Car Darches, the Bathshebas, and in especial poor Tess, who flit through
his unconventional pages, and hold that he deprives the Dorset peasant
of his moral character; but if you hold no brief for the natives in
their relation to the Ten Commandments, why, it need matter little or
nothing to you whether his characters are intended as portraitures, or
are evolved wholly from a peculiar imagination. It remains only to say
that they are very real characters to the reader, who can follow their
loves and hatreds, their comedy and tragedy, and can trace their
footsteps with a great deal more personal interest than can be stirred
up over the doings of many historical personages.
XXXIX
The Exeter Road begins to rise immediately on leaving Dorchester.
Leaving the town by a fine avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a
mile, the highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of a
Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and open expanse of
Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet by the stripling trees newly planted
as a continuation of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four
miles of road from the town are identical with the Roman _Via Iceniana_,
the Icen Way or Icknield Street; and on the left rises, at the distance
of a mile away, the sombre Roman earthwork of Maiden Castle crowning a
hill forming with the earthen amphitheatre of Poundbury on the right
hand, evidence, if all else in Dorchester were wanting, of the
importance of the place at that remote period.
At the fourth milestone the Exeter Road leaves that ancient military
way, and, turning sharply to the left, goes down steeply, amid loose
gravel and rain-runnels, to Winterborne Abbas, with an exceedingly
awkward fork to the road to Weymouth on the left hand half-way down.
Bold and striking views of the sullen ridge of Blackdown, with Admiral
Hardy’s pillar on the ridge, are unfolded as one descends.
XL
Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully
dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this
treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church
too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching
inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely
from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the
majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints.
Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure on the strip of grass
on the left-hand side of the road attracts the wayfarer’s notice. This
serves to protect from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of
eight prehistoric stones called the ‘Broad Stone.’
[Sidenote: _THE RUSSELLS_]
[Illustration: WINTERBORNE ABBAS.]
The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick, lying down. A
notice informs all who care to know that this group is constituted by
the owner, according to the Act of Parliament, an ‘Ancient Monument.’
The cynically-minded might well say that the hundreds of similar
‘ancient monuments’ with which the neighbouring downs are peppered might
also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade in iron
fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every misshapen stone without
a story is the New Idolatry.
Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of the park of
Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The place obtains its name from the
little river Bride or Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to
enter the sea at Burton (= ‘Bride-town’) Bradstock, eight miles away;
passing in its course the two other places named from it, Little Bredy
and Long Bredy.
Now the road rises again, and ascends wild unenclosed downs which
gradually assume a stern, and even mountainous, character. Amid this
panorama, in the deep hollows below these stone-strewn heights, are
gracious wooded dells, doubly beautiful by contrast. In the still and
sheltered nooks of these sequestered spots the primrose blooms early,
and frosts come seldom, while the uplands are covered with snow or swept
with bleak winds that freeze the traveller’s very marrow. One of these
gardens in the wilderness is Kingston Russell, the spot whence the
Russells, now Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity into wealth and
power. Deep down in their retirement, the world (or such small
proportion of it as travelled in those days) passed unobserved, though
not far removed. For generations the Russells had inhabited their old
manor-house here, and might have done so, in undistinguished fashion,
for many years more, had it not been for the chance which brought John
Russell into prominence and preferment in 1502. He was the Founder of
the House and died an Earl, with vast estates, the spoil of the Church,
showered upon him. He was the first of all the Russells to exhibit that
gift of ‘getting on’ which his descendants have almost uniformly
inherited. Unlike him, however, they have rarely commanded affection,
and the Dukes of Bedford, with much reason, figure in the public eye as
paragons of meanness and parsimony.
[Illustration: KINGSTON RUSSELL.]
At the cross roads, where on the left the bye-path leads steeply down
the sides of these immemorial hills to Long Bredy, and on the right in
the direction of Maiden Newton, used to stand Long Bredy Gate and the
‘Hut Inn.’ Here the high-road is continued
[Illustration: CHILCOMBE CHURCH.]
[Sidenote: _CHILCOMBE_]
along the very backbone of the ridge, exposed to all the rigours of the
elements. To add to the weird aspect of the scene, barrows and tumuli
are scattered about in profusion. We now come to a turning on the left
hand called ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ why, no legend survives to tell us.
