered. It would not be correct to say that the days of Poole as a port are over, but with the growth in size of modern ships, the shallowness of Poole Harbour in whose recesses it is tucked rather obscurely away, prevents any but vessels of slight draught coming up to its quays. For that reason, large ocean-going steamers are strangers to Poole, more familiar with wooden barques and brigantines and their maze of masts and spars, than with the capacious steamships that, although of much greater speed and tonnage, carry very slight and insignificant sticks ; and were it not for the china-clay ship- ments and for that coasting trade which seems almost indestructible, Poole would assuredly die. But Poole, besides being ancient, has been a place to reckon with. Already, in 1220, when by a proclamation of Henry III. the ships of many ports were sealed up, Poole appeared among the number. In 1347 its contribution towards the siege of Calais was four ships and ninety-four men, and it was the base from which the English army in France was provisioned. Then in 1349 came that four- teenth century scourge, the Black Death, and Poole, among other towns, was almost depopulated, and lost the Parliamentary representation it had long enjoyed. But it made a good recovery, and in the time of Henry VI. regained its Parliamentary representation, Leland, writing of the place describes it, two hundred years later, as " a poore fisshar village, much encreasid with fair building and use of marchaundise of old tyme." Poole, after that A SINK OF INIQUITY 263 description was penned, continued to recover itself, and fully regained its lost prosperity. Fifty years later it is found carrying on a thriving trade with Spain, and how truly it was said that its merchants were men of wealth and consideration may be judged from their large, and architectually and decoratively fine, mansions still remaining, although nowadays put to all kinds of mean uses and often occupied as tenements. Poole, however, long enjoyed a very bad reputa- tion, and the wealth of which these were some of the evidences, was not often come by in very reputable ways. When it is said that Poole " en- joyed " a bad reputation, it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it really did enjoy what should have been a source of some searchings of heart. It was a veritable nest of pirates and smugglers, and the home of strange and original sinfulnesses ; so that at last an injurious rhyme that still survives was circulated about it : " If Poole were a fish-pool, and the men of Poole fish, There'd be a pool for the devil, and fish for his dish." So early as the close of the fourteenth century, the buccaneers of Poole were infamous, and at their head was the notorious Harry Page, known to the French and the Spaniards as Arripay, the nearest they could frame to pronounce his name. Arripay was a very full-blooded, enterprising, and unscrupulous fellow ; if without irreverence we may call him a "fellow," who was the admiral of his rascally profession. There can be little doubt but that tradition has added not a little to the tales of his exploits, and it is hardly credible that he and his fellow-pirates should, on one 264 THE HARDY COUNTRY occasion, have brought home a hundred and twenty prizes from the coast of Brittany. His forays were made upon the shipping of the foreigner, and with such system that no ship, it was said, could success- fully run the gauntlet of his lawless flotilla. His success and power were so great that they necessitated the sending of an expedition to sweep the seas of him. This was an allied French and Spanish force, commissioned in 1406, and sailing under the com- mand of Perdo Nino, Count of Buelna. Adopting the tactics of raiders, they burnt and ravaged the coasts of Cornwall and Devon, and, coming to Dorset, swept into Arripay's hornets' nest of Poole Harbour, and landing at Poole itself, defeated the townsmen in a pitched battle. The brother of the redoubtable Arripay was among the slain. A worthy successor of this bold spirit in the pike and cutlass way — although he was no pirate, but just an honest stalwart sailor — was that bonny fighter, Peter Jolliffe, of the hoy Sea Adventurer. Off Swanage in 1694, he fell in with a French privateer having a poor little captured Weymouth fishing-smack in tow, and attacked the Frenchman repeatedly, and at last with such success, that he not only released the smack, but drove the privateer ashore near Lulworth, its crew being made prisoners of war. For so signal an instance of bravery Jolliffe received a gold chain and medal from the hands of the king himself. Jolliffe's example fired enthusiasm, and the follow- ing year, William Thompson, skipper of a fishing- smack, aided only by his scanty crew of one man and a boy, attacked a Cherbourg privateer that had attempted to capture him, and actually succeeded in capturing it and its complement of sixteen hands. MODERN POOLE 265 instead. He brought his prize into Poole, and he too, fully deserved that gold chain and medal awarded him. In St, James's church itself — disclosing an interior not unlike that of a stern cabin of an old man-o'- war, writ large — is a monument to the intrepid Jolliffe. From a reminiscence of it, no doubt, Mr. Hardy chose to name Captain Shadrach Jolliffe, that shipmaster engaged in the Newfoundland trade who is the ill-fated hero of To Please his Wife. For the rest, Poole figures so largely in the Civil War, as a town ardently in favour of the Parliament, that it has a long and stirring story of its own, in the varying fortunes of Roundheads and Stuarts. It is too lengthy a story to be told with advantage here. The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite dispel any idea that Poole is not prospering ; but, on the other hand, the many puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so rich in what have been noble residences, that they tell in unmistakable tones of a greater period than this of to-day. These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the fellow to St. James's, with its dolphin vane, to Poole Quay, where the most prominent feature is an ancient Gothic building, looking very like some desecrated place of worship, or a monastic tithe-barn. It is, as a matter of fact, neither, but the " Town Cellar," a relic of a past age when Poole was part of the manor of Canford. The lords of Canford, away back to that ubiquitous John o' Gaunt, "time-honoured Lancaster," who seems to have owned quite half of the most desirable 266 THE HARDY COUNTRY properties in the England of his time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when silver marks and golden angels were scarce ; and in the "Town Cellar" were stored those bales of wool, those spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods, which were made in this manner to render unto the Cassars of Canford, in times when such things were. It is a picturesque old building, its walls oddly com- posed of flint intermingled with large squared pieces of stone that, by the look of them, would seem to have been plundered from some older structure. Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether unpicturesquely provided with a loggia supported by columns, and still retaining the sundial erected when clocks were scarce. The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727 presided over the fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by the quaint tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and mayoral chain and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as though longing to be gone to those ethereal regions where double chins and " too, too solid flesh " are not. Poole Quay — its old buildings, waterside pictur- esqueness, and the shipping lying off the walls — is an interesting place for the artist, who has it very much to himself; for the holiday-maker does not often discover it. But waterside characters are not lacking : sailors, who have got berths and are only waiting for the tide to serve ; other sailors, who are in want of berths ; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea ; and nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered to them, and want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon, sunshine, a pipe of 5«; ii-° «.