THE
HARDY COUNTRY
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF
THE WESSEX NOVELS
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
AUTHOR OF “THE INGOLDSBY COUNTRY,” ETC.
“Here shepherds pipe their rustic song,
Their flocks and rural nymphs among.”
ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1904
PREFACE
Dorsetshire, the centre of the “Hardy Country,” the home of the Wessex Novels, is a land literally flowing with milk and honey: a land of great dairies, of flowers and bees, of rural industries, where rustic ways and speech and habits of thought live long, and the kindlier virtues are not forgotten in such stress of life as prevails in towns: a land desirable for its own sweet self, where you may see the beehives in cottage gardens and therefrom deduce that honey of which I have spoken, and where that flow of milk is no figure of speech. You may indeed hear the swish of it in the milking pails at almost every turn of every lane.
Thatch survives in every village, as nowhere else, and here quaint towns maintain their quaintness at all odds, while elsewhere foolish folk seek to be—as they phrase it—“up to date.” It is good, you think, who explore these parts, to be out of date and reckless of all the tiresome worries of modernity.
Spring is good in Dorset, summer better, autumn—when the kindly fruits of the earth are ingathered and the smell of pomace is sweet in the mellow air—best. Winter? Well, frankly, I don’t know.
To all these natural advantages has been added in our generation the romantic interest of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s novels of rural life and character, in which real places are introduced with a lavish hand. The identity of those places is easily resolved; and, that feat performed, there is that compelling force in his genius which inevitably, sooner or later, magnetically draws those who have read, to see for themselves what manner of places and what folk they must be in real life, from whose characteristics such poignant tragedy, such suave and admirable comedy, have been evolved. I have many a time explored Egdon, and observed the justness of the novelist’s description of that sullen waste: have traversed Blackmoor Vale, where “the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” but where the roads—it is a cyclist’s criticism—are always shockingly bad: in fine, have visited every literary landmark of the Wessex Novels. If I have not found the rustics so sprack-witted as they are in The Return of the Native and other stories—why, I never expected so to find them, for I did not imagine the novelist to be a reporter. But—this is in testimony to the essential likeness to life of his women—I know “Bathsheba”; only she is not a farmer, nor in “Do’set,” and I have met “Viviette” and “Fancy.” They were called by other names, ’tis true; but they were, and are, those distracting characters come to life.
A word in conclusion. No attempt has here been made to solemnly “expound” the novelist. He, I take it, expounds himself. Nor has it been thought necessary to exclude places simply for the reason that they by some chance do not find mention in the novels. These pages are, in short, just an attempt to record impressions received of a peculiarly beautiful and stimulating literary country, and seek merely to reflect some of the joy of the explorer and the enthusiasm of an ardent admirer of the novelist, who here has given tongues to trees and a voice to every wind.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
Petersham, Surrey,
July 1904.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
PAGE
I.
PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
1
II.
WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
9
III.
WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL
16
IV.
STOCKBRIDGE TO SALISBURY AND STONEHENGE
26
V.
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD
35
VI.
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER
47
VII.
DORCHESTER
62
VIII.
DORCHESTER (continued)
74
IX.
SWANAGE
84
X.
SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE
92
XI.
CORFE CASTLE
105
XII.
WAREHAM
114
XIII.
WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS
122
XIV.
BERE REGIS
133
XV.
THE HEART OF THE HARDY COUNTRY
148
XVI.
DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL
168
XVII.
SHERBORNE
178
XVIII.
SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
191
XIX.
SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH (continued)
205
XX.
WEYMOUTH
214
XXI.
THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
222
XXII.
WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER
232
XXIII.
WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE
246
XXIV.
BOURNEMOUTH TO POOLE
257
XXV.
WIMBORNE MINSTER
270
XXVI.
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
277
XXVII.
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY (continued)
288
XXVIII.
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO HORTON AND MONMOUTH ASH
297
XXIX.
OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW
302
INDEX
313
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Weymouth: St. Mary Street and Statue of George III.
