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
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” 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 waterworks, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon
the inn that will be interesting and picturesque some day, but now, rawly
new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these
old rustic surroundings.
[Picture: 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 not _the_ mill, but one of somewhat later
date—still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulking very 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 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
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 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.”
[Picture: Bincombe]
The story associated with this out-of-the-way place is 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” of _The 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 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 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 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.
[Picture: 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 of _The
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 at 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 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.
[Picture: 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.
[Picture: 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 _The Distracted Preacher’s_ parishioners landed their smuggled
spirit-tubs, and upon 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.
[Picture: 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 coast 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
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.
[Picture: Lytchett Heath]
[Picture: The Equestrian Effigy of George III]
[Picture: Entrance to Charborough Park]