«^ 54 ^ 268 THE HARDY COUNTRY tobacco, and the price of half a pint : these form the natural history of Poole Quay, which though it may have been — and was — one of the gateways into the great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his merry men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those stop-blocks at the end of a railway siding : what a railway man would call a " dead end." For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have turned down into it, on those three and a half miles from Bournemouth, you are either compelled to return the way you came, or else cross a creek by the toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where there is nothing but a church built in 1826 — and precisely of the nature one might expect from that date — and, a little way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths and whispering pines, which, even at night, '* tell the tale of their species," as phrenologists say, " without help from outline or colour," in " those melancholy moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness surpassing even that of the sea." It is the district of The Hand of Ethelherta^ and if we pursue it, we shall, as Sol says, in that novel, " come to no place for two or three miles, and then only to Flychett," which, in everyday life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that grand name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as Sol said, " a trumpery small bit of a village," where possibly that wheel- wright mentioned in the story still " keeps a beer- house and owns two horses," That house is the inn oddly named the " Peter's Finger," with a picture-sign standing on a post by the wayside, and "PETER'S FINGER" 269 showing St. Peter holding up a hand with two extended fingers in benedictory fashion, as though blessing the wayfarer. The origin of this sign is said to be the custom, once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on Lammas Day, the I St of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula — that St. Peter-in-thc-Fetters to whom the church on Tower Green, in the Tower of London, is so appropriately dedicated. On that day suit and service had to be performed by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in course of time, the corrupted title of " Peter's Finger " property. Around the village so slightingly characterised in The Hand of Ethelberta there is little save " the everlasting heath," mentioned in that story, " the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin." It is true the road leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and no further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in these pages. CHAPTER XXV WIMBORNE MINSTER WiMBORNE Minster or " Warborne " in Two on a Towet — is, or was, for the Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, the Vindo- gladia of the Antonine Itinerary. If you speak of it in the curt irreverent way of railways and their time-tables, or in the equally curt, but only familiar, manner of its inhabitants, it is merely " Wimborne." In their mouths, elision of the " Minster " merely connotes affection and use, as one drops the titles or the " Mister " of a friend, in speaking of him ; but in the case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of the ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and type. This common practice is all the more historically an outrage, for had there been no Minster, there would have been no town of Wimborne. It derives from an early religious settlement, founded in a.d. 700 near the site of the forgotten Roman station, by Cuthburga, one of those unsatisfactory princess spouses of the pietistic period of Saxon dominion, who, married to the King of Northumbria, refused him conjugal rights and finally established herself here, living a life of " continual watchings and fastings," and finally dying of them. We are not 270 Cl^flA^PfH^ STUKMINSTER MARSHALL. "//s village green, bordered icitli scatlcicd collages, lias a maypole. ...-^^^/iiiiiimm ,. _^ " :-^ ANTHONY ETKICKE'S TOMB, WIMBOKNE MINSTER. WIMBORNE MINSTER 271 concerned to follow the mazes of the early history of town and church. It suffered the usual plunder- ings and burnings, the nuns were occasionally carried off, sometimes against their will, at other times with their consent, and at last, somewhere about a.d, 902, monks replaced them. The whole foundation was re-established by Edward the Confessor, and re- mained as a Collegiate church until 1547, when it was disestablished, its revenues seized, and the building wholly converted to the purposes of a parish church. Wimborne Minster might be made the subject of a lengthy architectural disquisition. Its two towers, western and central, are themselves pointers to its history ; for they show, not in the different periods at which they were built, but in the richness of the one and the comparative plainness of the other, the combined uses of the building in days of old. The central tower, of transitional Norman design, and remarkably like the towers of Exeter cathedral, was originally surmounted by a stone spire, which fell in 1600. Its elaboration is explained by its having been a part of the monastic church, while the western tower erected about 1460, belonged to the parochial building. The church, endowed with two — and two dissimilar — towers, is a splendid feature in the streets of the old town. It and the town gain dignity and interest in an amazing degree, and here in Wimborne the pinnacled battlemented outlines " make " both town and Minster, in the pictorial sense. They bulk darkly and largely across the yellow sandiness of the broad market-place, and sort themselves into endless and changeful combinations down the 272 THE HARDY COUNTRY narrower streets. Apart, too, from these important considerations, the Minster is exceptionally rich in curious features, outside its architectural details. Our ancestors possessed a quaint mixture of serious devotion and light-hearted childishness, and we are the richer for it. Thus, high up on the external wall of the western tower, the observant will notice the odd little effigy, carved, painted and gilt, re- sembling a grenadier of a century ago, or a French gendarme of a past regime : it is difficult to assign it with certainty, and assuredly it does not look so old as 1600, the date when it is stated to have been placed here. His business is that of a quarter- jack, and he strikes the quarters upon a bell on either side of him. The clock within, an astrono- mical contrivance made in 1320 by that same ingenious Glastonbury monk, Peter Lightfoot, who was the author of the famous clock of Wells Cathedral, represents the courses of the sun, moon, and stars. The Minster, in short, is a museum of antiquities, found particularly interesting by the half-day ex- cursionists from Bournemouth who are its chief visitors and carry away a fine confused recollection of their scamper round it. Here, in a room above the vestry, is the Chained Library, a collection of over two hundred and forty volumes, mostly chained to iron rods. Some of the books are very early, but the collection was formed in 1686. Perhaps, for the sake of its story, the copy of Sir Walter Raleigh's " History of the World " is even more interesting than " The Whole Duty of Man " and the " Breeches Bible," for it still displays the care- fully mended hundred leaves burnt through when THE ECCENTRIC ETRICKE 273 the boy, afterwards poet, Prior fell asleep over his reading of it and upset the candle, with this result. Each damaged page was neatly mended by him and the missing letters so carefully restored that it is difficult, until attention is drawn to the repair, to detect anything exceptional. Prior was born at Wimborne in 1664, as a brass tablet in the western tower to his "perennial and fragrant " memory tells us. But of paramount interest to sightseers, far transcending the iron- bound deed-chests, some hollowed from a single trunk, and the tombs of the noble and knightly, is the last resting-place of Anthony Etricke, in the south wall of the choir aisle. Anthony Etricke was a personage of some local distinction in his day, for besides being a man of wealth, he was first Recorder of Poole. He has also won a little niche in the history of England by no effort of his own : a distinction thrust upon him by circumstance, and one which might have fallen upon any other local magistrate. Sentimentally speaking, it is also a wholly in- vidious and undesirable fame or notoriety, and was so regarded by the good folk of the town. Etricke, residing at Holt, near the spot where the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, was the magistrate before whom the wretched fugitive was brought. Another might possibly, greatly daring, have secured the escape of that romantic figure, and 18 THE WIMBORNE CLOCK-JACK. 274 THE HARDY COUNTRY by so doing at the same time have altered the course of English history and earned the admiration of those who admire chivalric deeds. But Etricke was not of this stamp, and was, moreover, of that old faith which the bigoted James was striving to re- introduce : while Monmouth was the Protestant champion. Alas ! poor champion. Etricke at once performed his bounden duty as a magistrate, and also satisfied his own private feelings ; and Mon- mouth ended miserably. Etricke never regained popularity in his district, and lived for eighteen years longer, a shunned and soured man. The story tells how he took what may surely be regarded as the odd and altogether in- sufficient revenge of declaring that he would be buried neither in the church of Wimborne nor out of it, and accordingly in his lifetime had a niche prepared here, in the wall, where the polished black slate sarcophagus, still seen above ground, was placed. He was eccentric beyond this, for he had conceived the date of his death and caused it to be boldly carved on the side, between two of the seven shields of arms that in braggart fashion are made to redound to the glory of the Etricke family. That year he had imagined would be 1691, but he actually survived until 1703, and the date was accordingly altered (as seen to this day) when at last, to the satisfaction of Wimborne, he did demise. For the keeping of his tomb in good repair he left twenty shillings annually, a sum still administered by the Charity Commissioners ; and it certainly cannot be said that he does not receive value for his money, because his eccentric lair is maintained, heraldic cognisances and all, in the most perfect condition. THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 275 Any ill-will this solemn personage may have felt towards Wimborne is altogether robbed of satisfac- tion nowadays, and his gloomy ghost may, for all we know, be enraged at the thought of the attraction his eccentricity has for visitors and the trade in photographs it has provoked, much to the material well-being of the town. The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne — I should have said " Warborne " — to see that Grammar School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, " they draw up young gam'sters' brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way," is like to be disappointed, for the place where " they hit so much larning into en that 'a could talk like the day of Pentecost " is no longer an ancient building. 