THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
Tothe 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 ofThe Trumpet Major, so Portland, the “Isle of Slingers,” as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially, though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district ofThe 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 stretching 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;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 in the Eighth Harry’s time, there were to be provided “the nombre 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!
Sandsfoot Castle
It is here, in the story ofThe 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 off 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 faëry that, while the Portlanders 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 theplace 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 Weymouth, 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 runsfrom 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 ofThe 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, notwithstanding 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, theBaleares, 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 extravagance 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 lived on the adjacent island of Great Britain andwere 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 surroundings, 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 appearance 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 facilitatethe 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 suspicion 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 knickerbockers 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 circumspectly 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,
. . . 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,fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of companies. We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised inThe Well Belovedas “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 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 andgive the lie to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious.
Bow and Arrow Castle
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 cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill, whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the topgallants, and at last the admiral’s flag of theVictorydrop 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 herein 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.
WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER
Toleave 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 inThe Trumpet Majoras 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 historicalpersonage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s friend and comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in 1769, 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 forthe 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′1767Fugio fuge.
Joseph Hardy,Esq.,Kingston Russell. Lat. 50° 45′1767Fugio fuge.
Portisham
It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching 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 heeWhen neare the date of 63Anno domini 1670.”
“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 heeWhen neare the date of 63Anno domini 1670.”
Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of 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,in the passage where he claims “Kings to be above those laws,” to have cheerfully borne some other foray on the Royalists’ behalf.
The road out of Abbotsbury
Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very interesting 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 ofFar from the Madding Crowd, 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 simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been attempted. 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 ventilation. One could say about this barn, whatcould 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.”
Sheep-shearing in Wessex
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 inA 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 inFellow 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,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 unstudied 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 seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomime. It is an eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that characterises 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 professionally 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,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.
West Bay, Bridport
The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old one. In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament empowering 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 indicatewhence 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 inFellow Townsmenthus 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 remaining, 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 ofneighbouring 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 manufacturers 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, tiredand 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—insincerely do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!
High Street and Town Hall, Bridport
Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme ofFellow 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 restoredin 1860, 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 Bridpurt. June the 14thAñ. Dõ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer underthe late Dvke of Mvnmovthin that Rebellion.”
The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised. It is the original of the “Black Bull” inFellow 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 aboundBy green and woody hills all round,”
“Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist aboundBy 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 inTess 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 acold 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.
WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE
Youcannot go far from Weymouth without a good deal of hill-climbing, but the longest stretch of level in this district, where levels are the exception 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, opposite the Ship inn, we come to the pretty village—or hamlet, for no church is visible—of Sutton Poyntz, the “Overcombe” ofThe 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 waterworks, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon the inn that will be interesting andpicturesque some day, but now, rawly new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these old rustic surroundings.
Sutton Poyntz: The “Overcombe” of “The Trumpet Major”
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 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 sympathetic tale came and went. The mill—I am afraid it is notthemill, but one of somewhat later date—still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulkingvery largely between the trees, “the smooth millpond, 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 battlefield 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 ofThe Trumpet Majorbelong wholly to a bygone age.
To the same age belonged the characters inThe 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 avoidhearing, 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 theimpedimentaof the soldiery. From within the canvases come guttural 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.”
Bincombe
The story associated with this out-of-the-way placeis one in its chief lines true to facts, for in an unmarked 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” ofThe Trumpet Major. It is really three miles from “Overcombe,” and therefore not the close neighbour 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 farmstead, 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 anavant-gardeand 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 andmow,” 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 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.
Poxwell Manor
Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and a half, to the cross-roads at “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 ofThe Distracted Preacher, 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 exciseman 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 III., 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 atthe 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 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.
Owermoigne: The Smugglers’ Haunt in “The Distracted Preacher”
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.
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 inland end of a coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove.
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 whereThe Distracted Preacher’sparishioners landed their smuggled spirit-tubs, andupon its milk-white shores of limestone pebbles the lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and his companion 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 flotilla might land in his projected invasion of England.
Lulworth Cove. The coastgard station
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 coastoutside. 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 anywhere 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.
Lytchett Heath
The Equestrian Effigy of George III
Entrance to Charborough Park
BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE
Bournemouth, the “Sandbourne” ofTess of the D’Urbervillesand 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 1896, putting it at “about 40,000,” and then referring to the last census returns, discover it to have further risen to forty-seventhousand souls, and a few over. By now it doubtless numbers full fifty thousand, and has further rubricated 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 Egdon 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 Cæsars. 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 lofty 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.”
Bournemouth: The Invalid’s Walk
This rich and populous seaside home of wealthy valetudinarians was until well on into the nineteenthcentury 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 public 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 sophisticated 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 invalids 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 moreimportant, a winter residence for the most delicate constitutions requiring a warm and sheltered locality at this season of the year.” Then follow comparisons favourable to the site of Bournemouth, and derogatory to other seaside resorts.
Every circumstance insured attention being drawn to this weighty pronouncement, and advantage being taken of it. Consumptives came and found the air beneficial, and Bournemouth grew suddenly and astonishingly upon a lonely coastline; 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 exclusive a residential health-resort has been so successful, 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 distinguished 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 theplace 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 consumptive, 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 statue 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 Bournemouth 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 beingneighboured by Bournemouth’s wide-awake life is italicised when that port—the “Havenpool” ofTo 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 shipments 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 fourteenth 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 thatdescription 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 architecturally 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 reputation, 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 “enjoyed” a bad reputation, it is said advisedly, for Poole was so lost to shame that it reallydidenjoy 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.”
“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 oneoccasion, 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 successfully 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 command 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 hoySea 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 following 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,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 ofTo 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 desirableproperties 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 Cæsars of Canford, in times when such things were. It is a picturesque old building, its walls oddly composed 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 picturesqueness, 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 oftobacco, 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.”
Poole Quay
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 ofThe Hand of Ethelberta, 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 wheelwright 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, andshowing 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 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula—that St. Peter-in-the-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 inThe Hand of Ethelbertathere 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.