“UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE”--DORCHESTER--MAIDEN CASTLE--BRIDPORT--WEST
BAY
From Warmwell Cross the route into Dorchester may advantageously be
varied by bearing to the right, through the very pretty village of
West Stafford, where there is an interesting church, and an inn with a
deprecatory set of verses, beginning:
I trust no Wise Man will condemn
A Cup of Genuine now and then.
Pleasant by-roads lead across tributaries of the Frome and into
Stinsford, which is in the heart of the Hardy Country, about two miles
from Dorchester. It is a secluded place amid massed woods and at the
edge of the fine park surrounding Kingston House. Stinsford is the
“Mellstock” of that sweet idyll _Under the Greenwood Tree_.
[Illustration: WAREHAM CHURCH.
The church of St. Martin, perched boldly on its terrace above the road
on the north side of the town, has a striking Saxon interior.]
Beyond it we gain the highroad that leads down on the left into
Dorchester. The right-hand route conducts up Yellowham Hill to
Piddletown; or the stranger may on some summer day be well content to
lose himself in the sylvan wilds in the valley of the Frome, through
the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, where the rustic cottage that was the
birthplace of Thomas Hardy may be seen on the very verge of the open,
under Ilsington Woods. There, where the blue wood-smoke from rustic
chimneys ascends amid dense foliage, and where the swart heaths begin,
he learned his “wood-notes wild.” Piddletown Church, with its monuments
of the Martins of Athelhampton, and the fine Jacobean minstrel gallery,
is well worth seeing, for its own sake and for its associations in
the Wessex novels, in which it figures prominently as “Weatherbury.”
At Lower Walterstone, about one mile north, is the beautiful Jacobean
farmhouse described in _Far from the Madding Crowd_ as the home of
Bathsheba Everdene.
Coming into Dorchester, the road traverses the water-meadows of
the Frome, over the spot called Ten Hatches, and across the little
bridges that were the scene of Henchard’s despair, in _The Mayor
of Casterbridge_. “Casterbridge,” as everyone familiar with Wessex
knows, is Dorchester--and an excellent name, too, for this grave town
of early British and Roman antecedents. It would be vain to pretend
that Dorchester is picturesque. If you expect in it nodding gables,
and half-timbered fifteenth-century buildings to be the note of
it, you will experience a disappointment in seeing the real thing.
For the general aspect of the town is one of Georgian four-square
respectability, and sky-lines are apt to be horizontal instead of at
acute angles. There are, however, older things by far at Dorchester.
At Fordington, for instance, which is an integral part of the town,
there have been discovered Roman remains, as, indeed, they have been
plentifully unearthed all in and about the borough. The tympanum
over the south door of the parish church is exceptionally well worth
inspection. It is a very remarkable example of Norman sculpture, and
represents the miraculous appearance of St. George on horseback at the
Battle of Dorylæum. The figures are full of life and vigour, except
those represented as being dead, and they look very dead indeed. St.
George is shown in the act of thrusting his lance into the mouth
of one of the enemy, who vainly endeavours to pluck it out. At the
back are two others of the foe, stricken with fear at this horrible
sight, and praying on their knees for mercy. The peculiar interest of
this sculpture lies in the fact that all the actors in this scene are
represented in Norman chain-mail.
[Illustration: NEAR MAIDEN CASTLE.
The prehistoric earthworks frown darkly against the skyline to the west
of Dorchester.]
There is an unmistakably “county-town” atmosphere in Dorchester, which
is a distinctly urban place, and not now of that thinly-modified
rusticity described long ago by Thomas Hardy: “The farmer’s boy could
sit under his barleymow and pitch a stone into the window of the town
clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned
a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa’ that floated
in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
No, modern Dorchester is not like that, and its chief features--the
noble elm avenues, that struck the traveller by road into and out of
the town with admiration--have had their exquisite nobility qualified
by time and change. Those grand avenues extended north, south, east,
and west; but to-day they have in some cases disappeared, and in
others have been obscured by suburban buildings, that have shut out the
views of the fields from the pavements. Dorchester, however, is rich in
notable things. As you enter it from Piddletown and Ten Hatches, and
rise up along High East Street to Cornhill, which is the very centre
of the town, you approach the grey old church of St. Peter, and note
in the flagged space beneath the tower the bronze statue of William
Barnes, the “Dorset poet,” 1801–1886, with a verse aptly chosen from
his own writings:
Zoo now I hope his kindly fëace
Is gone to vind a better plëace,
But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
He’ll always be a’ kept in mind.
Thus appropriately, in the olden Wessex folk-speech he did so much to
preserve, is the memory of the amiable “Pa’son Barnes” kept alive.