'Tis true, the founda- tion is what the country folk might call an " old arnshunt " thing enough, being the work indeed of that very great founder of schools and colleges, the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII. It was refounded by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this good deed in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and willed that it should be styled " The Grammar School of the Foundation of Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset." That was pretty bad, but worse came with the whirling years. James I., like the shabby fellow he was, raised a question respecting the validity of its charter, and was only bought off with ;^6oo ; and Charles I., unlike the noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be, bled the institution to the tune of another ^1,000, by a similar dodge. The wonder is that it has survived 276 THE HARDY COUNTRY at all, and not only survived, but flourished and was able, so long ago as 1851, to build itself that new and substantial home which is so scholastically useful, but at the same time disappointing to the literary pilgrim who, at the place where Swithin St. Cleeve was educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of mediaeval age. CHAPTER XXVI WIMBORNE MINISTER TO SHAFTESBURY WiMBORNE shall here be the starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route, that in its south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the one north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth. It follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its conclusion brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury is built. There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the easeful and the toilsome. You may elect to go directly up-along, to the height frowned down upon by the greater height of Badbury Rings, or may go more circuitously but by more level ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall, On the first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies Kingston Lacy, the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph Bankes in 1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic relics. Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those keys of Corfe Castle, held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes in the two sieges she withstood. A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the shoulders of what has been identified as Mons Badonicus — Badbury Rings — the scene of the overwhelming victory gained in a.d. 520, over 277 278 THE HARDY COUNTRY Cerdic and his Saxons by King Arthur and his Britons. In later years, when at last Saxon dominion had spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons them- selves encamped where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes occupied this inhospitable height. It is now tufted with a clump of fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a lowering sky, looks a fitting scene for any national portent of evil. They are less Impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. There the farmer reaps his heavy crops of hay and cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps again, and history is only a matter of comparison between this year of a poor harvest, when prices are high and marketable produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the horn of Ceres was full and prices low. No matter what the yield, there is ever a something to dash the farmer's cup from his expectant lips. At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road branches off from our route, going to Bere Regis and Dorchester. This is the road made at the suggestion of Mr. Erle-Drax of Char- borough Park, whose property, it may be supposed, gained in some way from it. Charborough Park is one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower of Two on a 'Tower were drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of two miles from our route. It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main entrance-lodge of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a long-continued brick boundary-wall that must have cost a small fortune, and decorated at intervals with arches surmounted by efiigies of CHARBOROUGH PARK 279 stags and lions. Time has dealt very severely with some of the squire's stags, shorn here and there of a limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to the gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of it, even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its own, in the revelation that these imposing " stone " decora- tions are really of plaster, and hollow. The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature that breaks the long, straight perspective of this undeviating road, seems to have been erected by the squire as a species of permanent self-advertis- ing hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed : " This road from Wimborne to Dorchester was projected and completed through the instrumentality of J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842." Caesar himself could have done no more than was performed by this magnate of the many names, and could not with greater magnificence have suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary influence procured, the public purse paid for. There is this essential difference between Char- borough Park and " Welland House." Charborough is very closely guarded from intrusion, and none who cannot show a real reason for entering is allowed through the jealously closed and locked gates of the lodges. The residence of Lady Constantine was, however, very readily accessible, and, " as is occasionally the case with old-fashioned manors, possessed none of the exclusiveness found in some aristocratic settle- ments. The parishioners looked upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare, particularly for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passed 2 8o THE HARDY COUNTRY the squire's mansion, with due considerations as to the scenic effect of the same from the manor windows." So much to show the composite nature of the scene drawn in Two on a Tower. The tower — the " Rings Hill Speer " ot the story — stands in the park, at a considerable distance from the house on the other side of a gentle dip, but well within sight of the drawing-room windows. In between, across the turf and disappearing into the woodlands to right and left, roam the deer that so plentifully inhabit this beautiful domain. The tower is approached by roomy stone staircases, now over- grown with grass, moss, and fungi, and so far from it or its approaches being in " the Tuscan order of architecture," they are designed in a most distinctive and aggressive Strawberry Hill Gothic manner. Built originally by Major Drax in 1796, and struck by lightning, it was rebuilt in 1839. Returning now from this interlude and re- gaining Bailey Corner, we come to Sturminster Marshall, a place that now, for all the dignity of its name, is just a rustic village, with only that name and an ancient church that was the " Stour Minster " of the Earls of Pembroke, the Earls Marshal of England, to affirm its vanished importance. Its village green, bordered with scattered cottages, has a maypole, painted, like a barber's pole, with vivid bands of red, white, and blue. An expedition from this point, across the Stour to Shapwick, although a roundabout pilgrimage, is not likely to be an unrewarded exertion, for that is a village which, although unknown to the greater world, has a local fame that, so long as THE '^SHAPWICK MONSTER" 281 rustic satire lives, will assuredly not be allowed to die. Shapwick is not remote from the sea, but it might be a midland village (and exceptionally ignorant at that) if we are to believe the legend which accounts for the local name of " Shapwick Wheel- offs," by which its villagers are known. According to this injurious tale, a shep- herd, watching his sheep on Shapwick Down at some period unspecified — let us call it, as the children do, " once upon a time," or " ever so long ago " — found a live crab, or lobster, that had fallen out of an itinerant fish- monger's cart. He was so alarmed at the sight of the strange thing that he hurried into the village with the news of it, and brought all the people out to see. With them was the oldest inhabitant, a " tar'ble wold man," incapable of locomotion, brought in a wheelbarrow to pronounce, out of the wisdom his accumulated years gave him, what this unknown THE TOWER, CHARBOROUGH PARK. " Destg>?ed in a most distinctive and ag- gressive Strawberry Hill Gothic tnanner. ' 282 THE HARDY COUNTRY monster might be. When his ancient eyes lighted upon it, or rather, in the Do'set speech : " When a sin 'en, a carled out, tar'ble feared on 'en, * wheel I off, my sonnies, wheel I off.' " So they wheeled him off, accordingly, well pleased to leave that mysterious thing to itself. As may well be supposed, the Shapwick folk are by no means proud of their nickname, and it is therefore a little surprising to find an old and very elaborate weathervane in the village, surmounting the roof of a barn, and giving, in a quaintly silhouetted group, a pictorial representation of the scene. It seems that there were originally three more