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[Illustration: SHERBORNE ABBEY CHURCH]
_Beautiful Britain_
_Wessex_
_By_
_Charles G Harper_
_London Adam & Charles
Black
Soho Square W
1911_
[Illustration]
PREFACE
This is a modest, gossipy and allusive sketch of a delightful part of
England, designed rather to arouse the interest and the curiosity of
those not already acquainted with what I will call the “Middle West”
than to fully satisfy it. If in this connection you choose to regard
the author of these pages as a commercial traveller in the interest of
Wessex, displaying samples of the picturesque wares the West of England
can offer the tourist, it will entirely fit the humour in which they
were penned. To aid the medium of words is added a feast of colour in
the accompanying selected views, which show the lovely golden russet
interior of Sherborne Abbey, the misty rich blue haze of Blackmore
Vale, the architectural majesty of Wells, and much else that awaits the
traveller in Dorset and Somerset.
C. G. H.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WAREHAM--BERE REGIS--THE HEATHS 5
II. CORFE CASTLE--SWANAGE 12
III. WOOLBRIDGE HOUSE-CULWORTH COVE--OWERMOIGNE--WEYMOUTH 16
IV. “UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE”--DORCHESTER--MAIDEN CASTLE--
BRIDPORT--WEST BAY 24
V. CERNE ABBAS--THE VALE OF BLACKMORE--SHERBORNE--SHAFTESBURY 34
VI. YATTON--CHEDDAR CHEESE AND CHEDDAR CLIFFS--WELLS--
GLASTONBURY--THE ISLE OF ATHELNEY--DUNSTER 43
VII. NORTON ST. PHILIP--BATH--CORSHAM--CASTLE COMBE 54
INDEX 63
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. SHERBORNE ABBEY CHURCH _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. CORFE CASTLE 9
3. BERE REGIS 16
4. WAREHAM CHURCH 25
5. NEAR MAIDEN CASTLE, DORCHESTER 27
6. FORDINGTON, DORCHESTER 30
7. BLACKMORE VALE FROM SHAFTESBURY 32
8. THE BRIDPORT ARMS 43
9. THE ALMSHOUSES, CORSHAM, WILTSHIRE 46
10. THE MARKET-PLACE, WELLS 49
11. DUNSTER CASTLE AND YARN MARKET 56
12. CASTLE COMBE, NORTH WILTSHIRE 59
WESSEX
CHAPTER I
WAREHAM--BERE REGIS--THE HEATHS
The Wessex of which I shall treat in these gossiping pages is
that Wessex of romance and of the great dairy-farms, which has
been little touched by the influence of railways. Hampshire and
Wiltshire--Winchester and Salisbury--have become too closely in touch
with London to stand so fully upon the ancient ways as does Dorset,
with the greater part of its north-western neighbour, Somerset. But
in these rural territories the countryman still talks the old broad
Do’set and Zummerzet speech, in which the letter “o” in every possible
circumstance becomes “a,” as you will perceive in that old rhyme
beginning:
A harnet zet in a holler tree,
A proper spiteful twoad was he.
And thus he zung as he did zet,
“My sting is as zharp as a bagginet.”
And they think, too, the olden thoughts.
Nothing can give one a greater sense of the difference between the
exploited modernized coast-line and the real old Wessex than the
journey from up-to-date Bournemouth to Poole, that olden nest of
smugglers, and thence across to the untamed heaths and to Wareham. In
this way, then, we will begin our exploration of Wessex.
Wareham is a little town which has been left to drowse peacefully in
its old days. Nothing has happened in Wareham since its almost complete
destruction by fire (1762), an event which here as distinctly marks
an era as does the Great Fire of London in the City. It not only
rubricates the local table of events with a glowing finger, but the
rebuilding necessary after it has set a specious stamp of modernity
upon the place, to which its long and troubled history and its two
ancient churches give an emphatic denial. Mr. Hardy styles Wareham
“Anglebury,” and it is a name which well befits a town whose story is
so greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset
and the fortunes of the older kingdom of Wessex. The original founders
of Wareham, who were probably antecedent to the Anglo-Saxons, were very
properly afraid of overseas rovers, who might sail into Poole Harbour
and attack them, and they raised around the place those huge ditches
and embankments which remain to this day to astonish the stranger, and
are known as the “walls of Wareham.” Covered with grass, the summit of
them forms an interesting ramble. But these defences never did confer
upon Wareham the desired security. Its early story is one of continual
capture, and it had been burnt so often that the inhabitants had at
last feared to rebuild it and live there again; and it was a deserted
place William the Conqueror found. He caused a castle to be built,
but that fortress in its long career again and again invited siege
and plunder, until it was at last destroyed in the troubles between
Charles I. and his Parliament. The last pitiful scene was in 1685, when
three rebels in the Monmouth rising were hanged on the famous walls,
at a corner still known as “Bloody Bank.” The chief architectural
interest is centred upon the ancient church of St. Martin, a
curiously-proportioned building, standing piquantly beside the road
outside the town, to the north, on a little bank or terrace. The
antiquary perceives by a mere glance at its stilted narrow and lofty
proportions that it is Saxon, and the interior discloses a lofty nave
of stern unornamental appearance, with characteristic Saxon chancel
arch, the whole closely resembling the interior of the Saxon church of
Bradford-on-Avon. The Church of St. Mary, at the other extremity of the
town, possesses a hexagonal leaden font, one of the twenty-seven leaden
fonts in England.
