CERNE ABBAS--THE VALE OF BLACKMORE--SHERBORNE--SHAFTESBURY
Northwards out of Dorchester we come by favour of the long straight
old Bristol road into the heart of the great Wessex dairying district
of Blackmore Vale; but before reaching that region of green fatness
we pass through the country associated in the minds of all readers of
the Wessex novels with _The Woodlanders_. The road goes through the
village of Charminster and in the valley of the little river Cerne,
under the chalk downs that gradually rise as the decayed town of Cerne
Abbas is approached. Just where the shoulders of those lofty chalk
hills are at their highest and steepest, the stranger will see with
that gasp of astonishment which is the proper meed of such a thing the
gigantic figure of a man outlined upon the grass. This is the “Giant
of Cerne,” who well deserves that name, for he is 180 feet high. He
is represented wielding an immense club, which he flourishes over his
head. The history of this singular figure is, like that of the several
“White Horses” cut on hillsides in various parts of England, and like
the famous “Long Man of Wilmington,” on the downs near Eastbourne,
unknown. Whether the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Cerne traced
his outlines, or whether, as legends declare, this was a work of the
early pagan Saxons, and intended by them to represent their god, Heil,
to whom human sacrifices were offered here, must ever be matters for
conjecture.
If you would make acquaintance with a dead town, allow me to introduce
you to Cerne Abbas. It is a weary, age-worn place, a little off the
main road, and rapidly falling into decay. It suffered when the
great abbey, of which the noble Perpendicular gatehouse remains, was
dissolved; but it experienced a considerable revival in the great days
for agriculture, when the Napoleonic wars sent up the price of corn
and made the farmers happy. You may see the signs of this in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century houses in the place, with
large shop-fronts. Those shop-fronts tell a tale, for they are for the
greater part no longer shops, and serve as the immeasurably too large
windows for sitting-rooms. The great final causes of the decline and
fall of Cerne Abbas were the coming of railways, which rendered so many
small towns and rural markets no longer necessary, and the failure
of agriculture. So Cerne is dead. You will find no deader townlet in
England. Therefore let us pace reverently her empty streets.
We now come between the hills to the pretty village of Minterne
Magna, which is the “Great Hintock” of _The Woodlanders_. “Here,”
says a rustic wag in that story, “you do see the world and life.”
Not much, though, for although the old Bristol road is still an
excellent highway, it is not precisely crowded. Beyond the extremely
small village the road reaches the steep escarpment whence the great
bastioned mid-Dorset heights go, in many places with dramatic steepness
down into the far-spreading Blackmore Vale. The road itself naturally
descends at the least steep place to the levels of Middlemarsh; but
it is very well worth while to explore for some distance along the
by-road to the left, which follows the very edge of this ridge. Here
is the lofty height of High Stoy, with its great neighbours, Dogbury,
Bulbarrow, and Nettlecombe Tout. Three miles along this byway brings
you past the most striking scenery to the lofty down above Batcombe,
passing on the way the lonely, mysterious stone pillar called
“Cross-in-Hand,” associated with a dramatic episode in _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_. It is described rather curiously in those pages as “the
scene of a miracle or murder, or both.”
Beyond where Batcombe Church is seen, down in the profound vale, the
road goes into a secluded region, where the three Melbury villages and
that of Evershot cluster about the noble Melbury Park, seat of the
Earl of Ilchester. The great mansion is the “King’s Hintock Court,” of
that delightful story, “The First Countess of Wessex,” in _A Group of
Noble Dames_. The tiny village of Melbury Osmund, the Hardyean “Little
Hintock,” is described, aptly enough, by one of his characters as “such
a small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if you
don’t know where ’tis.”
Returning now from these Arcadian recesses, we descend by the old
Bristol road into the vale at Middlemarsh, a part of that Vale of
Blackmore which has been described with such complete justness as “This
fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never
brown and the springs never dry.... The atmosphere is languorous, and
is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance
partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest
ultramarine.” Dense scrub-woods are at first met as we gain the
Marshwood level, and then die away as Holnest is reached--Holnest, with
its little church quite dwarfed by the huge mausoleum erected by the
late J. S. W. S. Erle-Drax for himself. Near at hand is Holnest Lodge,
one of that eccentric squire’s residences, still with the tall column
in front, crested by a bronze statue of himself, erected by himself to
his own honour and glory, since no one else was in the least likely to
do so much for him.
