ROUND AND ABOUT WEYMOUTH
I walk in the world's great highways,
In the dusty glare and riot,
But my heart is in the byways
That thread across the quiet;
By the wild flowers in the coppice,
There the track like a sleep goes past,
And paven with peace and poppies,
Comes down to the sea at last.
E. G. BUCKERIDGE.
Modern Weymouth is made up of two distinct townships, Weymouth and
Melcombe Regis, which were formerly separate boroughs, with their own
parliamentary representatives. Of the two Weymouth is probably the
older, but Melcombe can be traced well-nigh back to the Conquest; and
now, although it is the name of Weymouth that has obtained the
prominence, it is to Melcombe that it is commonly applied. Many visitors
to Weymouth never really enter the real, ancient Weymouth, now chiefly
concerned in the brewing of Dorset ale. The pier, town, railway station
and residences are all in Melcombe Regis. The local conditions are
something more than peculiar. The little River Wey has an estuary
altogether out of proportion to its tiny stream, called the Blackwater.
The true original Weymouth stands on the right bank of the estuary at
its entrance into Weymouth Bay. Across the mouth of the estuary, leaving
a narrow channel only open, stretches a narrow spit of land, on which
stands Melcombe. The Blackwater has thus a lake-like character, and its
continuation to the sea, the harbour, may be likened to a canal. The
local annals of the kingdom can hardly furnish such another instance of
jealous rivalry as the strife between the two boroughs. Barely a
stone's-throw apart, they were the most quarrelsome of neighbours, and
for centuries lived the most persistent "cat and dog" life. Whatever was
advanced by one community was certain to be opposed by the other, and
not even German and English hated each other with a more perfect hatred
than did the burgesses of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis. As they would not
live happy single, it was resolved to try what married life would do,
and so in 1571 the two corporations were rolled into one, the only
vestige of the old days retained being the power of electing four
members to Parliament from the joint municipality--a right which was
exercised until 1832. Not until the union was the old-fashioned ferry
over the Wey supplemented by a bridge, the predecessor of that which
now joins the two divisions of the dual town. The union proved to be a
success, and in this way Weymouth saved both itself and its name from
becoming merely a shadow and a memory.
It is to George III. that Weymouth must be eternally grateful, for just
in the same way as George IV. turned Brighthelmstone into Brighton, it
was George III. who _made_ Weymouth. Of course there was a Weymouth long
before his day, but whatever importance it once possessed had long
disappeared when he took it up. For many years the King spent long
summer holidays at Gloucester Lodge, a mansion facing the sea, and now
the sedate Gloucester Hotel.
Considering its undoubted age, Weymouth is remarkably barren in traces
of the past, and a few Elizabethan houses, for the most part modernised,
well-nigh exhaust its antiquities.
Weymouth, which figures as "Budmouth" in Hardy's romances, is the
subject of many references. Uncle Bengy, in _The Trumpet Major_, found
Budmouth a plaguy expensive place, for "If you only eat one egg, or even
a poor windfall of an apple, you've got to pay; and a bunch of radishes
is a halfpenny, and a quart o' cider tuppence three-farthings at lowest
reckoning. Nothing without paying!"
When George III. and the sun of prosperity shone upon the tradesfolk of
Weymouth the spirit of pecuniary gain soon became rampant. The inflated
prices which so roused poor old Uncle Bengy even staggered Queen
Charlotte, and "Peter Pindar" (Dr John Wolcot) criticised her household
thriftiness in bringing stores and provisions from Windsor:
"Bread, cheese, salt, catchup, vinegar and mustard,
Small beer and bacon, apple pie and custard;
All, all from Windsor, greets his frugal Grace,
For Weymouth is a d----d expensive place."
Sandsfoot Castle, built by Henry VIII., on the southern shore of the
spit of land called the Nothe, Weymouth Bay, is now a mere pile of
corroded stone. It was built as a fort when England feared an invasion
prompted by the Pope. The old pile plays a prominent part in Hardy's
_The Well-Beloved_. The statue of King George, which is such an object
of ridicule to the writers of guide-books, was the meeting-place of
Fancy Day and Dick Dewy in _Under the Greenwood Tree_.