Steeply this lane leads to the downs that roll away boldly to the sea,
coming in little over a mile to ‘chilly Chilcombe,’ a tiny hamlet with a
correspondingly tiny church tucked away among the great rounded
shoulders of the hills, but not so securely sheltered but that the eager
winds find their way to it and render both name and epithet eminently
descriptive. The population of Chilcombe, according to the latest
census, is twenty-four, and the houses six; and it is, accordingly,
quite in order that the church should be regarded as the smallest in
England. There are many of these ‘smallest churches,’ and the question
as to which really deserves the title is not likely to be determined
until an expedition is fitted out to visit all these rival claimants,
and to accurately measure them. Of course the remaining portions of a
church are not eligible for inclusion in this category. Chilcombe,
however, is a complete example. The hamlet was never, in all
probability, more populous than it is now, and the church certainly was
never larger. Originally Norman, it underwent some alterations in the
late Perpendicular period. The measurements are: nave 22 feet in length,
chancel 13 feet. It is a picturesque though unassuming little building,
without a tower, but provided instead with a quaint old stone bell-cote
on the west gable. This gives the old church the appearance of some
ancient ecclesiastical pigeon-house. The bell within is dated 1656. The
very fine and unusual altar-piece of dark walnut wood, with scenes from
the life of Christ, is credibly reported to have been brought here from
one of the ships of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ known to have been wrecked
on the beach at Burton Bradstock, some three miles away.
Returning to the highway at ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ we come to ‘Traveller’s
Rest,’ now a wayside inn on the left hand, situated on the tremendous
descent which commences a mile beyond Long Bredy turnpike, and goes
practically down into Bridport’s long street; a distance of five miles,
with a fall from 702 feet above the sea, to 253 feet at ‘Traveller’s
Rest,’ two miles farther on, and eventually to sea-level at
[Sidenote: _HILLS ROUND BRIDPORT_]
[Illustration: ‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’]
Bridport, with several curves in the road and an intermediate ascent or
two between this point and the town. The cyclist who cares to take his
courage in both hands, and has no desire to linger over perhaps one of
the most magnificent scenic panoramas in England, can coast down this
long stretch with the speed of the wind, and chance the result. But it
is better to loiter here, for none of the great high-roads has anything
like this scenery to show. From away up the road the eye ranges over a
vast stretch of country westwards. South-west lies the Channel, dazzling
like a burnished mirror if you come here at the psychological moment for
this view--that is to say, the late afternoon of a summer’s day; with
the strangely contorted shapes of the hills round about suggesting
volcanic origin, and casting cool shadows far down into the sheltered
coombes that have been baking in the sun all day long. Near at hand is
Shipton Beacon, rising almost immediately beyond ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ and
looking oddly from some points of view like some gigantic ship’s hull
lying keel uppermost. Beyond are Puncknoll and Hammerdon, and away in
the distance, with the Channel sparkling behind it, and the sun making a
halo for its head, overlooking the sea at a height of 615 feet, the
grand crest of Golden Cap, which some hold to be so named from this
circumstance, while others have it that the picturesque title derives
from the yellow gorse that grows on its summit. To the right hand rises
the natural rampart of Eggardon, additionally fortified by art, a
thousand years ago, whether by Briton, Dane, or Saxon, let those
determine who will, with the village of Askerswell lying deep down,
immediately under this ridge on which the road goes, the roof of its
village church tower apparently so near that you could drop a stone
neatly on to its leads. But ‘one trial will suffice,’ as the
advertisements of much-puffed articles say, for the stone goes no nearer
than about a quarter of a mile.
Very charming, this panorama, on a summer’s day; but how about the
winters’ nights, in the times when the ‘Traveller’s Rest’ was better
named than now; when the coaches halted here, and coachmen, guards, and
passengers alike, half-frozen and breathless from the blusterous heights
of Long Bredy, tumbled out for something warming? For this hillside was
reputed to be the coldest part of the journey between London and Exeter,
and it may be readily enough supposed by all who have seen the spot,
that this was indeed the fact.
XLI
The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify-descents,
although, to be sure, there are sudden curves in the road which it
behoves the cyclist to take slowly, for they may develop anything in the
way of traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine advance-guard
of a travelling circus.
[Sidenote: _BRIDPORT_]
At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border, the country already
begins to lose something of the Dorset character, and to look like the
county of junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is difficult to
say what character it possesses, for its featureless High Street is
redeemed only from tediousness by the belfry of the Town Hall which,
with the fine westward view, including the conical height of Colmer’s
Hill and the high table-land of Eype to the left, serves to compose the
whole into something remotely resembling an effect.
Bridport is a town which would very much like to be on the sea, but is,
as a matter of fact, situated rather over a mile from it. Just where the
little river Bredy runs out and the sea comes banging furiously in, is a
forlorn concourse of houses sheltering abjectly one behind the other,
called variously Bridport Harbour and West Bay. This is the real port,
but it matters little, or nothing at all, by what name you call the
place; it remains more like a Port Desolation.