Frontispiece
Fawley Magna
3
High Street, Oxford, Facing
4
High Street, Winchester
Winchester Cathedral, Facing
14
Weyhill Fair
24
Salisbury Cathedral
30
Stonehenge
32
Pentridge
36
Eastbury
41
Blandford Forum
45
The Old Manor-House, Milborne St. Andrew
49
Weatherbury Castle
50
The Obelisk, Weatherbury Castle
51
Piddletown
55
A Quaint Corner in Piddletown
57
Lower Walterstone Farm; Original of “Bathsheba’s Farm” in Far from the Madding Crowd
59
Ten Hatches, Dorchester
69
Dorchester Gaol
75
The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester
77
Colyton House, Dorchester
79
The Old Church, Swanage
89
Encombe
95
Corfe Castle
99
Corfe Castle, Facing
106
Approach to Wareham: The Walls of Wareham
116
Wareham
119
The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey
123
Woolbridge House
125
Woolbridge House: Entrance Front
127
Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath, Facing
128
Chamberlain’s Bridge
130
Rye Hill, Bere Regis
131
Bere Regis
135
Bere Regis
Bere Regis: Interior of Church
141
“Toothache,” Bere Regis
143
“Headache,” Bere Regis
143
Bere Regis: The Turberville Window
145
Stinsford Church; the “Mellstock” of Under the Greenwood Tree
149
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy
158
Birthplace of Thomas Hardy
159
The Duck Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn in The Return of the Native
161
Tincleton
163
An Egdon Farmstead
165
A Farm on Egdon
166
Cross-in-Hand, Facing
170
Batcombe
171
Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”
173
Melbury House, Facing
174
Sherborne Abbey Church, Facing
184
Long Burton
192
Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum
194
Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore
195
Cerne Abbas
201
The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey, Facing
202
The Cerne Giant
203
Cerne Abbas
206
Wolveton House
207
Weymouth and Portland from the Ridgeway
209
The Wishing Well, Upwey
211
Weymouth Harbour
219
Sandsfoot Castle
223
Bow and Arrow Castle
229
Portisham
The Road out of Abbotsbury
235
Sheep-Shearing in Wessex, Facing
236
West Bay, Bridport
239
High Street and Town Hall, Bridport
243
Sutton Poyntz: the “Overcombe” of The Trumpet Major
247
Bincombe
249
Poxwell Manor
251
Owermoigne: the Smugglers’ Haunt in The Distracted Preacher
253
Lulworth Cove
254
Lulworth Cove
255
Lytchett Heath: The Equestrian Effigy of George III.: Entrance to Charborough Park, Facing
256
Bournemouth: The Invalids’ Walk
258
Poole Quay
267
Sturminster Marshall: Anthony Etricke’s Tomb, Wimborne Minster, Facing
270
The Wimborne Clock Jack
273
Wimborne Minster: the Minster and the Grammar School, Facing
274
The Tower, Charborough Park
281
Weather-vane at Shapwick: the “Shapwick Monster”
283
The Maypole, Shillingstone
285
Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn
286
Marnhull
289
Gold Hill, Shaftesbury
295
The Observatory, Horton, Facing
298
Horton Inn: the “Lorton Inn” of Barbara of the House of Grebe
299
Monmouth Ash
300
Bingham’s Melcombe
303
Milton Abbas, Facing
306
Milton Abbas, an Early “Model” Village
307
Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey
Milton Abbey
310
Turnworth House
311
CHAPTER I
PRELIMINARIES: THE HARDY COUNTRY DEFINED; FAWLEY MAGNA; OXFORD
In the literary partition of England, wherein the pilgrim may discover tracts definitely and indissolubly dedicated to Dickens, to Tennyson, to Ingoldsby, and many another, no province has been so thoroughly annexed or so effectively occupied as that associated with the Wessex novels written by Mr. Thomas Hardy. He holds Wessex in fee-simple, to the exclusion of all others; and so richly topographical are all those romances, that long ere sketch-maps showing his literary occupancy of it were prepared and published in the uniform edition of his works, there were those to whom the identity of most of his scenes offered no manner of doubt. By the circumstances of birth and of lifelong residence, the “Wessex” of the novels has come to denote chiefly his native county of Dorset, and in especial the neighbourhood of Dorchester, the county town; but Mr. Hardy was early an expansionist, and his outposts were long ago thrown forward, to at last make his Wessex in the domain of letters almost coterminous with that ancient kingdom of Saxon times, which included all England south of the Thames and west of Sussex, with the exception of Cornwall. The very excellent sketch-map prepared for the definitive edition of Mr. Hardy’s works very clearly shows the comparative density of the literary settlements he has made. Glancing at it, you at once perceive that what he chooses to term “South Wessex”—named in merely matter-of-fact gazetteers Dorsetshire—is thickly studded with names of his own mintage, unknown to guidebook or ordnance map, and presently observe that the surrounding divisions of Upper, North, Mid, Outer, and Lower Wessex—as who should say Hampshire, Berkshire, Wilts, Somerset, and Devon—are, to follow the simile already adopted, barely colonised.
