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 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!
[Picture: Sandsfoot Castle]
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
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 the 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 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 runs
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,
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, 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
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 and 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 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 facilitate 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 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,
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
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 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 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.
[Picture: 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 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 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.