The "Budmouth" localities mentioned in _The Trumpet Major_ are: the
Quay; Theatre Royal; Barracks; Gloucester Lodge; and the Old Rooms Inn
in Love Row, once a highly fashionable resort which was used for dances
and other entertainments by the ladies and gentlemen who formed the
Court of George III. It was also the spot where the battle of Trafalgar
was discussed in _The Dynasts_. However, the old assembly rooms and the
theatre have now vanished. Mention of Hardy's tremendous drama reminds
me that it is rarely quoted in topographical works on Dorset, and yet it
is full of the spirit and atmosphere of Wessex. Thus in a few words he
tells us what "Boney" seemed like to the rustics of Dorset:
"WOMAN (_in undertones_). I can tell you a word or two on't. It is about
His victuals. They say that He lives upon human flesh, and has rashers
o' baby every morning for breakfast--for all the world like the Cernel
Giant in old ancient times!
"SECOND OLD MAN. I only believe half. And I only own--such is my
challengeful character--that perhaps He do eat pagan infants when He's
in the desert. But not Christian ones at home. Oh no--'tis too much!
"WOMAN. Whether or no, I sometimes--God forgi'e me!--laugh wi' horror at
the queerness o't, till I am that weak I can hardly go round house. He
should have the washing of 'em a few times; I warrent 'a wouldn't want
to eat babies any more!"
There are a hundred clean-cut, bright things in _The Dynasts_, and some
of the songs are so cunningly fashioned that we know the author must
surely have overheard them so often that they have become part of his
life. Does the reader remember this from the first volume?--
"In the wild October night-time, when the wind raved round the
land,
And the Back-sea met the Front-sea, and our doors were blocked
with sand,
And we heard the drub of Dead-man's Bay, where bones of thousands
are,
We knew not what the day had done for us at Trafalgar.
(_All_) Had done,
Had done
For us at Trafalgar!"
Or the other ballad sung by a Peninsular sergeant--
"When we lay where Budmouth Beach is,
Oh, the girls were fresh as peaches,
With their tall and tossing figures and their eyes of blue and
brown!
And our hearts would ache with longing
As we passed from our sing-songing,
With a smart _Clink! Clink!_ up the Esplanade and down."
The principal attraction of Weymouth is its magnificent bay, which has
caused the town to be depicted on the railway posters as the "Naples of
England"; but Mr Harper, in his charming book, _The Hardy Country_,
cruelly remarks that no one has yet found Naples returning the
compliment and calling itself the "Weymouth of Italy." But there is no
need for Weymouth to powder and paint herself with fanciful
attractions, for her old-world glamour is full of enchantment. The pure
Georgian houses on the Esplanade, with their fine bow windows and
red-tiled roofs, are very warm and homely, and remind one of the glories
of the coaching days. They are guiltless of taste or elaboration, it is
true, but they have an honest savour about them which is redolent of
William Cobbett, pig-skin saddles, real ale and baked apples. And those
are some of the realest things in the world. There is a distinct
"atmosphere" about the shops near the harbour too. They shrink back from
the footpath in a most timid way, and each year they seem to settle down
an inch or so below the street-level, with the result that they are
often entered by awkward steps.
Near the Church of St Mary is the Market, which on Fridays and Tuesdays
presents a scene of colour and activity. In the Guildhall are several
interesting relics, the old stocks and whipping-posts, a chest captured
from the Spanish Armada and a chair from the old house of the Dominican
friars which was long ago demolished.
Preston, three miles north-east of Weymouth, is a prettily situated
village on the main road to Wareham, with interesting old thatched
cottages and a fifteenth-century church containing an ancient font, a
Norman door, holy-water stoups and squint. At the foot of the hill a
little one-arched bridge over the stream was once regarded as Roman
masonry, but the experts now think it is Early Norman work. Adjoining
Preston is the still prettier village of Sutton Poyntz, hemmed in by the
Downs, on the side of which, in a conspicuous position, is the famous
figure, cut in the turf, of King George III. on horseback. He looks very
impressive, with his cocked hat and marshal's baton. Sutton Poyntz is
the principal locale of Hardy's story of _The Trumpet Major_. The tale
is of a sweet girl, Anne Garland, and two brothers Loveday, who loved
her; the "gally-bagger" sailor, Robert, who won her, and John, the
easy-going, gentle soldier, who lost her. _The Trumpet Major_ is a
mellow, loamy novel, and the essence of a century of sunshine has found
its way into the pages. Even the pensiveness of the story--the sadness
of love unsatisfied--is mellow. The village to-day, with its tree-shaded
stream, crooked old barns and stone cottages, recalls the spirit of the
novel with Overcombe Mill as a central theme. How vividly the pilgrim
can recall the Mill, with its pleasant rooms, old-world garden, and the
stream where the cavalry soldiers came down to water their horses! It
was a dearly loved corner of England for John Loveday, and if to keep
those meadows safe and fair a life was required, he was perfectly
willing to pay the price--nay, more, he was proud and glad to do so. In
the end John was killed in one of the battles of the Peninsular War, and
his spirit is echoed by a soldier poet who went to his death in 1914:
"Mayhap I shall not walk again
Down Dorset way, down Devon way.