figures, behind the barrow, but they have disappeared. Perhaps this is evidence ot attempts on the part of Shapwick folk to destroy the record of their shame. A succession of pretty villages — Spettisbury, Charlton Marshall, Blandford St. Mary — enlivens the five miles of road between Sturminster Marshall and Blandford ; and then Blandford itself, already described, is entered. Passing through it, and skirting the grounds of Bryan- stone, the Stour, more beautiful than earlier on the route, is crossed, and the twin villages of Durweston and Stourpaine, one on either bank, are glimpsed. Then comes the large village of Shillingstone, still steadfastly rural, despite its size, and keeping to the ancient ways more markedly than Sturminster Marshall, for it not only shares with that village the peculiarity of owning a may- pole, but a maypole of exceptional height, and one still dressed and decorated with every spring. This tall pole, tapering like the mast of a ship, SHILLINGSTONE MAYPOLE 283 is a hundred and ten feet in height, and most carefully guarded with wire stays against destruction by the stormy winds that in winter sweep down the valley of the Stour. If we were to name the Shillingstone maypole in accordance with the date of its annual garlanding, it would rather be a " Junepole," for it is on the 9th of that month that the pretty old ceremony and its attendant merrymakings are held. This WEATHER-VANE AT SHAPWICK : THE *' SHAPWICK MONSTER." apparently arbitrary selection of a date is explained by the old May Day games and rejoicings having been held on May 29th, in the years after the Restoration of Charles II. in 1660 ; and by the change from Old Style to New, more than a hundred and fifty years later. That change, taking away eleven days, converted what would have been May 29th into June 9th ; and thus by gradual change this survival of the ancient pagan festival 284 THE HARDY COUNTRY of Floralia is held when May Day has itself passed and become a memory. The pole has several times been restored. Its present appearance is due to the restoration of October 1868, but the arrow vane with which it was then surmounted appears to have been blown down, and its improving mottoes — " Tanquam sagitta " (Like as an arrow), and " Sic et nos " (So even we) — lost. Another Latin inscription is Englished thus : " Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and inhabitants of Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with all due observance, have carefully restored it on the ninth day of June 1850: " The fading garland mourns how short life's day, The towering maypole heavenward points the way. Read thou the lesson — seek to gather now Undying wreaths to twine a deathless brow." All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofuUy lacking in the May Day spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting: to the " Memento mori " fashion of the neighbouring churchyard. In this old church of Shillingstone — or " Shilling- Okeford," as from the old manorial lords it was once named — the pilgrim may see by the evidence of an old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London, fleeing terrorstruck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it and died here in 1666. The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will perhaps not require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone has nothing whatever to do with shillings ; but if he doubts, let it at once be said that it was so called long before that coin was known. It was originally " Oakford " and became " Schelin's Oak- THE VALLEY OF THE STOUR 285 ford," or " Schelin's Town," when the manor was in Norman times given to an ancestor of those who for centuries later continued to hold it and in more elaborate fashion styled themselves Eschellings. Down over intervening hills the road, for a little ->/--!Hf>;A^,„^^^, THE MAYPOLE, SHILLINGSTONE. 'A maypole of exceptional height, carefully guarded with wire stays.'' space forsaking its character of a valley route, comes beside the stream again at Piddleford — or, as the Post Office authorities prefer to call it — '' Fiddleford " — on the way to Sturminster Newton, the '^ Stourcastle " of Tess. This is the place mentioned at the opening of the story, to which Tess was driving the load of beehives from Marnhull at night, 286 THE HARDY COUNTRY when the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into the trap, killed the horse, Prince ; thus starting the tragical chain of events that led at last to Winchester gaol. Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps " Sturminster Newton Castle," Leland says : " The townlette is no greate thing. STURMINSTER NEWTON : THE WHITE HART INN. and the building of it is mene," and, although it would not occur to a modern writer to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable about it. There is no " minster," no " castle," and no " new town," and little to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main street seems in its decay to typify the history of the STURMINSTER FIGHT 287 market itself. As the church has been rebuilt, and as the castle on the outskirts is now little more than a memory, the only resort is to turn for some point of interest to that quaintly thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than the tablet, " W. M. P. 1708," on its front would lead many to suppose. It was probably restored at that date, after those troublous times had passed in which the cross, just opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in the fighting in the streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the associated clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a brutal conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry unskilled in the use of the weapons with which they had hastily equipped themselves. But, unprofessional soldiers though they were, the club- men at Sturminster gave an excellent account of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the dragoons, and taking sixteen others prisoners. CHAPTER XXVII WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY {continued) Onwards from Sturminster Newton the road comes into the rich Vale of Blackmore and traverses levels watered by the Lidden, in addition to the Stour. Turning here to the right-hand and avoid- ing the way to Stalbridge, we follow the steps of Tess to her home at " Marlott," a village to be identified with Marnhull. Could we associate any cottage here with the birthplace of Tess, how interesting a landmark that would be ! But it is not to be done. " RoUiver's," the "Pure Drop" inn, may be the "Crown," but you who call there to wet a particularly dry whistle on a scorching day will not find the name of Rolliver over the door, either of this house or of another, with the picture- sign of a dashing hussar outside. As to whether either or both of them keep " a pretty brew," as we are told RoUiver's did, I cannot tell you, for when dry, I drink ginger-beer if it is to be got, and, if it isn't, go thirsty, refusing alike malt-liquors and the abomin- able gaseous compounds made cheaply of harmful materials, sold expensively, and rather thirst-pro- voking than quenching. 288 MARNHULL 289 Marnhull is not precisely the type of village the readers of 'Tess would picture as the home of a heroine whose adventures have so constant a background of dairying. It is, or was, a quarry- village, and the shallow pits that supplied for stone the church and the cottages are still prominent in a field to the left of the road to Shaftesbury. Thus Marnhull is somewhat formal and prim, and instead of the abundant thatch noticeable in the typical MARNHULL. The church totuer is a beautiful and imposing specimen oj Gothic." villages of dairy farms, its houses are roofed with slates and tiles. The church of Marnhull has a singularly fine tower, which, although the details of its Perpendi- cular design are largely intermingled with Renais- sance ornament, is in general outline a beautiful and imposing specimen of Gothic, built in that period — the early eighteenth century — generally thought impossible for Gothic art. It was in 19 290 THE HARDY COUNTRY 171 8 that this fine work arose out of the heap of ruins into which the old tower had suddenly fallen, but it has almost every appearance of being three hundred years older, and it seems likely that, as it now stands, it was a free copy of its predecessor. The body of the church is of much earlier date, and well supplied with mediaeval effigies and finely carved capitals to its pillars. But it is not without amusement that one reads the flamboyant epitaph to the Reverend Mr. Conyers Place, M.A., " the youngefl son of an ancient and reputable family in the County of York, who, after he had been liberally educated at Trinity College, in Cambridge, was invited to the Mafter-fliip of the Grammar School in Dorchester, which he governed many years with great succefs and applaufe till, weary of the fatigue of it, he chofe to refign it. He was endowed with many excellent talents, both natural and ac- quired : a lively wit, a sound judgement, with solid and extenfive learning : he was eminently Studious, yet remarkably facetious : attached to no party, nor addicted to any caufe but that of Truth and Religion, in the defence of whofe Doctrines he wrote many learned and ingenious Treatifes ; while he was efteemed by all worthy of the greatell: Preferments, he lived content with the praife of deferving without enjoying any but the small Rectory of Poxwell, in this County, which he held two years, and in the Pofsefsion of which he died." Shaftesbury, six miles onward from