In less than five miles we come into Sherborne, that pleasant old town
which still bears some considerable traces of that cathedral-city
dignity of which it was deprived so long ago as 1078. It is situated
in a little vale of its own, the Vale of that _Scir burne_, or clear,
sparkling brook, which made the spot seem so desirable to the monks
who were settled here by King Ina as early as A.D. 705. That stream
originated the place-name, while losing its own, for it is identical
with the River Yeo, or Ivel, which in turn gives a name to Yeovil
town, anciently called “Ivell.”
The great glory of Sherborne is, of course, its noble abbey church,
standing in its own precincts, reached through a low-browed archway
out of the main street, past the beautiful old “Monks’ Conduit.” This
minster-like church--really a minster in the technical sense of the
word, it having been the church of a Benedictine monastery--is grouped
with the buildings of the Grammar School, itself founded by Edward VI.
from the spoils of that dissolved religious house, and having its home
in the old domestic buildings of those Black Monks. It is a stately
grouping. The great church itself is of the loveliest form and colour.
Externally presenting the appearance of a Late Perpendicular building,
with architectural details exhibiting the approach of the Renaissance,
the interior discloses, particularly in the transepts, the fact that
the core of the building is actually in great degree Norman, and that
the late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century work is practically a
refacing in a later fashion. But the choir is a rebuilding, effected
after the fire of 1437--a fire which still shows its traces in the
reddened patches on the golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone, whose lovely
tints contribute so greatly to the beauty of the soaring architecture
of clerestory and delicate fan vaulting. Sherborne, history will not
forget, gave a lead in modern times to the passion for historical
pageants, inaugurated here in the great Sherborne Pageant held in the
grounds of Sherborne Castle Park, 1905. There, amid the ruins of the
ancient Bishop’s Castle, the story of the town for over a thousand
years was retold.
Some five miles west is Yeovil, that great dairying centre; that neat
and prosperous town, looking so bright and cheerful with its houses
of the yellow Ham Hill stone, a sandstone that reveals itself in the
wayside cuttings as you descend towards it down Babylon Hill. But
Yeovil has little of antiquity to show the visitor, except those two
old inns, the George and the Castle, which face one another in High
Street, for it has rebuilt itself pretty thoroughly.
Sixteen miles eastward of Sherborne stands the hill-top town of
Shaftesbury, to which railways do not come, and from whose eyrie all
modern developments turn aside. The milestones tell a strange tale of
so many miles to “Shaston,” and it is not always that the traveller
understands Shaftesbury to be indicated under that disguise, but as
such it still remains in rustic speech. The novelist tells us, in one
voice with the ascertained history of the place, how Shaftesbury was
originally the British “Caer Palladour.” It possessed three mints,
twelve satellite churches, attendant upon a magnificent abbey, and many
other architectural glories, for which the stucco-fronted eighteenth
and early nineteenth century houses which now constitute the main
part of the town are a sorry exchange. All those magnificences have
disappeared, like the baseless fabric of a vision; and antiquaries
to-day, grubbing in trenches and turning over potato-patches, can do
little more than retrieve a few shattered stones and broken tiles that
hint of the vanished abbey’s former existence. Three parish churches
remain, and form a very generous provision for the small place that
Shaftesbury long since became. But if, architecturally speaking, the
town is so negligible, the distant views, both of it and from it, are
grand. Blackmore Vale is disclosed perhaps to its greatest advantage
from these heights, in that southward view between St. Peter’s Church
and the massive time-stained buttresses on the right hand, which mark
the precincts of the long-abolished abbey. The road descends from this
point, incredibly steep, and quite impossible for anything on wheels,
seeing that it goes down in a series of gigantic sett-paved stairs.
Framed in thus romantically, the view across the most beautiful part
of the Vale of Blackmore extends far away until it melts in a blue
vagueness.
The streets of Shaftesbury have names a good deal more picturesque than
the houses that front upon them. That of “Bimport” is an example. In
that quiet thoroughfare is the house styled in _Jude the Obscure_ “Old
Grove’s Place.” It is easily recognizable by reason of its projecting
porch.
[Illustration: THE BRIDPORT ARMS.
The old inn forms part of some scattered groups of houses at West Hay,
near Bridport. The place is chiefly a waste of sand.]