Nor pick a posy in a lane
Down Somerset and Sussex way.
But though my bones, unshriven, rot
In some far-distant alien spot,
What soul I have shall rest from care
To know that meadows still are fair
Down Dorset way, down Devon way."
The mill is not the one sketched in the tale, but it still grinds corn,
and one can still see "the smooth mill-pond, over-full, and intruding
into the hedge and into the road." The real mill is actually at Upwey.
Bincombe, two miles north-east of Upwey, is one of the "outstep placen,"
where the remnants of dialect spoken in the days of Wessex kings is not
quite dead, and as we go in and out among the old cottages we come upon
many a word which has now been classed by annotators as "obsolete." "I'd
as lief be wooed of a snail," says Rosalind in _As You Like It_ of the
tardy Orlando, and "I'd as lief" or "I'd liefer" is still heard here in
Bincombe. There is a large survival of pure Saxon in the Wessex speech,
and Thomas Hardy has made a brave attempt to preserve the old local
words in his novels. He has always deplored the fact that schools were
driving out the racy Saxon words of the West Country, and once remarked
to a friend:
"I have no sympathy with the criticism which would treat English as a
dead language--a thing crystallised at an arbitrarily selected stage of
its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it
has a future. Purism, whether in grammar or vocabulary, almost always
means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before
language. And as for the people who make it their business to insist on
the utmost possible impoverishment of our English vocabulary, they seem
to me to ignore the lessons of history, science, and common sense.
"It has often seemed to me a pity, from many points of view--and from
the point of view of language among the rest--that Winchester did not
remain, as it once was, the royal, political, and social capital of
England, leaving London to be the commercial capital. The relation
between them might have been something like that between Paris and
Marseilles or Havre; and perhaps, in that case, neither of them would
have been so monstrously overgrown as London is to-day. We should then
have had a metropolis free from the fogs of the Thames Valley; situated,
not on clammy clay, but on chalk hills, the best soil in the world for
habitation; and we might have preserved in our literary language a
larger proportion of the racy Saxon of the West Country. Don't you think
there is something in this?"
Returning from Bincombe and passing through Sutton to Preston we come in
a mile to Osmington. A short distance beyond the village a narrow road
leads off seawards to Osmington Mills. Crossing the hills, this narrower
road descends to the coast and the Picnic Inn--a small hostelry noted
for "lobster lunches" and "prawn teas." If we strike inland from
Osmington we come to Poxwell, the old manor-house of the Hennings, a
curiously walled-in building with a very interesting gate-house. This is
the Oxwell Manor of _The Trumpet Major_ and the house of Benjamin
Derriman--"a wizened old gentleman, in a coat the colour of his
farmyard, breeches of the same hue, unbuttoned at the knees, revealing a
bit of leg above his stocking and a dazzlingly white shirt-frill to
compensate for this untidiness below. The edge of his skull round his
eye-sockets was visible through the skin, and he walked with great
apparent difficulty."
Pressing onward from this village, we arrive, after a two-mile walk, at
"Warm'ell Cross," three miles south-west of Moreton station. The left
road leads to Dorchester, the right one to Wareham, and the centre one
across the immemorially ancient and changeless "Egdon Heath." Here we
turn to the right and Owermoigne, the "Nether Mynton" in which the
events of _The Distracted Preacher_ take place. Here indeed is a nook
which seems to be a survival from another century; a patch of England of
a hundred years ago set down in the England of to-day. The church where
Lizzie Newberry and her smugglers stored "the stuff" is hidden from
those who pass on the highroad and is reached by a little rutty, crooked
lane. The body of the church has been rebuilt, but the tower where the
smugglers looked down upon the coastguard officers searching for their
casks of brandy remains the same.
The highway leads for two miles along the verge of Egdon Heath, and then
we come to a right-hand turning taking us past Winfrith Newburgh and
over the crest of the chalk downs steeply down to West Lulworth.
Lulworth Cove is justly considered one of the most delightful and
picturesque retreats on the coast. It is a circular little basin
enclosed by towering cliffs of chalk and sand and entered by a narrow
opening between two bluffs of Portland stone. It exhibits a section of
all the beds between the chalk and oolite, and owes its peculiar form to
the unequal resistance of these strata to the action of the sea. The
perpetually moving water, having once pierced the cliff of stone, soon
worked its way deeply into the softer sand and chalk.
Lulworth is the "Lullstead Cove" of the Hardy novels. Here Sergeant Troy
was supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the landing-places
chosen by the Distracted Preacher's parishioners during their smuggling
exploits, and in _Desperate Remedies_ it is the first meeting-place of
Cynthera Graye and Edward Springrove.
The cove is most conveniently reached from Swanage by steamer. By rail
the journey is made to Wool and thence by bus for five miles southward.
By road the short way is by Church Knowle, Steeple, Tyneham and East
Lulworth--but the hills are rather teasing; however, the views are
wonderful. It is nine miles if one takes the Wareham road from Corfe as
far as Stoborough, there turning to the left for East Holme, West Holme
and East Lulworth.
The entrance to the cove from the Channel is a narrow opening in the
cliff, which here rises straight from the sea. Mounted on a summit on
the eastern side of the breach is a coastguard's look-out, while in a
hollow on the other side are the remains of Little Bindon Abbey. The
cove is an almost perfect circle, and in summer the tide, as it flows
in, fills the white cove with a shimmering sheet of light blue water.
Each wave breaks the surface into a huge circle, and the effect from the
heights is a succession of wonderful sparkling rings vanishing into the
yellow sands. To the east rise the ridges of Bindon Hill and the grey
heights of Portland stone that terminate seaward in the _Mupe Rocks_,
then the towering mass of _Ring's Hill_, crowned by the large oblong
entrenchment known as Flower's Barrow, which has probably been both a
British and a Roman camp.
In the summer steamers call daily at the cove. The landing is effected
by means of boats or long gangways. After having climbed the hill roads
into Lulworth, the pilgrim will not, I am certain, look with any delight
upon a return to them, and will welcome an alternative trip to Swanage,
Weymouth or Bournemouth by an excursion steamer.
[Illustration: CORFE CASTLE
From a photograph taken in 1865
The old-time shepherd stands in the foreground with his dog--a shaggy
ruffian of a now fast-disappearing breed]
Portisham, under the bold, furzy hills that rise to the commanding
height of Blackdown, appears in _The Trumpet Major_ as the village to
which Bob Loveday (who was spasmodically in love with Anne Garland)
comes to attach himself to Admiral Hardy for service in the Royal Navy.
Notwithstanding the fact that Robert Loveday is merely an imaginary
character, the admiral was a renowned hero in real life, and no less a
personage than Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy. He lived here, in a picturesque
old house just outside the village, and the chimney-like tower on Black
Down was erected to his memory. In a garden on the opposite side of the
road to Hardy's house is a sundial, inscribed:
JOSEPH HARDY, ESQ.
KINGSTON RUSSELL, LAT. 50° 45'
1769
FUGIO FUGE
Admiral Hardy was born at Kingston Russell, and his old home at
Portisham is still in the possession of a descendant on the female side.
From Portisham a walk of four miles leads to Abbotsbury, situated at the
verge of the Vale of Wadden and the Chesil Beach. The railway station is
about ten minutes' walk from the ancient village, which consists of a
few houses picturesquely dotted around the church and scattered ruins of
the Abbey of St Peter. The abbey was originally founded in King Knut's
reign by Arius, the "house-carl," or steward, to the king, about 1044,
in the reign of Edward the Confessor. The building at the south-east
corner of the church is part of the old abbey. It is now used as a
carpenter's shop, but an old stoup can be seen in the corner. At the
farther end of this building is a cell in which the last abbot is said
to have been starved to death.
A gate-house porch and a buttressed granary of fourteenth-century
architecture, still used as a barn, and a pond, with a tree-covered
island, the ancient fish-pond of the monks, are all that remain to
remind us of the historic past of this spot.