Marnhull, is soon seen, standing as it does majestically upon a commanding hill. It looks perhaps best from the point where the old farmstead of Blynfield *'SHASTON" 291 stands, at the foot of the long and winding ascent, whence you see the hillside common stretching up to the very edge of the town. From distant points such as this, " Shaston," as Mr. Hardy, the milestones, and old chroniclers agree to call it, wears the look of another Jerusalem the Golden, and any who, thus looking upon this town of old romance, should chance to come no nearer, might well carry away an impression of a fairy city whose architecture was equal to both its half-legendary history and its natural surroundings. If such a traveller there be, let him rest assured that nothing in Shaftesbury, saving only the view over limitless miles of Vale, stretching away into the distance, is worth the climbing up to it, and that to make its near and intimate acquaintance is only to dispel that distant dream of an unearthly beauty which afar off seems to belong to it. Shaftesbury's streets are in fact more than ordinarily commonplace, and its houses grossly tasteless. It is as though, despairing of ever bringing Shaftesbury back to a shadow of the magnificence of history and architecture it once enjoyed, the builders of the modern town built houses as plastiferously ugly as they could. " Shaston " is described with a wonderful sympathy and lightness of touch by Mr. Hardy : — " The ancient British Palladour was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone man- sions — all now ruthlessly swept away — throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, 292 THE HARDY COUNTRY which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless land- scape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints and bishops, knights and squires. The bones of King Edward ' the Martyr,' carefully removed thither for holy preservation, brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle Ages the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin ; the martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie." " The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain ; but, strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day. It has a unique position on the summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Casde Green over three counties of verdant pasture — South, Mid, and Nether Wessex — being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible by a rail- way, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles ; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that '^PALLADOUR" 293 side. Such Is, and such was, the now-forgotten Shaston or Palladour." That finely Inaccurate chronicler, or rather romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who never lacked " historical " details while his Imagination remained in good preservation, has some picturesque " tacts " to narrate of Shaftesbury. It was founded, says he, by Hudibras, grandfather of King Lear, a trifle of 950 years before the Christian era. Between that shamelessly absurd origin and the earliest known mention of the place, in a.d. 880, when Alfred the Great founded a nunnery here, there Is thus a gulf — a very yawning gulf, too — of one thousand, eight hundred and thirty years. " Caer Palladour," as it had been in early British times, became " Edwardstow " when, in the year 979, the body of the young king "martyred" at Corte Castle was translated from Its resting-place at Wareham, but although his shrine was the scene of many miracles and greatly resorted to, we do not find that change of name so greatly favoured as was the like change made In East Anglia, when, early in the eleventh century, the town that had been Beodric's Weorth became, with the miracle-mongering of St. Edmund's shrine, that town of St, Edmundsbury which we know as Bury St. Edmunds. No : as the expressive modern slang would phrase It, the name of " Edwardstow " never really *' caught on," and Caer Palladour, which had in the beginning of Saxon rule become " Shaftesbyrig," has so remained. Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully digging 294 THE HARDY COUNTRY on the spot once occupied by it ; and the great abbey estates, the booty at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town. There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury ; St. James's, as you climb upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter's in the town itself. It is St. Peter's which is seen in the illustration of Gold Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from the deep recesses of the Vale. This is the most difficult approach, paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths ; and with the craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk. The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House. There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but this shows it on its most characteristic side. Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels with "Jude the Obscure^ for here it was that the long-suffering and inoffensive Phillot- son — who (why .'') always reminds me of Words- worth — obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to jointly keep. Their house, " Old Grove's Place," is easily recognisable. You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau. It is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windows OLD GROVE'S PLACE 295 through which it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one inside ; and the GOLD HILL, SHAFTESBURY. " The tHcredibly steep ascent .... paved with granite setts, the craggy aides shored up by ancient buttresses o/ prodigious bulk." upper room over the entrance is not too high above the pavement for any one who, hke Sue, leaped from the window, to alight without injury. Those 296 THE HARDY COUNTRY people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic Sue Bridehead : " We don't live in the school, you know," said she, " but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove's Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not to Jive in. I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools, there is only your own life to support." Close by are the schools. Looking upon them the more than usually sentimental pilgrim, with, it may be, some ancient tender passages of his own, stored up in the inviolate strong-box of his memory, to be unlocked and drawn forth at odd times, may think he identifies that window whence Sue, safely out of reach, spoke with Jude, standing down on the footpath, and said, "Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet ! " CHAPTER XXVIII WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH It is by the direct road to Cranborne, and past the Gate Inn at Clapgate, that one reaches Horton, where, at the intersection of the two broad main roads from Wimborne to Cranborne, and from Shaftesbury to Ringwood, stands Horton Inn, a fine, substantial old house, once depending upon a great coaching and posting traffic, and even now that only an occasional cyclist stays the night, dis- pensing good, old-fashioned, solid comforts in its cosy and comfortable rooms. When Horton Inn was built, let us say somewhere about the time of Queen Anne (who, poor soul ! is dead), those who designed it, disregarding any temptations to be picturesque, devoted their energies to good, honest workmanship, with the result that nowadays one sees a building certainly lacking in imagination, with windows equidistant and each the counterpart of its fellow, but disclosing in every quoin and key- stone, and in each well and truly laid course of brickwork, the justness and thoroughness of its design and execution. Within doors it is the same : unobtrusive but excellent workmanship characterises panelling and window-sashes, doors and handrails, 297 298 THE HARDY COUNTRY with the result that in its old age Horton Inn has an air of distinction and dignity strongly marked to those who take an interest in technical details, and attracting the notice of even the ieast observant, who from its superior air generally conceive it to be an old mansion converted to its present use. It is the subject of an allusion in the tale of Barbara of the House of Grebe : the "Lornton Inn" whence Barbara eloped with the handsome Willowes, and where she was to meet her disfigured husband, posting along the road from Southampton, on his return from foreign parts. The village of Horton, down the road, at some little distance from the inn, has an oddly German- looking tower to its church, containing the monu- ment of " Squire Hastings " of Woodlands, who died, aged 99 years, in 1650. On an eerie hillside near by, in what of old was Horton Park, but sold by the Sturts in 1793 ^° the Earl of Shaftesbury, and disparked, stands the many-storied tower of what was once an observatory built by Humphry Sturt. It is now an empty shell, throucrh whose ruined windows the wind sighs mourn- fully at night, and the moonlight gleams ghostlike. It is an ugly enough place in daylight, but should you particularly desire to know what the creepy, uncanny feeling of being haunted is like, why then, walk up on a windy night to " The Folly," as the villagers call it, and stand in it, listening to the wind howling, grumbling or whispering in and out of the long, shaft-like building, and nocturnal birds fluttering and squeaking on the upper ledges. It is not a little gruesome. This is one of the originals whence Mr. Hardy THIi OUSKKVA lUKY, IIOKTON. MONMOUTH ASH 299 drew his idea of the tower in Two on a Tower ^ and is certainly the most impressive of them. Very many years have passed