[Illustration: CORFE CASTLE.
The massive ruins of the great castle of Corfe owe their present
appearance to the blowing-up of the fortress by gunpowder, in 1646,
after its capture by the Parliament.]
Six miles north-west of Wareham we come to Bere Regis, a place very
notable in the Hardy literature, for it is the “Kingsbere” of _Tess of
the D’Urbervilles_, and the “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of _Far from the
Madding Crowd_. Before ever it acquired the kingly prefix or suffix, it
was merely “Bere,” a word which explained its situation amid underwoods
and copses. I have all the will in the world to describe Bere Regis
as “picturesque”; but it is not that. It is an old rather grim and
grey village that has had troubles--not romantic troubles, please to
understand, but economic ones. It has a “past”--neither scandalous nor
noble, but just the past of a place that has seen better days and has
suffered--suffered, truly, in the peculiarly Dorset way, from fire.
How many times the dry thatch of the cottages has gone up in flame and
smoke I know not; only I know--and all may see--that experience has not
made the villagers wise, for it is a long street of thatched cottages
yet; and here and there is the ruin of one more recently burnt in like
manner. The scattered heaps remain untouched, for it is not worth the
while to rebuild in Bere Regis. That is why the heavily-thatched roofs,
with little bedroom windows peering out like weary-lidded eyes, look
to me grim and sad. The church is fine, and owes much of its beauty to
the ancient Turberville family, something to the Abbey of Tarent, and
most of all to Cardinal Morton, a native of this parish. He is said to
have given the noble--indeed, the extraordinarily noble--elaborately
carved, painted and gilded roof of the nave, which by itself would
make the artistic reputation of a church. It is really not a West of
England roof at all, but distinctly of the East Anglian type, and
there are legends that explain the bringing of it here. However that
may be, it is a bold and striking object; the hammer-beams carved into
the huge shapes of Bishops, Cardinals, and pilgrims, with immense
round faces carved on the bosses, which look down upon you with fat,
complacent smiles. Add to this the fact that the figures are painted
with flesh-tints and the costumes vividly coloured, and it will be
guessed that this is a remarkable work. Here are interesting carved
fifteenth-century bench-ends, and on two of the Transitional Norman
pillars extraordinary sculptures of heads--one tugging open its
mouth, the other with hand to forehead. They are popularly said to be
“Toothache” and “Headache,” but were probably intended to symbolize the
divine gifts of speech and sight. Battered old Purbeck marble tombs of
the bygone Turbervilles are seen here.
Bere Regis is a fine point whence to explore into what Mr. Thomas
Hardy styles “Egdon Heath.” By that name the wild stretch of moorlands
marked on the maps as “Bere Heath,” “Hyde Heath,” “Decoy Heath,” etc.,
is understood, chiefly between Wareham on the east and Dorchester on
the west, and roughly bounded on the south by the River Frome. It is
not merely a wild, but also a very beautiful, region, on whose borders
the novelist himself, the creator of so many alluring rustics, and the
true begetter of the Hardy Country, was born, at Upper Bockhampton,
1840. Nature reigns, unchallenged, on these swarthy moors of brown
and purple. He tells us, truly, how this country figures in Domesday.
“Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
wilderness--‘Bruaria.’” Leland, writing in the reign of Henry VII.,
describes this tract as “overgrown with heth and mosse”; and as it was
in the eleventh and in the sixteenth centuries, so it remains in the
twentieth. In these untamed scenes the sombre novel of _The Return of
the Native_ is set.