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
personage, 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 for 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.
[Picture: 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 hee
When neare the date of 63
Anno 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.
[Picture: 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 of _Far 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, what 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.”
[Picture: 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
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 _Fellow 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.
[Picture: 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 indicate 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 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 of 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 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, tired 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—insincerely
do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!
[Picture: High Street and Town Hall, Bridport]
Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of _Fellow 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 in 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 14th Añ. Dõ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer under the
late Dvke of Mvnmovth 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 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.