since the old tower was used, and since the park in which it stands was converted into a farm. The Woodlands estate, on the broad acres be- longing to the Earl of Shaftesbury, is a sandy, heathy district of furze and pine-trees, with a con- spicuous ridge in the midst, shaped in a semicircle and crested with those sombre trees. Here is Shag HORTON INN: THE " LORNTON INN" OF "BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE." Heath and the cultivated oasis called " The Island " where on July 8th, 1685, the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth was captured, hiding amid the bracken and undergrowth, beneath an ash-tree. He might possibly have succeeded in stealing away to the coast and so escaping, despite the thoroughness of the search made by the Sussex Militia, spurred to it by the reward of ^5,000, offered for the capture of the fugitive, had it not been for the information given by an old woman who lived in a cottage 300 THE HARDY COUNTRY near at hand. She had seen him, disguised as a shepherd, threading his way cautiously through the heath, and he was accordingly discovered near the spot she had indicated by a militiaman named Parkin. The Duke, half-starved and unkempt from his hunted wanderings since the fatal Sedgemoor fight of three days earher, was found in possession of his MONMOUTH ASH. badge of the George, a pocket-book and several guineas. In his pockets were a number of peas, the remains of a quantity he had plucked, to stave off his hunger. A total of ;^5,500, was divided among Lord Lumley, the officers, militiamen, and others concerned in the capture. Among these was Amy Farant, BLOOD-MONEY 301 whose information had directly led to it, and she received a sum of fifty pounds. Local tradition points out the spot on the hill- side where this woman's cottage formerly stood, overlooking the field called '' Monmouth Close " ; and the horror always felt by the rustics at the taking of what they still call the " blood-money " is seen in the story told of her after-years. The price of blood brought a curse with it. She fell upon evil times, and at last lived and died in a state of rags and dirt, shunned by all. After her death, the cottage itself speedily earned a sinister reputation, and was at length either pulled down, or allowed to decay. The spot is still called locally Louse, or more genteelly Slough, Lane. The " Monmouth Ash " — or " Aish," in the country speech — still survives, with a diiference. Those who, looking upon the present tree and thinking, despite its decrepit and propped-up condition, that it cannot be over two hundred years old — and therefore that this cannot be the precise spot — may, with the reservation already made, be reassured of its absolute genuineness. The original trunk grew decayed in the long ago, and was blown down, but the present tree is a growth from the '* stool," or root, of that under which the unhappy Protestant Champion was dis- covered. CHAPTER XXIX OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW Beyond the rainbow is Fairyland, but no one has ever penetrated to that country, save in dreams, to which nothing is impossible. There is also a Rainbow-land in Dorsetshire, certainly not impossible of achievement, but still a district of which no one knows anything, saving only those who live in it, and those sturdy fellows, the carriers, the Marco Polos and Livingstones of this age and country, who every week or so travel from it to the nearest market-town, and back again. The carriers are men of strange speech and dress. Although sturdy, they move slowly both in body and mind ; and their tilt-carts are as slow as themselves, and as dusty and travel-worn as the caravans of any African expedition. The Rainbow country of Dorset is, in fact, a country innocent of railways. It is comprised within a rough circle made by tracing a course from Bere Regis to Piddletrenthide, Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Holnest, Sherborne, Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Sturminster Newton, and Blandford, and is not only in parts extremely hilly, but includes Bulbarrow, one of the highest hills in Dorsetshire, 927 feet above sea-level, and Nettlecombe Tout ; among a fine diversified array 302 THE WILDS 303 of lesser eminences. There is thus some consider- able difficulty in travelling out of it, and a very widespread disinclination to penetrate into v^hat may, not without considerable warranty, be termed its " wilds." Wise men, who study maps, and from the tracks of BINGHAM S MELCOMBE. watercourses deduce easier, or at any rate, rather less arduous, routes, may find a means of winning to this Rainbow country by turning off" the Piddle- town and Bere Regis road at Burlestone, and thence making along the slight valley of the Chesil Bourne or Divelish stream. The small village of Dewlish on the map points to the amazing colonial energy 304 THE HARDY COUNTRY of the Roman, for here, in a district that even we moderns are accustomed to think remote, was found a fine Roman pavement, many years awo. In another two miles and a half the valley closes in, and the neighbourhood of those big brothers, Bulbarrow and Nettlecombe Tout, is evident from their smaller kindred, on either hand. Here, under the shelter of the everlasting hills, and in a " lew " warm hollow surrounded by benignant trees that lovingly shut it in, is Bingham's Melcombe. A little pebbly brook, the Chesil Bourne, prattles down the combe, sheep-bells sound from the hillsides, cattle low in the meadows, and rooks scold and gibber, or lazily caw, in over- arching elms ; otherwise, all is still, for much more than even the rustic scenes of Mr. Hardy's especially farming story, Bingham's Melcombe is " far from the madding crowd," and there is nothing of it but a farmstead, the tiny church, and the little gem of an ancient manor-house. For all that Bingham's Melcombe is so insignificant, it has sent out at least one distinguished man. Fluellen boasted that there were " good men porn at Monmouth," and here was born that Sir Richard Bingham who earns the praise of Fuller, as being " a brave soldier and fortis et felix in all his under- takings." He lies, as a brave soldier should, but all brave soldiers cannot, in Westminster Abbey. The Binghams of Bingham's Melcombe came from a younger son of the Binghams of Sutton Bingham in Somersetshire, and early allied themselves with prominent families. The ducally crowned lion rampant of the Turbervilles quartered on their ancestral shield owes its place there to the marriage THE BINGHAMS 305 of Robert Bingham, about the reign of Henry III., or Edward I., with the daughter and heiress of Robert Turberville. These long-descended Binghams maintained their hold upon this lovely old home of theirs from the middle of the thirteenth century until recently. Now it has passed into other hands. A member of the family, Canon Bingham, was the original of the " Parson Tringham," the learned antiquary, who, in the opening pages of Tess of the D'UrbervilleSy so indiscreetly informs old John Durbeyfield, the haggler, of his distinguished ancestry. The manor-house of Bingham's Melcombe, within its courtyard, is a perfect example of a sixteenth-century country residence. The court- yard, entered by a gatehouse, discloses stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the highly carved and decorated projecting gable of the hall in front ; displaying with a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole overgrown with trailing roses. A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills and dales, leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the hamlet and starved hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound, water is scarce, and farmers are obliged to depend largely upon the " dew-ponds " made on the arid downs. Here is Dole's Ash farm, the original of " Flint- comb Ash," the " starve-acre place " where Tess toiled among the other weariful hands in the great swede-fields, " a hundred odd acres in one patch," with not a tree in sight : Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate. The farm, as Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated " above stony lanchets 20 3o6 THE HARDY COUNTRY — the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk forma- tion, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes," and is at the other extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of the Frome, the " Vale of Great Dairies." Very different from the forbidding westerly range from Bingham's Melcombe is the country imme- diately to the east. There the village of Milton Abbas lies enfolded between the richly wooded hills, where the little Mill Bourne rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque descent ; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every cottage. Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of regularly spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the autocratic whim of Joseph Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of Dorchester, who (then a commoner) purchased the large and beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the old village, which rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey, rebuilt it, a mile away, in 1786. Milton Abbas is, indeed, the precursor of many recent " model " villages, and typical of the high- handed ways of the eighteenth-century landed gentry, who could not endure the sight of a cottage from the windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the manner of Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away from between the wind and their gentility. Each cottage is built four- square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and windows, all in the Doll's House or Noah's Ark order of architecture, and there is scarce a pin to choose between any of them. Half-way down v%>.