His nearest frontier-post towards London is Castle Royal, to be identified with none other than Windsor; while near by are Gaymead (Theale), Aldbrickham (Reading), and Kennetbridge (Newbury). In the midst of that same division of North Wessex, or Berkshire, are marked Alfredston and Marygreen, respectively the little town of Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great, and the small village of Fawley Magna, placed on the draughty skyline of the bare and shivery Berkshire downs.
Then, near the eastern border of Upper Wessex is Quartershot, or Aldershot, and farther within its confines Stoke-Barehills, by which name Basingstoke and the unclothed uplands partly surrounding it are indicated. Its “gaunt, unattractive, ancient church” is accurately imaged in a phrase, and it is just as true that the most familiar object of the place is “its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediæval ruins beside the railway”; for indeed Basingstoke cemetery and the fine ruins of the chapel once belonging to the religious who, piously by intent, but rather blasphemously to shocked ears, styled themselves the “Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost,” stand immediately without the railway station. At Stoke-Barehills, Jude and Sue, visiting the Agricultural Show, were observed by Arabella, Jude’s sometime wife, with some jealousy.
Finally, northernmost of all these transfigured outer landmarks, is Christminster, the university town and city of Oxford, whose literary name in these pages derives from the cathedral of Christ there. This remote corner of his kingdom is especially and solely devoted to the grievous story of Jude the Obscure, a pitiful tale of frustrated ambition, originally published serially in Harper’s Magazine, under the much more captivating, if less descriptive, title of Hearts Insurgent. The story opens at Fawley Magna, to whose identity a clue is found in the name of Fawley given the unhappy Jude. The village, we are told, was “as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an upland adjoining the undulating North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. . . . Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilised as pigsty walls, garden-seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of German-Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day.” Who was that obliterator thus held up to satire? Inquiries prove the church to have been rebuilt in 1866, and its architect to have been none other than G. E. Street, R.A., than whom the middle Victorian period had no more accomplished architect. Truly enough, its design is something alien, but candour compels the admission that, however detached from local traditions, it is really a very fine building, and its designer quite undeserving of so slighting a notice.
From Fawley the scene of Jude’s tragedy changes to Christminster, the Oxford of everyday commerce. Oft had he, as a boy, seen from this vantage-point the faint radiance of its lights reflected from the sky at night, twenty miles away. His anticipations and disillusionments, his strong resolves and stumblings by the way, over stumbling-blocks of his own and of extraneous making, picture a strong character brought low, like Samson by Delilah—cheated of scholarly ambition by the guardians of learning, who open its gates only to wealth or scholarships acquired by early opportunity. Take Jude the Obscure as you will, it forms a somewhat serious indictment of university procedure: “They raise pa’sons there, like radishes in a bed. ’Tis all learning there—nothing but learning, except religion.” Jude sought learning there, and Holy Orders, but never rose beyond his trade of stonemason, and, after many fitful wanderings through Wessex, ends tragically at Oxford.
Since Jude the Obscure was written Oxford has gained another historic personality, none the less real than the great figures of actual life who have trodden the pavements of its High Street. You may follow all the innermost thoughts of that mere character in a novel, and see fully exposed the springs that produce his actions; and thus he is made seem more human than all your Wolseys and great dignitaries, whose doings, smothered in dust, and whose motives, buried deep beneath
In one novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Mr. Hardy has made an expedition far beyond the confines of his Wessex. Away beyond “Lower Wessex,” or Devonshire—itself scarce more than incidentally referred to in the whole course of his writings—he takes the reader to the north coast of Cornwall, the “furthest westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border of the Wessex kingdom, on that side which, like the westering verge of modern American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.”
