CORFE CASTLE--SWANAGE
From Wareham we cross the Frome by an ancient bridge, and enter the
Isle of Purbeck. The road runs a straight four miles to Corfe, across
a heath in which the activities of clay-cutters will be observed. Soon
Corfe Castle appears ahead, the mighty upstanding ruins of ancient keep
and surrounding walls rising from an abrupt hill curiously situated in
a gap of a great range of heights. The stony little town of Corfe comes
only after we have swung round by the curving road under the castle
hill, and it is well it should be so; for thus, with but the frowning
steeps, crested by the military architecture of the medieval times, for
company, we obtain the true romantic touch which the little domestic
details of the townlet itself would destroy.
It is a romance of cruelty and blood, for which the great castle
of Corfe stands. It arose in the great fortress-building era that
followed the establishment of the Conqueror’s rule, upon a site already
bloodstained and ominous with the murder of King Edward “the Martyr,”
A.D. 978, by his stepmother, Queen Elfrida, and it was no sooner
built than besieged. King John imprisoned in its dungeons twenty-four
knights, adherents of Prince Arthur, captured in Brittany, and either
caused them to be starved to death or ended by foul and midnight
assassination. And so through the centuries it stood, with constant
additions, until there came at last a time when even these stout walls
of from ten to fourteen feet thickness were shivered. That was when
the castle surrendered to treachery in 1646, after a long siege by the
Parliament’s forces. It had withstood a fortnight’s siege in 1643, when
the gallant defender, Lady Bankes, beat off horse and men, cannon and
siege-train; but now the ancient place was undermined, and gunpowder
laid in its foundations. Matches were applied, and the fortress was
blown into ruin. As it was left in this process of “slighting,” as
the Cromwellians termed their new way with old castles, so it remains
to-day.
The gaunt ruins rear boldly up above the stony little town--an
impressive sight; and as you go onwards toward Swanage, a backward
glance now and then shows how far they dominate the landscape.
And so into Swanage. Time was when such a thing as a brick was a
strange thing here and a brick house practically unknown, for the
building-stone for which Purbeck is famous was and is the natural
material, cheap and plentiful. But things have indeed changed since the
coming of the railway into Swanage, and the old stony fishing village
is now in great measure a red-brick town, and there are hotels on the
seashore that glow like geraniums. There are strange expatriated things
in and about Swanage--strange in these surroundings, but ordinary
enough in London, whence they came. The great figures in Swanage some
forty years ago were Mr. Mowlem and Mr. Burt, of the London contracting
firm of Mowlem and Burt, and thus many of the miscellaneous discarded
things that found their way into the firm’s yard came at last to a
resting-place here. Thus the Town Hall frontage was formerly that of
Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside, and the Gothic clock-tower that stands on
the shore was formerly on the south side of London Bridge, where it was
erected as a memorial to the Duke of Wellington. The lamp-posts in the
streets once served the same office in the streets of Westminster and
other districts of London, and still bear their old distinctive marks.
But the handiwork of the amazing Burt did not end here. He conceived
the idea of developing Swanage in the direction of Durlston Head, a
stony promontory about one mile to the west, and marked out many roads
along what he was pleased to call the “Durlston Park Estate.” The whole
thing remains at this day a derelict affair, the text for a sermon on
the Vanity of Human Wishes. Nobody ever wanted to live on those steep
gradients of the Durlston Park Estate. The roads end at the headland,
where, among other manifestations of the Burt whimsies, adjoining the
old Tilly Whim caves, on a platform overlooking the sea, is a thing
quite famous, locally, as “The Great Globe.” This is an enormous stone
globe, some ten feet in height, engraved with representations of the
seas and continents of the earth. Behind it, on large tablets, is
inscribed a mass of astronomical information, in which most of the
family secrets of the solar system are laid bare; and, with a care for
the weaknesses of human nature, there are slabs on which those visitors
who feel they must carve their names are invited to do so.