Bridport almost distinguished itself in 1651 by the fugitive Charles the
Second having been nearly captured at the ‘George Inn’ by the Harbour,
an ostler recognising his face, which, it must be conceded, was one that
once seen could scarce have been mistaken when again met with. Charles
was then trying to reach the coast after the disastrous battle of
Worcester, and it is quite certain that if Cromwell’s troopers had laid
their hands on him, there would never have been any Charles the Second
in English history.
The tragical comedy of the Stuarts throws a glamour over the Exeter Road
to its very end. The fugitive Charles, fleeing before the inquisitive
stare of the ostler, is a striking picture; and so, thirty-four years
later, is the coming of his partly acknowledged son, the Duke of
Monmouth, to upset James the Second. Bridport was seized, and one of
the ‘Monmouth men’ slew Edward Coker, gentleman, of Mappowder, on the
14th of June 1685, as the memorial tablet to that slaughtered worthy in
Bridport parish church duly recounts. For their share in the rebellion,
a round dozen of Bridport men were hanged before the eyes of their
neighbours, ‘stabbed,’ as the ancient slang phrase has it, ‘with a
Bridport dagger.’ The ghastly imagery of this saying derives from the
old-time local manufacture of rope, twine, and string, and the
cultivation of hemp in the surrounding country. Rope-and twine-walks
still remain in the town.
Leaving Bridport behind, the coach passengers by this route presently
came to its most wildly romantic part; only it is sad to reflect that
the travellers of a hundred years ago had not the slightest appreciation
of this kind of thing.
Through Bridport’s stony lanes our way we take,
And the proud steep descend to Morcombe’s lake.
Thus the poet Gay, but he writes from the horseman’s point of view, and
if he had bruised his bones along this road in the lurching Exeter Fly,
his tone would probably have been less breezy. Travellers, indeed,
looked upon hills with loathing, and upon solitude (notwithstanding the
poets of the time) with disgust; therefore it may well be supposed that
when they came to the rugged scenery around Morecomblake, and the next
village Chideock (called locally ‘Chiddick’), they did not enjoy
themselves.
[Sidenote: _A ROYAL FUGITIVE_]
Here Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, with many lesser eminences, frown
down upon the steep highway on every side, and render the scenery
nothing less than mountainous, so that strangers in these parts,
overcome with ‘terrour’ and apprehensions of worse to come, wished
themselves safe housed in the roadside inn of Morecomblake, whose
hospitable sign gave, and still gives, promise of good entertainment.
[Illustration: CHIDEOCK.]
The run down into Charmouth from this point is a breakneck one. At this
remote seaside place, in that same year, 1651, Charles the Second had
another narrow escape. Travelling in bye-ways from the disastrous field
of Worcester on horseback, with his staunch friends, Lord Wilmot and
Colonel Wyndham, arrangements had been made with the master of a trading
vessel hailing from Lyme, to put in at Charmouth with a boat in the
stillness of the night. But they had reckoned without taking into
account either the simplicity of the sailor, or the inquisitiveness of
his wife, who wormed the secret out of him, of his being engaged in this
mysterious affair with a party of strangers. All the country was ringing
with the escape of Charles from Worcester and the hue and cry after him,
and the woman rightly guessed whom these people might be. She
effectually prevented her husband from putting in an appearance by the
threat that if he made any such attempt she would inform the magistrate.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.]
Wearied with watching for the promised boat, the King’s companions
reluctantly had to make Charmouth the resting-place of the party for the
night. In the morning it was found that the King’s horse had cast a
shoe. When it was taken to the blacksmith, that worthy remarked the
quaint circumstance that the three others had been replaced in three
different counties, and one of these three in Worcestershire.
[Sidenote: _ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS_]
When Charles heard that awkward discovery he was off in haste, for if a
rural blacksmith was clever enough to discover so much, it was quite
possible that he might apply his knowledge in a very embarrassing
manner.
The little band had not hurried away a moment too soon, for the ostler
of the inn (what Sherlock Holmes’s all these Dorsetshire folks were, to
be sure!) who had already arrived independently at the conclusion that
this was King Charles, had in the meanwhile gone to the Rev. Bartholomew
Wesley, a local Roundhead divine, and told him his thoughts. Thence to
the inn, where legends tell us the landlady gave Mr. Wesley a fine
full-flavoured piece of her mind, and so eventually to the ears of a
captain of horse, this wondrous news spread. Horsemen scoured the
country; clergyman returned home to think over the loyal landlady’s
abuse; ostler, probably dismissed, had leisure to curse his
officiousness; while King and companions were off, whip and spur, to
Bridport, whence, after that alarming recognition at the Harbour, to
Broadwinsor.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.]