“Castle Boterel” he styles the stage of his tragical story of A Pair of Blue Eyes; a place to be found on maps under the style and title of Boscastle. That tiny port and harbour on the wildest part of a wild coast obtains its name, in a manner familiar to all students of Cornish topography, by a series of phonetic corruptions. Originally the site of a castle owned by the Norman family of De Bottreaux, its name has in the course of centuries descended from that knightly designation to that it now bears. Leland, four hundred years ago, described the place as “a very filthy Toun and il kept,” and probably had still in mind and in nostrils when he wrote the scent of the fish-cellars and the fish-offal which to this day go largely towards making up the bouquet of most of the smaller Cornish fishing-ports.
Still, as in Leland’s time, goes the little brook, running down from the tremendously hilly background “into the Severn Se betwixt 2 Hylles,” and still the harbour remains, from the mariner’s point of view, “a pore Havenet, of no certaine Salvegarde,” winding, as it does, in the shape of a double S, between gigantic rocky headlands, and most difficult of approach or exit. It will thus be guessed, and guessed rightly, that, although poor as a harbour, Boscastle is a place of commanding picturesqueness. Its Cornish atmosphere, too, confers upon it another distinction. In the romantic mind of the novelist the district is “pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom, of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.”
But it is not always like that at Boscastle. There are days of bright sunshine, when the sea is in colour something between a sapphire and an opal, when the cliffs reveal unexpected hues and the sands of Trebarrow—the “Trebarwith Strand” of the novel—shine golden, in contrast with the dark slaty headland of Willapark Point—the “cliff without a name” where Elfride, the owner of that pair of blue eyes, saves the prig, Henry Knight, by the singular expedient none other than the author of the Wessex novels would have conceived. The average reader may perhaps be allowed his opinion that it had been better for Elfride had she saved her underclothing and allowed Knight to drop from his precarious hand-hold on the cliff’s edge into the sea below waiting for him.
The town of “St. Launce’s” mentioned in the book is of course Launceston, and “Endelstow” is the village of St. Juliot’s.
CHAPTER II
WINCHESTER: THE ANCIENT CAPITAL OF WESSEX
But, to have done with these preliminary triflings in the marches of the Hardy Country, let us consider in what way the Londoner may best come to a thoroughgoing exploration of this storied land. On all counts—by force of easy access, and by its ancient circumstance—Winchester is indicated. “The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, afore-time capital of Wessex,” stands at the gate of this literary country and hard by the confines of the New Forest, to which by tradition and history it is closely akin. At one in feeling with that hoary hunting preserve, it is itself modern in but little measure, and loves to linger upon memories of the past. Here the Saxon and the Norman are not merely historical counters with which, to the ideas of unimaginative students, the dusty game of history was played; but do, by the presence of their works, make the least impressionable feel that they were creatures of blood and fibre, strong to rule, to make and unmake nations; groping darkly in superstition, without doubt, but perceiving the light, distant and dim, and striving with all the strength of their strong natures to win toward it. They fought as sturdily for Christianity as they had done for paganism, and were not—it really seems necessary to insist upon it—creatures of parchment and the wax of which seals are sealed; but lived as human a life as ourselves, and loved and hated, and despaired and triumphed, just as keenly, nay, with perhaps even greater keenness, than any Edwardian liege of this twentieth century. Still runs the Itchen, bright and clear as when the Romans came and the Saxons followed, to be in their turn ousted in governance by the Norman-French; and still, although this England of ours be yet overlorded by the relics of Norman domination, it is the broad-shouldered, level-headed, stolid, and long-suffering Saxon who peoples Winchester and Wessex, and in him that ancient kingdom, although unknown to modern political geographies, survives.
Sweet and gracious city, I love you for old association and for your intrinsic worth, alike. Changing, although ever so slowly, with the years, your developments make, not as elsewhere, for black bitterness of heart and vain regrets for the things of sweet savour and good report, swept away into the dustheaps and potsherds of “progress,” but for content and happy assent. In these later years, for example, it has occurred to Winchester to honour Alfred, the great Wessex king, warrior and lawgiver, born at Wantage, warring over all southern England, ruling at Winchester, dead at Faringdon in A.D. 901, and buried here in a spot still shown, in the long desecrated Hyde Abbey. That is a noble, heroic-sized bronze effigy of him, erected in 1901, to commemorate the millenary of this hero-king, and one in thorough keeping with Winchester’s ancient dignity.
