CALSHOT CASTLE AND THE OLD SOUTH-EASTERN COAST.
[Illustration: Calshot Castle]
This corner of the Forest, once perhaps the most beautiful, is now the
least known, because, to most people, so inaccessible. It lies quite by
itself. No railway yet disfigures its fields and dells. The best way to
see it and the whole Forest is to cross the ferry at Southampton, and
land at the hard at Hythe. And as we cross, behind us, amongst a clump
of trees, rises the ruined west end of Netley Abbey Church, and the
modern tower on Henry VIII.’s Fort; whilst, lower down, the new
Government Hospital loads the shore with all its costly ugliness. If we
have not, perhaps, yet reached the height of Continental profanity which
has turned the Convent of Cordova into barracks, and St. Bernard’s
Monastery at Clairvaux into a prison, and the Church of Cluny into
racing stables, we yet seem to delight to place side by side with the
noblest conceptions that ever rose in beauty from English ground, our
modern abortions. There is not a cathedral town whose minster-square is
not disgraced by some pretentious shed. And now Government not only
invades the country, but chooses above all, the better to display our
folly, that place which the old Cistercian monks had for ever made
sacred by the loveliness of faith and work.
Hythe is only a little village, but as its name shows, once the port of
the New Forest.[63] The Forest, however, has now receded from it, and in
this chapter we shall see nothing of its woods. The district, however,
is too important in a historical point of view to be omitted. The walk,
even though it is not over wild moors and commons, is still very
beautiful. True English lanes will lead us by quiet dells, with glimpses
here and there through hedgerow elms of the blue Southampton water, down
to the shore of the Solent.
So, leaving Hythe[64] and going southward, skirting Cadlands Park, we
reach Fawley, the Falalie and Falegia of _Domesday_, where Walkelin,
Bishop of Winchester, held in demesne, as Abbey land, one hyde and three
yardlands. The whole of the manor was thrown into the Forest, but in its
place now are ploughed fields and grass pastures. The church, with its
central tower, stands at the entrance of the village, and its handsome
Romanesque doorway shows plainly that the Conqueror did not destroy
every place of worship. The building was partially restored in 1844, but
the pillars on the north side of the chancel were copied from the
original Norman work, which, with the three piscinas and the hagioscope,
give it a further interest to the ecclesiologist.
After Fawley, the walk becomes more beautiful. We pass deep lanes and
scattered cottages set in their trim gardens, when suddenly on the shore
rises the round gray castle of Calshot, standing at the very end of a
bar of sand, separating the Southampton water from the Solent. Though
much repaired, it stands not much altered from Henry VIII.’s original
blockhouse. Once of great importance, its garrison now consists of only
the coastguard and a master-gunner. Its walls are still strong,
measuring in the lower embrasures sixteen feet through, but the upper
storeys are much slighter. On the west side is cut the date 1513, whilst
some stone cannon balls of the Commonwealth period show the importance
Cromwell attached to the place. But the stronger fortifications of
Hurst, and the new batteries in the Isle of Wight, have done away with
its necessity, and it stands now only as a monument of Tudor patriotism
and of Cromwell’s care.[65]
But the place has older associations than these. In _The Chronicle_ and
_Florence of Worcester_ we read[66] that, in 495, Cerdic and his son
Cynric arrived with five ships, and landed at Cerdices-ora, and on the
same day defeated the natives. No site has given rise to so much
discussion as this Cerdices-ora. Mr. Thorpe in one place says it is not
known, whilst in another, by an evident oversight, he fixes upon
Charford.[67] Dr. Guest places it at the mouth of the river Itchen,[68]
whilst Mr. Pearson and others have identified it with Yarmouth.[69] Now,
I think there can be little doubt, looking both at the etymology of the
name and the situation, that Calshot is the true place. The land here
runs out into the sea with no less than ten fathoms of water close to
it, so that large vessels can to this day lie alongside the Castle. It
is the first part, too, of the mainland which can be reached, and on its
north side offers a safe anchorage. Besides, about four miles off stand
some barrows, which, though we may not be able to identify them as
covering those slain in the first battle which the West-Saxons fought,
offer some presumption in favour of that theory. In the very word
Calshot, and its intermediate forms of Caushot, Caldshore, and
Cauldshore,[70] we may, without difficulty, recognize a corruption of
the original Cerdices-ora of the _Chronicle_ and _Florence_. The word is
formed like the names of various places close by, such as Needsore (the
under-shore) and Stansore Point.[71] But going farther back, we come
much nearer to its original form in the old Forest perambulation made in
the eighth year of Edward I., where it is spelt Kalkesore.[72] As then,
Charford, on the north-east borders of the New Forest, is the
representative of Cerdices-ford, where Cerdic’s last victory was gained
over Ambrosius; so here, I think, at the south-west, near Kalkesore, now
Calshot, was his first achieved.
From this point the scenery completely changes. Instead of lanes and
cultivated fields, the shingly beach of the Solent, covered in places to
the water’s edge with woods, sweeps away to the west. Passing on to
Eagle-hurst, and noticing the truth of the termination even to this day,
let us sit down on the shore. Here is a view which should be remembered.