Much else is changed, but still on market-days the country-folk come
pouring into what they to this day call “Darchester.” They come into
it chiefly by carrier’s cart, or by dogcarts and other road vehicles,
just as of yore; and although the market-day assemblage of carriers’
tilt-carts is an astonishing survival in numerous old English towns,
there are nowhere to be seen so astonishingly many as here; and
the occupants of them are not infrequently such genuine old crusted
characters as you read of, and wag the same old Wessex tongue. For
the rest, Dorchester has the Roman encampment of Poundbury and the
amphitheatre of Maumbury to show; in High West Street is the house,
duly marked, where the infamous Judge Jeffreys lodged when on his
Assize of Blood in 1685, and in the Town Hall his chair is shown. While
some things have changed, other trivial details have remained the
same for considerably over a century. Thus, Rowlandson in 1797 made
a drawing of King George III. being driven in a post-chaise to the
“King’s Arms.” The “King’s Arms” Hotel still stands where it did, and
looks in every respect the selfsame place, which is itself a remarkable
proof of the abiding nature of our institutions; but what is yet more
remarkable is the fact that the selfsame, indubitable individual old
flower-pots are on the roof of the portico yet. In the face of the
destiny of all flower-pots to be resolved at some time into potsherds,
and in view of the many times when the roof of that portico must have
been used, on election and other occasions, as a convenient place
whence to harangue excited crowds, their survival is strange indeed.
For the rest, a gruesome little cottage will be found by taking the
road out of High West Street known as Glydepath Lane, and following
it to a fine damp situation near the river. It is only gruesome
when you know its old story; otherwise it is a quite idyllic little
thatched cottage, and stands in a nice garden. But it is handy to
Dorchester Gaol, and it was the hangman’s cottage. In this same
street is a mingled grim and stately great early eighteenth-century
mansion, known as Colyton House. The hideously battered keystone
mask in the blocked-up archway of one of its outbuildings has been
appropriated, and made literary capital of, by Mr. Hardy in _The Mayor
of Casterbridge_. “High Place Hall,” the home of Lucetta, Henchard’s
lady-love in that story, is really a house at the corner of South
Street and Durngate Street, but he transfers the unlovely thing from
Colyton House to it. He has an extraordinary aptitude for seeing
something malignant and inimical in lifeless objects, and you are
almost persuaded that there was some malevolence in this that wrought
Henchard’s ruin.
[Illustration: FORDINGTON.
The village stands upon a steep bank above the Frome at the eastern
extremity of Porchester, and looks picturesquely out upon the
water-meadows.]
Comparatively few are those who explore from Dorchester along the old
Exeter road to Bridport, for the scenery is wild and the road lonely
and steep. Well, then, what of that? Those places are few indeed where
level roads accompany rugged scenery. Explore those fourteen miles.
Truly they will reward the amateur of scenery: the lofty ridge whose
summit is reached three parts of the way revealing widespreading views
out to sea on the left, and over wonderful hills and vales inland on
the right. You have a taste of what this route is like immediately
after leaving Dorchester and its western avenue behind, for cresting
the sky-line of the downs on the left are the giant prehistoric
earthworks of Maiden Castle, glooming darkly upon the road. Who delved
the deep and lofty ditches and embankments, the amazing concentric and
overlapping circles enclosing the vast camp on yonder height? Nay, who
among the ancient peoples that warred in Britain from the earliest
prehistoric times until the dawn of history did _not_ have a hand in
that immense fortification and camp of refuge? It was old when the
Romans came and added their quota of spade-work to it. But this at
least we may deduce from those cyclopean earthworks: that those who
made them and added to them must have been horribly afraid, thus to
seek the defensive so diligently, instead of going out to battle in the
open. Unquestionably, ancient warfares must have raged along this way,
for prehistoric tumuli are plentiful along the downs as we progress.
Passing Bridehead Park, a road leads steeply down on the left to
Longbredy, where will be found the deserted old manor-house of Kingston
Russell, whence the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity
in 1502, in the person of the courtly and ingratiating John Russell.
Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy was also born here, and under the
same roof died John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic,
some thirty years ago. Approaching Bridport, a stone at the corner of
the hedgerow in Lee Lane on the right commemorates what Fuller styles
the “Miraculous Divergence,” the escape of Charles II., September 23,
1651, when he baffled his pursuers by turning out of the main road at
this point.
[Illustration: BLACKMORE VALE.
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown and the springs never dry.”--THOMAS HARDY.]
Bridport town stands upon its sponsorial little river, Brit, about
one and a half miles from the sea, at West Bay. There, on the exposed
seashore of what is often styled “Deadman’s Bay,” the river slides
into the Channel. West Bay is the queerest of places. It has a small
harbour, formed by locking up the river behind lock-gates, and two
parallel wooden jetties start hazardously out from the beach. In and
out of this harbour small sailing-vessels make their way; and certain
scattered cottages, the Bridport Arms Inn, and some few recent houses,
all standing in the sands and minute gravel of the Chesil Beach, which
ends here, make believe that West Bay is a seaside resort. On either
side of it the cliffs rise to great heights, and are partly of a
friable, earthy nature, yellow in hue.