Near by, where its imposing
But that’s as may be. From this vantage-point by King Alfred’s statue—or “Ælfred,” as the inscription learnedly has it, to the confusion of the unscholarly—you may see, as described in Tess, “the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross to the bridge”; but you can only make out a portion of the squat, low Norman tower of the cathedral itself; for here, instead of being beckoned afar by lofty spire, you have to seek that ancient fane, and, diligently inquiring, at last find it. Best it is to come to the cathedral by way of that aforesaid mediæval cross in the High Street, hard by the curiously overhanging penthouse shops, and under a low-browed entry, which, to the astonishment of the stranger, instead of conducting into a backyard, brings one into the cathedral close, a lovely parklike space of trim lawns, ancient lime avenues, and noble old residences of cathedral dignitaries with nothing to do and exceedingly good salaries for doing it. It has been remarked, with an innocent, childlike wonder, that some sixty per cent. of the famous men whose careers are included in the Dictionary of National Biography were the sons of clergymen. No wonder at all, I take it, in this, for it is merely nature’s compensating swing of the pendulum. The parents, living a life of repose, have been storing up energy for the use of their offspring, and thus our greatest empire-makers and men of action, and some of our greatest scoundrels too, have derived from beneath the benignant shadow of the Church.
That squat, heavy Norman tower just now spoken of has a history to its squatness—a history bound up with the tragical death of Rufus. The grave of the Red King in the cathedral forms the colophon of a tragical story whose inner history has never been, and never will be, fully explained; but by all the signs and portents that preceded the ruthless king’s death at Stoney Cross, where his heart was pierced by the glanced arrow said to have been aimed at the wild red deer by Walter Tyrrell, it should seem that the clergy were more intimately connected with that “accident” than was seemly, even in the revengeful and bloodstained ecclesiastics of that time. It must not be forgotten that the king had despoiled the Church and the Church’s high dignitaries with a thorough and comprehensive spoliation, nor can it be blinked that certain of them had denounced him and prophesied disaster with an exactness of imagery possible only to those who had prepared the fulfilment of their boding prophecies. “Even now,” said one, “the arrow of retribution is fixed, the bow is stretched.” This was not metaphor, merely: they prophesied who had with certainty prepared fulfilment. And when the thing was consummated and the body of the Red King was buried in the choir beneath the original central tower, the ruin in which that tower fell, seven years later, was not, according to clerical opinion, due to faulty construction and the insufficient support given to its great crushing weight by the inadequate pillars, but to the fact that one was buried beneath who had not received the last rites of the Church. If indeed that be so, the mills of God certainly do grind slowly.
For the rest, the cathedral is the longest in England. Longer than Ely, longer than St. Albans, it measures from east to west no less than 556 feet. As we read in the story of Lady Mottisfont, Wintoncester, among all the romantic towns in Wessex, is for this reason “probably the most convenient for meditative people to live in; since there you have a cathedral with nave so long that it affords space in which to walk and summon your remoter moods without continually turning on your heel, or seeming to do more than take an afternoon stroll under cover from the rain or sun. In an uninterrupted course of nearly three hundred steps eastward, and again nearly three hundred steps westward amid those magnificent tombs, you can, for instance, compare in the most leisurely way the dry dustiness which ultimately pervades the persons of kings and bishops with the damper dustiness that is usually the final shape of commoners, curates, and others who take their last rest out-of-doors. Then, if you are in love, you can, by sauntering in the chapels and behind the episcopal chantries with the bright-eyed one, so steep and mellow your ecstasy in the solemnities around that it will assume a rarer and fairer tincture.”
In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered, ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.
But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.
CHAPTER III
WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL
From Wintoncester to Melchester—that is to say, from Winchester to Salisbury—is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley roads by King’s Somborne and Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious route and a puzzling. We will therefore take the highway and for the present leave the byways severely alone.
The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs relieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside varied at infrequent intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or absolute silences. But before the traveller comes thus out into the country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through the recent suburb of Fulflood; for “Winton” as its natives lovingly name it, and as the old milestones on this very road agree to style it, has after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing. It is not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester’s ancient kirtle, and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of Roebuck Hill. Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison, with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above
Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the crest of Roebuck Hill and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic mediævalism, spelled “Wyke.” For myself, did I reside there, I would certainly have my notepaper stamped “Wyke next Winchester,” and find much satisfaction therein. Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a characteristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.
And then? Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than they possess: every circumstance of their featureless rotundity disclosed from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the billhook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the preservation of a boundary. Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone, as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.
Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and Crawley, and where the white-topped equatorial of an observatory serves to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky. It is only from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue and the bees are busy wherever the farmer has left nooks for the wild-flowers to grow. On such days the dark woods of Lainston, crowning the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade. Fortunately they are easy of access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues with which the place is criss-crossed. A slightly marked footpath through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of last year’s beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees. The spot would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life. That tale is now historic—how Walpole’s “Ælia Lælia Chudleigh” was in 1745 privately married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol. “Miss Chudleigh,” however, she still continued to be at Court. Twenty-five years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. This was that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, “went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia, but as naked as Andromeda.”
The ruined chapel has long been in that condition. Its font lies, broken and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor, are cracked and defaced. The “living” of Lainston is worth £60 per annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of Sparsholt, the vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year. Stress of weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws. But their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.
One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this to be a district of many woodlands. Across the road is Northwood, where, close by Eastman’s great school, are thick coppices of hazels and undergrowths that the primroses and bluebells love. In another direction lies Sparsholt. None may tell what the “Spar” in the place-name of this or the other Sparsholt in Berkshire means, but “holt” signifies a wood; and thus we may perceive that the surroundings must still wear very much the aspect they owned when the name was conferred. Sparsholt has no guidebook attractions—nothing but its old thatched cottages and quiet surroundings to recommend it. But the fragrant scent of the wood-smoke from cottage hearths is over all. You may see its blue filmy wreaths curling upwards on still days, against the dark background of foliage. It is a rustic fragrance never forgotten, an aroma which, go whithersoever you will, brings back the sweet memory of days that were, and the sound of a voice in more actual fashion than possible to the notes of a well-remembered song, or the scent of a rose.
They are not woods of forest trees that beset this district, but hillside tangles of scrub oaks, of hazels and alders, where the wild-flowers make a continual glory in early spring. There are the labyrinths of No Man’s Land, the intricacies of Privet and Crab Wood, through whose bosquets run the long-deserted Roman road from Winchester to Old Sarum, and the nameless spinneys dotted everywhere about. Away on the horizon you may perceive a monument, capping a hill. It is no memorial of gallantries in war, but is the obelisk erected on Farley Mount to the horse of a certain “Paulet St. John,” which jumped with him into a chalk-pit twenty-five feet deep, emerging, with his rider, unhurt. That was in 1733. An inscription tells how that wonderful animal was afterwards entered for the Hunters’ Plate, under the name of “Beware Chalk Pit,” at the races on Worthy downs, and won it.
Continuing on to Stockbridge, whose race-meeting has recently been abolished, the way grows grim indeed, with that Roman grimness characteristic of all the Wessex chalky down country. The road is long, and at times, when the
And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
Farewell, convivial honest John.
Oft at the well, by fatal stroke
Buckets like pitchers must be broke.
In this same motley shifting scene,
How various have thy fortunes been.
Now lifting high, now sinking low,
To-day the brim would overflow.
Thy bounty then would all supply
To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry.
To-morrow sunk as in a well,
Content unseen with Truth to dwell.
But high or low, or wet or dry,
No rotten stave could malice spy.
Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise
And claim thy station in the skies;
Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.
In 1715, when the poet Gay rode horseback to Exeter and wrote a rhymed account of his journey for the Earl of Burlington, he described Stockbridge in doleful dumps. Why? Because for seven years there had been no election:
Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears;
What! no election come in seven long years!
Of all our race of Mayors, shall Snow alone
Be by Sir Richard’s dedication known?
Our streets no more with tides of ale shall float!
Nor cobblers feast three years upon one vote.
Some of this seems cryptic, but it is explained by the fact of Sir Richard Steele having published, September 22nd, 1713, a quarto pamphlet entitled The Importance of Dunkirk considered . . . in a letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, whose name was John Snow. The number of voters at Stockbridge was then about seventy, and its population chiefly cobblers. To say it was a corrupt borough is merely to state what might be said of almost every one at that time; but it seems to have been especially notable, even above its corrupt fellows, for a contemporary chronicler is found writing: “It is a very wet town and the voters are wet too.” He then continues, as one deploring the depreciation of securities, “The ordinary price of a vote is £60, but better times may come.” But when elections only came septennially, the wet voters who subsisted three years upon one vote must have gone dry, poor fellows, an unconscionable while.