>, U5 c < ca a c < "^ z ^ o O •2, MILTON ABBAS 307 the street is the almshouse, and opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be seen that Lord Dorchester's village — transplanting was complete and highly methodical. Now that time has weathered his model village, and the chestnut trees planted between the cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas is a not unpleasing curiosity. But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest surprise, in the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey church, rising in all the MILTON ABBAS, AN EARLY "MODEL" VILLAGE. Stately bulk and beautiful elaboration of a cathedral, beside the great mansion built for Lord Dorchester in 1 77 1 by Sir William Chambers, familiar to Londoners as the architect of Somerset House. That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond the Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall find, comes all un- wittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey, is greatly to be envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise as though its existence had never been 3o8 THE HARDY COUNTRY breathed beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows it lies hid ; and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing less than a discovery. Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly, the abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of hills, strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral, underneath the Mendips. Milton Abbey, the " Middleton Abbey " of The Woodlanders^ was founded so early as a.d. 933, by Athelstan, and in thirty years from that date became a Benedictine monastery. Nothing, how- ever, of that early time has survived, and the great building we now see belongs to the period between 1322 and 1492, when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309. But the noble building rising so beauti- fully from the gravel drives and trim lawns of this park is but a completed portion of an intended design. It consists of choir, tower, and north and south transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet. Had not the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have been added. To Sir John Tregonwell, King's Proctor in the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may reasonably be called this fine piece of "spoil" ; for the price of one thousand pounds at which he bought the monkish estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as adequate purchase money. Coming at last into the hands of Joseph Damer, the domestic ofiices of the monastery, which had until then survived in almost perfect condition, were with one exception utterly destroyed, and the existing mansion built in a MILTON ABBEY 309 bastard " Gothic " style, as understood by Chambers. The sole exception is the grand Abbot's Hall, en- shrined within that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther side of the great quadrangle. Now in use as a drawing-room, there is probably no more stately room of that description in existence. It has the combined interest and beauty of size, loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone and carved wood, with antiquity. ABBOT MILTON S REBUS, MILTON ABBEY. The abbey church stands immediately to the south of the mansion, separated from it only by lawns and a drive, and is used as a chapel by the present owner of the estate, a nephew of the late Baron Hambro, who restored it at great cost under the professional advice of that arch-restorer. Sir Gilbert Scott. The solitude, the size and beauty of the interior, are very impressive. Here is a place of worship like a cathedral, used for the prayers of a private household, and if you can by any means manage to forget the grotesque 3IO THE HARDY COUNTRY disproportion of ancient size and magnificence to modern use, you will feel very reverent indeed. There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful time-server, Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails of his public conduct in those times of quick-change, between the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman Catholic, he managed to enrich himself at the expense of the old religion's misfortunes, and MILTON ABBEY. " The Abbey Church, disclosed against a ivooded background of hills." to die at peace with all men, although in the posses- sion of property belonging to others. There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monu- ment by Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775. It represents her in the costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously over her. A quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be seen on one of the walls, in the shape of the sculptured rebus of one Abbot William Middleton, with the Arabic date, 1 5 14, and the device of a mill on a tun, or barrel. Thus did the strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish fancies and puns in stone. RESTORATION 311 A sign of the times may be noted, in the re- storation and re-dedication of the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on the hilltop to the east of the abbey. When the monastery was dissolved, TURNWORTH HOUSE. " To describe it as slaiiding in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house ; it stood in a hole." the chapel of course fell out of use, and so remained until recently. It had in turn been used as a pigeon-house, a labourer's cottage, a carpenter's shop, and a lumber-room, and was falling into com- plete decay when Mr. Evcrard Hambro in 1903 312 THE HARDY COUNTRY decided to restore it. The varied Saxon, Norman, and Perpendicular architecture was accordingly re- paired, and the building reconsecrated on St. Catherine's night of the same year. Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winter- borne Stickland, two of the eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream that flows into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to Turnworth House, a mansion which might be the original of the " Great Hintock House " of The WoodlanderSy where Mrs. Charmond, fascinator ot the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived. It is situated just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell : '*To describe It as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house ; it stood in a hole. But the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds'-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet ; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . . The front of the house was an ordinary manorial pre- sentation of Elizabethan windows, mulHoned and hooded, worked in rich snufF-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . . Above the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys." From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of Durweston, Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy : a facilis descensus^ as well in spirit as in the matter of gradients, for thus you come out of the untravelled and the unknown into the well- worn tracks and intimate life of every day. INDEX Abbot's Ann, 23 " Abbot's Cernel," Cerne Abbas, 31-38, ir6, 170, 199-203, 206, 302 Abbotsbury, 84, 235, 236 " Aldbrickham," Reading, 2 Aldershot, " Qiiartershot," 2 " Alfredston," Wantage, 2 Andover, 23 "Anglebury," Wareham, 10, 38, 86, III, 1 13-122, 138, 192 Anna, Lady Baxby, 189 Anton, River, 23, 24 Athelhampton, 54 Bankes Family, 37, 106, 108, iii Barbara of the House 0/ Grebe, 43. 298, 299 Barnes, Reverend William, 65 Basingstoke, " Stoke-Barehills,'' 2, 3 Batcombe, 171, 172 Bathsheba's Farm, 57-59 Beaminster, " Emminster,'' 38, 170, 244, 245 Bere Heath, 50, 128, 130 Bere Regis, " Kingsbere-siib- Greenhill," 54, 126, 127, 132- 146, 163, 302 Berkshire, " North Wessex," 2 Bincombe, 211, 248-250 Bindon Abbey, 122 BindoQ Abbey Mill, 123 Bingham's Melcombe, 303-306 Blackmore, or Blackmoor, Vale of, 36, 38, 39. 65, 169, 191. 195, 197, 198, 288, 291, 292 Blandford Fonim, " Shottsford Forum," 39, 42-47, 138, 282, 302 Bloody Assize, 83 Blox worth, 140 Bockhampton, Lower, 157, 160 Bockhampton, Upper, 157-160 Boscastle, "Castle Boterel," 6, 7 Bourne, River, 259 Bournemouth, "Sandborne," 31, 88, 257-262 Bow and Arrow Castle, 229 Bredy, River, 237 Bridport, "Port Bredy," 82, 231, 237, 240-244 Brit, River, 237 Broadwey, 212 Browning, Robert, 37, Bryan's Piddle, 145, 163 Bryanstone, 46 " Budmouth," Weymouth, 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212-221, 225, 226, 232, 246 " Castebrridge," Dorchester, 26, 35. 38, 47, 58, 61-83, 116, 138, 148, 149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215 " Castle Boterel," Boscastle, 6, 7 3ii 314 INDEX " Castle Royal," Windsor, 2 Castleton, 186 Cerne Abbas, "Abbot's Cernel," 31, 38, 116, 170, 199-203, 206, 302 Cerne, River, 205 "Ciialk Newton," Maiden New- ton, 168 Chamberlain's Bridge, 130, 132 Charborough Park, 50, 123, 136 192, 278, 279 Charminster, 79, 168, 205 Chesil Beach, 224, 231, 240 Chesil Bourn, 304 " Cliristminster," Oxford, 3, 5, 6 Clavijthan, 207, 246 " Cliff without a Name," 8 Colyton House, 78 " Conjuring Minterne," 172 Coombe Bissett, 35, 40 Corfe Castle, "Corvsgate Castle," 87. 92. 93. 97-113. 121. 133. 138, 277 Corfe Mullen, 277, 278 Cornwall, " Nether Wessex," 6, 292 " Corvsgate Castle," 87, 92, 93, 97-113, 121, 133, 138, 277 Cranborne Chase, 35 Cross-in-Hand, 170 Desperate Remedies^ 60 Devonshire, " Lower Wessex,'' 2,6 Distracted Preacher, The, 252, 254 Dogbury, 191, 197 Dole's Ash Farm, " Flintcomb Ash," 170, 305 Dorchester, " Casterbridge,'' 26, 35. 