This historic Charmouth inn is still existing. The ‘Anchor,’ as it is
now known, was for many years the ‘Queen’s Arms,’ but although the sign
has thus been altered and half of the building partitioned off as a
separate house, the interior remains very much the same as it was then,
and the original rough, stone-flagged passages, dark panelling, and
deep-embrasured windows add a convincing touch to the story of the
King’s flight through England with a price on his head.
For the rest, Charmouth, which stands where the tiny river Char empties
itself into the sea, consists of one long street of mutually
antagonistic houses, of all shapes, sizes, and materials, and is the
very exemplar of a fishing village turned into an inchoate seaside
resort. But a sunny, sheltered, and pleasing spot.
On leaving Charmouth, the road begins to ascend again, and leaves
Dorsetshire for Devon through a tunnel cut in the hillside, called the
‘New Passage,’ coming in four miles to ‘Hunter’s Lodge Inn,’
picturesquely set amid a forest of pine trees. From this point it is two
and a half miles on to Axminster, a town which still gives a name to a
particular make of carpets, although since 1835 the local factories have
been closed and the industry transferred to Wilton, in Wiltshire. It was
in 1755 that the industry was started here.
[Sidenote: _SHUTE HILL_]
There is one fine old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ at Axminster, with
huge rambling stables and interminable corridors, in which one ought to
meet the ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road. But they are
shy. There should, in fact, be many ghosts in this old town of many
memories; and so there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ‘mind’s eye.’
But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ, and it is only to
a vivid imagination that the streets are repeopled with the excited
peasantry who, in that fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of
the Duke of Monmouth, whom ‘the Lord raised vp’ as the still existing
manuscript narrative of an Axminster dissenting minister says, to
champion the Protestant religion--with what results we already know.
Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded roads from Axminster by
the river Axe to Axmouth, Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues
inland.
XLII
There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between
Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of
the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton
lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town
itself.
The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is
Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the
coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down
to Kilmington, where the travellers, having recovered their hearts from
their boots or their throats, according to their temperaments, and found
their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and threatened them with
all manner of pains and penalties for reckless driving. Thence, by way
of Wilmington, to Honiton.
A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the traveller comes upon a
singular debased Gothic toll-house. If he walks or cycles he may pass
freely, but all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer
survival is known as King’s Road Gate, or by the more popular name of
‘Copper Castle,’ from its once having a peaked copper roof above its
carpenter-gothic battlements.
[Illustration: ‘COPPER CASTLE.’]
[Sidenote: _THE LAST COACH_]
Honiton, whose name is locally ‘Honeyton,’ is a singularly uninteresting
town, with its mother-parish church half a mile away from the one broad
street that forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet, and
neither very old nor very new, so far as outward appearance goes,
Honiton must be of a positively deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy
day; when to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain in, thrown on
the slender resources for amusement afforded by the local papers and the
ten-years-old county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a
weariness.
Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not
too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway
hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic.
Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing
country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and
are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the
present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five years since the Great
Western Railway was opened through to Exeter, and during that more than
half a century these long reaches of the road have been deserted. Do
belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit nights along this tree-shaded
road, ever conjure up a picture of the last mail down; the farewells at
the inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning out of their
windows, to see the visible passing away of an epoch; the flashing of
the lamps past the hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn
sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away? If they do not, why then
they must be sadly lacking in imagination, or ill-read in the Story of
the Roads.
Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four and a half miles from
Honiton, and all ways seem to lead to Exeter, there stands on the grassy
plot at the fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop, Dr.
Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyrdom, together with two
other workers in the missionfield, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the
eldest son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by, hence the
placing of this brick and stone column here, surmounted by a cross, and
plentifully inscribed with texts. The story of his and his friends’
death is set forth as having been ‘in vengeance for wrongs suffered at
the hands of Europeans by savage men whom he loved and for whose sake he
gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.’
This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post, for directions are
carved on its four sides; and very necessary too, for where two roads go
to Exeter, the one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than the
other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be depended upon for clear
and concise information. Cobbett in his day found that exasperating
direction of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ‘keep straight
on,’ just as great a delusion as the tourist now discovers it to be. The
formula, according to him, was a little different in his time, being
‘keep _right_ on.’
‘Aye,’ says he, ‘but in ten minutes, perhaps, you come to a [Y] or a
[T], or to a [X]. A fellow once told me, in my way from Chertsey to
Guildford, “keep _right on_, you can’t miss your way.” I was in the
perpendicular part of the [T], and the top part was only a few yards
from me. “_Right on_,” said I, “what, over _that bank_ into the
wheat?”--“No, no,” said he, “I mean _that road_, to be sure,” pointing
to the road that went off to the _left_.’
Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road in the wooded dell of
Fenny Bridges, and in the course of another mile, on the banks of
another stream, stands the ‘Fair Mile Inn,’ the last stage into
[Sidenote: _EXETER_]
[Illustration: ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’]