In one sense the world cannot show its equal. Far away to the east
stretches the low Hampshire coast, ended by the harbour of Portsmouth
and its bare forest of masts. To the south, towards Spithead, rides the
long line of battle-ships; and round the harbours of the two Cowes sail
fleets of yachts, showing how much still of the old Scandinavian blood
runs in our veins—of the spirit which finds employment in adventure and
delight in danger. Steamers, with their black pennants of smoke, hurry
down the narrow strait, carrying the news or the merchandise of the
world; whilst all is overshadowed by supreme natural beauty, the hills
of the Isle of Wight standing boldly up, crested with their soft green
downs, and their dark purple shadows resting fold over fold on the
valley sides. Still continuing along the shore we reach Leap, a small
fishing village, where boats ply across from its hard to the Island. Its
name is, perhaps, derived from the Old-English _leap_, a weel, or basket
for catching fish.[73] Here, it is said, but I know not on what
authority save that worst—tradition, that the Dauphin, afterwards Louis
VIII. of France, embarked after the defeat of his army at Lincoln, and
his fleet off Dover. Certain it is that he had adherents to his cause in
the neighbourhood, especially in William de Vernon, whose arms were
formerly blazoned with his own in the east window of the north aisle of
the Forest Church of Boldre.[74]
On somewhat better authority,[75] it rests that the unhappy Charles I.,
on the 13th of November, 1647, outwitted by his enemies and deceived by
his friends, entrusted himself, after his flight from Hampton Court, to
Colonel Hammond, and, embarking here, returned by Hurst to atone for the
past by his life.
But of greater interest is the Roman Road which connected Leap with
Southampton and Winchester in one direction, and Ringwood and the west
in another. Its traces may be found not only here but on the opposite
side, where, still known by the Norman name of Rue Street, it passes
westward of Carisbrook to the extreme south of the Island.[76] Its old
appellation is preserved, too, on this side in the name of a
farmhouse—King’s Rue, and Rue Copse, and Rue Common; and it is well
worthy of notice that this word is even now sometimes used in the
Forest, as in Sussex, for a row or hedgerow. Previous to it, however,
there existed a British track, still clearly visible across the Forest,
especially near Butts Ash barrows, by its deep depressions. Both roads,
though, can still tell us something of the past. The opinion of late
philologists and geographers, with the exception of Lappenburg and Sir
G. C. Lewis, has been against the idea that the Isle of Wight was the
Vectis or Ictis of the ancients. The argument, however, against the
passage in Diodorus Siculus,[77] that it would be so much easier for the
first traders to have exported the tin from Belerium instead of bringing
it by inland transport to the Island, and then shipping it to Gaul, is
founded upon ignorance. Sea carriage was then far more difficult and
dangerous than land conveyance. Ancient mariners were easily frightened,
and their vessels put into land every night. As Sir G. C. Lewis further
remarks, foreign merchants were always regarded with jealousy and
distrust, and the overland route would enable the traffic to be carried
out through the whole distance by native traders.[78]
Singularly enough, however, Warner[79] states that a large mass of tin
was found on the very site of this old Roman road, or, rather, as the
fact of the mere shapeless mass would prove, on the older British track.
Not only, too, was tin brought here from Cornwall, but also, in later
times, lead from the Mendip Hills. Pigs of it have been picked up on a
branch of the same Roman road running from Uphill on the Severn to
Salisbury, and from thence joining the Leap road. One of them, stamped
with the name of Hadrian, is now in the Bath Museum. We are thus enabled
to connect Leap with the famous passage of the Greek historian.
Sir George Lewis’s theory has, too, been singularly corroborated in
other directions, especially by the large quantities of bronze ornaments
found during the excavations in the Swiss Lakes, 1853 and 1854, the
metals of which could only have been brought there by an overland route.
Further, too, we must not reject the account of Diodorus, because he
says that at low tide the tin was carried over in carts. We must
remember the extremely indefinite views of the ancients on all
geographical subjects. The vaguest ideas were held, especially about
Britain. Erring in a different direction, the mistake is not so bad as
Pliny’s, in making the Island six days’ sail from England. There seems,
however, a most natural explanation, that Diodorus, not having been
there, took for granted the wild traditions and rumours which reached
him, and which, even in these days, with only the slightest possible
variation of form, still hold their ground with the Forest peasantry, in
the legend that the stone of which Beaulieu Abbey is built was brought
over the dry bed of the Solent, in carts, from the Binstead Quarries.
Still the passage is not without the further difficulty, that Diodorus
seems, from the context, to have supposed that the Island was situated
close to where the tin was dug. This, again, must be set down to that
ignorance of geography, which has involved all Greek writers in such
extraordinary mistakes.
Leap itself is now nothing but a village, with a scattered agricultural
population; some few, however, maintaining themselves by fishing in the
summer, and in the winter by shooting the ducks and geese which flock to
the creeks and harbours of the Solent. Leaving it, and still keeping
westward, we come to the Beaulieu river, where, in the autumn, after the
heavy floods from the Forest, the salmon leap and sport in the freshets.
The road now winds past Exbury by the side of thick copses which fringe
the river. At last, at Hill Top, we reach Beaulieu Heath, and, in the
far distance, the green foliage of the Forest hangs cloudlike in the
air, whilst down in the valley lies the village of Beaulieu.
[Illustration: The Norman Doorway of Fawley Church.]