38, 47, 58. 61-83, 116, 138, 148, 149, 153, 168, 199, 206, 207, 215 Dorsetshire, " South Wessex," 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 138, 149, 291, 292 Drax family, 193, 194 Dungeon Hill, 195 D'Urbervilles, the, 37, 124, 126 132, 170 Durnovaria, 62, 80, 207 " Durnover," Fordington, 61-63, 148, 149 East Stoke, 122 Eastbury Park, 40 '' Egdon Heath," 128-130, 132, 161-167, 254, 258 " Emminster," Beaminster, 38, 170, 244, 245 Encombe, " Enkworth Court," 94-96 " Endelstow," 8 " Enkworth Court," 94-96 Erle-Drax, J. S. W. Sawbridge, Esq., M.P., 192, 278, 279 Evershot, " Evershead," 169, 172, "Falls Park," Mells Park, 172-175 Far from the Madding Crowd, 43. 48, 53- 56-59. 150.236, 254 Fawley Magna, " Marygreen," 2, 4, 94 Fellow Townsmen, iy], 241, 243. 244 Fiddler of the Reels, The, 150, 161 First Comiiess of Wessex, The, 31, 172-175,237 " Flintcomb Ash," Dole's Asli Farm, 170, 305 " Flychett," Lytchett Minster, 268 For Co7iscience' Sake, 177 Fordington, "Durnover," 61-63, 148, 149 Fortune's Well, " Street of Wells," 224, 225, 227, 231 Frome, River, 38, 62, 115, 117, 118, 121, 123, 124, 156, 157, 161, 163, 205, 306 ■' Gaymead," Theale, 2 " Giant of Cerne," 203 INDEX 315 Glydepath Lane, 76, 78 Goathorn, 1 14 Godmanstone, 205 " Gray's Bridge," 70 " Great Hintock," Minterne Magna, 39, 168, 191, 198, 302 " Great Hintock House,'' Turn- worth House, 311, 312 Group of Noble Dames, A, 14, 31, 43, 172-176, 189, 205, 237, 297-299 Hampshire, " Upper Wessex," 2, 257 Hamworthy, 268 Hand of Ethelberta, The, 86, 90, 93, 94, 98, 268, 269 Hangman's Cottage, Dorchester, 76, n Hardy, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman, 66, 232, 233 Hardy, Thomas, birthplace of, 158-160 Hardy, Thomas, residence of, 148 "Havenpool," Poole, 88, 107- 109, III, 140, 261-268 Hearts Insurgent, 4 Heedless William's Pond, 160 " High Place Hall," 78 High Stoy, 39, 191, 197 " Higher Crowstairs," 75, 199 Holnest, 123, 191-194, 302 Horner family, 173-175 Horton, 50, 298 Horton Inn, " Lornton Inn," 297- 299 Hurst, 163 Ilchester, Earls of, 172-175 Ilsington Woods, 159 Interlopers at the Knap, 1 68 " Ivell,' Yeovil, 169, 176-178 Jordan Hill, 246 Jude the Obscure, 4, 5, 29, 30, 31. 151. 294, 295 " Kennetbridge, ' Newbury, 2 "King's Hintock Court," Mel- bury Park, 172-176 King's Stag Bridge, 195 " Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill," Bare Regis, 54, 126, 127, 132-146, 163, 302 Kingston, 92, 93, 94, 97 Kingston House, " Knapwater House," 60, 150 Kingston Lacy, 106 " Knapwater House," Kingston House, 60, 150 " Knollsea,'' Swanage, 84-92, 97, III, 257, 264 Lady Mottisfont, 14 Lady Penelope, The, 205 Lainston, 19, 20 Langton Matravers, 92 Launceston, " St. Launce's," 8 Lidden, River, 195 Little Ann, 23 " Little Hintock," Melbury Osmund, 176, ig8 " Little Jack Horner," 174 Lobcombe Corner, 26 Lodmoor Marsh, 246 " Long Ash Lane," 168, 169 Long Burton, 191, 192 " Long Piddle," Piddletrenthide, 57 " Lornton Inn," Horton Inn, 297- 299 Lower Walterstone Farm, 57-59 " Lucetta's house," 78 Lulworth Cove, " Lullstead," 139, 254, 255-257 Lulworth West, 254 Lytchett Minster, " Flychett, 268 Maiden Castle, 208 Maiden Newton, " Chalk New- ton," 168 MarnhuU, " Marlott," 36, 285, 288, 290 Martinstown, or Winterborne St. Martin, 153 3i6 INDEX " Marygreen," Fawley Magna, 2, 4. 94 Maumbury, 71, 72 Max Gate, 63, 148 Mayor of Casterbfidge, The, 23, 25, 26, 63-80, 149 Melaiicholy Hussar of the German Ixgio7i, The, 248-250, Melbury Osmund, Little Hin- tock,' 176, 198 Melbury Park, " King's Hintock Court," 172-176 Melbury Sampford, 172-176 " Melchester," Salisbury, 16, 26- 28, 31, 35- 36, 187 Melcombe Regis, 66, 210, 215- 217, 220, 221 Mells Park, "Falls Park," 172- 175 " Mellstock," Stinsford, 61, 149- 151 Middlemarsh, 194 " Middleton Abbey," Milton Abbas, 38, 306-311 Milborne Port, 302 Milborne St. Andrew, '' Millpond St. Jude's," 48-50 Milton Abbas, " Middleton Ab- bey," 38, 306-311 Minterne Magna, " Great Hin- tock," 39, 168, 191, 198, 302 " Monmouth Ash," 299-301 Monmouth, Duke of, 83, 121, 140, 299-301 Mottisfont, Lady, 14 Nether Cerne, 205 " Nether Mynton," Owermoigne, 252, 253 Newbury, " Kennetbridge," 2 Observatory, The, Horton, 298 Old Sarum, 21, 28, 179 On the Western Circuit, 29 Osmington, 250 "Overcombe," Sutton Poyntz, 246, 247, 250 Owermoigne, "Nether Mynton," 252, 253 Oxford, " Christminster," 3, 5, 6 '' Oxwell Hall," Poxwell Manor, 250, 251 Pair of Blue Eyes, yi, 6, 7, 8 Penelope, The Lady, 205 Pennsylvania Castle, "Sylvania Castle," 229 Pentridge, " Trantridge," 36, 37 Piddle, River, 54, 57, 117, 121, 132, 144 Piddleford, or Fiddleford, 285 Piddletovvn, "Weatherbury,"53- 58, 157 Piddletrenthide, "Long Piddle," 57- 302 Plush, 170 Poole, " Havenpool," 88, 107, 108, 109, III, 140, 261-268 Poole Harbour, 39, 114, 117, 131 " Port Bredy," Bridport, 82, 231, 237, 240-244 Portisham, 232-234 Portland Bill, 224 Portland, Isle of, " Isle of Slingers," 209, 210, 214, 222- 231, 240 Poundbury, 79, 206 Poxwell, 250, 290 Poxwell Manor, " Oxwell Hall," 250, 251 Preston, 246, 250 Pulham, 195 " Pummery," 206 Purbeck, Isle of, 85, 87-89, 97, "5 " Quartershot," Aldershot, 2 Radipole, 213 Reading, " Aldbrickham," 2 Return of the Native, The, 114, 128, 129, 161 Revels Inn, 199 Rye Hill, Bere Regis, 131, 132 Ryme Intrinseca, 176, 177 INDEX 317 St. Jultot's, " Endelstow," 8 " St. Laiince's," Laiinceston, 8 Salisbury, " Melchester," 16, 26- 28, 31, 35, 36, 187 Salisbury Plain, 31 " Sandbourne," Bournemouth, 31, 88, 257-262 Sandsfoot Castle, 222, 223 " Serpent," The, 155 Shaftesbury, " Shaston, 39, 277, 290, 291-296 Shapwick, 280, 281, 282, 283 "Shapwick Wheeloffs," 281 " Shaston," Shaftesbury, 39, 277, 290, 291-296 Sherborne, " Sherton Abbas," 38, 39, 178-191 Sherborne Castle, 184, 186-190 ^ "Sherton Abbas," 38, 39, 178- 191 Shillingstone, 282-285 " Shottsford Forum," Blandford Forum, 39, 42-47, 75, 138, 282, 302 " Slingers, Isle of," Isle of Port- land, 209, 210, 214, 221-231, 240 Some Crusted Characters, 70 Somersetshire, " Outer Wessex," 2, 176 Sparsholt, 20 Stalbridge, 302 " Stickleford," Tincleton, 157, 1 60, 163 Stinsford, " Mellstock," 61, 149- 151 Stoborough, 115 Stockbridge, 16, 21-23, 26 " Stoke-Barehills," Basingstoke, 2, 3 Stonehenge, 31-34 Stour, River, 38, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283, 288 " Stourcastle," Sturminster New- ton, 39, 286-288 Strangvvays family, 173-175 " Street of Wells," 224, 225, 227, 231 Sturminster Marshall, 38, 277, 278, 280 Sturminster Newton, " Stour- castle," 39, 286-288 Sutton Poyntz, " Overcombe," 246, 247, 250 Swanage, " Knollsea," 84-92, 97, III, 257, 264 " Sylvania Castle," Pennsylvania Castle, 229 Tarent Abbey, 134, 145 Tarrant Hiiiton, 40 Templecombe, 38, 39 Ten Hatches, 70 TessoftheDUrbervilles, 12, 17, 3'. 32, 36. 38. 122-126, 143, 147, 161, 168, 170, 199, 244, 257, 258, 285, 288, 289, 305 Theale, " Gaymead," 2 Three Strangers, The" 75, 199 Tincleton, "Stickleford," 157, 160, 163 To Please his Wife, 262, 265 Tragedy of Two Ambitio7is, 177 " Trantridge,'' Pentridge, 36, 37 Trebarrow Sands, "Trebarwith Strand," 7 " Troy Town," 59 Trumpet Major, The, 70, 218, 222, 230, 232, 246-248, 250, 253 Turberville, Dr. D'Albigny, 30, 146 Turberville, George, 48, 146 Turberville, John, 123 Turberville, Thomas, 146 Turberville, family. The, 126, 134, 140-144, 146, 304 Turnworth House, " Great Hin- tock House," 311, 312 Two on a Tower, 49, 53, 115, 270, 275, 278, 280, 298, 299 Under the Greenwood Tree, 59, 149, 150 Upper Bockhampton, 63 Upwey, 211, 212 3i8 INDEX •' Vale of Great Dairies," 38, 156, 161, 306 Vale of Little Dairies, 38, 39 " Vale of White Hart," 196 Village Choirs, 151-155 Vindogladia, 270 Wallop, Little (orMiddle), 26 Wantage, " Alfredston,'' 2 " Warborne," 270 " Wareham, " Anglebury," 10, 38, 86, III, 113-122, 138, 192 " Warm'ell Cross," 252 "Weatherbury,"Piddletown, 53- 58, 157 Weatherbury Castle, 50, 51, 80 Weeke, 18 Well Beloved, the, 224, 226, 229, 230 Welland House, 50, 278, 279 " Wellbridge," Woolbridge, 124, 127 " Wells, the Street of," Fortune's Well, 224, 225, 227, 231 Wessex, i, 9, 14, 21, 148, 253 Wessex, Lower, Devonshire, 2, 6 Wessex, Mid, Wiltshire, 2, 292 Wessex, Nether, Cornwall, 2g2 Wessex, North, Berkshire, 2 Wessex, Outer, Somersetshire, 2, 176 Wessex, South, Dorsetshire, 2, 38, 39, 44, 134, 135, 1 38, 249, 291, 292 Wessex, Upper, Hampshire, 2, 257 West Bay, 237, 238, 239, 241 West Stafford, 157 Wey, River, 212 Weyhill, " Weydon Priors," 23- 25 Weyhill Fair, 24, 25 " Weydon Priors," Weyhill, 23- 25 Weymouth, " Budmouth," 71, 200, 207, 209, 210, 212, 221, 225, 226, 232, 246 Whitcomb, 65 Willapark Point, 8 Wilts, 2 Wimborne Minster, " War- borne," 106, 138, 270-276 Wincanton, 39 ^Winchester, " Wintoncester," 9- 17, 21, 148 Windsor " Castle Royal," 2 Winterborne Came, 65 Winterborne Monkton, 208, 210 Winterborne St. Martin, or Martinstovvn, 153 Winterborne Whitchurch, 47, 48, 146 Winterslow, 16 " Winterslow Hut," 27 "Wintoncester," Winchester, 9- 17, 21, 148 "Wishing Well," Upvvey, 211- 213 Withered Arm, The, 74 Wolveton House, 168, 205, 207 Woodbury Hill, Bere Regis, 138, 140 Woodlmiders, The,i\.i, 176, 286, 191, 19s, 197, 198, 308, 312 Woodlands, 298, 299 Woodyates Inn, 35, 36, 38, 40 Wool, 38, 123, 126, 130 Woolbridge, " Wellbridge," 124, 127 Woolbridge House, 122, 123, 125 "Yalbury Hill," Yellowham Hill, 59 Yellowham Woods, "Yalbury Great Wood," 59, 150 Yeo, River, 176, 178, 186, 191 Yeovil, "Ivell," i6g, 176-178 Printed by HaseU, VVatsoit & I'inry, /, "^ohO^ \ ■ .'" * ^1^. 336565 I UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY