Abbotsbury is a place of very great interest. It lies within half a mile of the sea, near by the Fleet Water and the Chesil Beach, and was at one time the site (as its name implies) of a very extensive and powerful abbey. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the appropriation of their funds, put an end to this religious house, among others, and very few remains of it are to be seen to-day. The Abbey Farm, a delightful old house, is built of its stones, and portions of the Gatehouse remain, with vestiges of the fish-ponds, here as elsewhere a great feature of the monastic settlement. All else is gone, even the great mansion built by Sir Giles Strangways upon the abbey lands that had been granted to him, and with the stones of its ruinated buildings, has disappeared. But the great tithe-barn of the monks still remains—a building of noble proportions, some 300 feet in length, built with sturdy buttresses and neatly-joined ashlar, with a great porch and a roof held up by massive timbers, every detail fashioned with exquisite taste, and over all a decided ecclesiastical feeling. Few modern churches are built so substantially, and fewer so tastefully, as Abbotsbury tithe-barn. Half of its length is roofless; the moiety of it suffices for the secular farmer who uses it to-day for the same purposes for which it was built many centuries ago: if it was not too large when built, how immense the products of these tithes must have been!

The parish church still exhibits some good architectural details, particularly on the exterior of the north aisle, which shows some excellent Perpendicular windows, surmounted by a string-course and battlements. Pinnacles are corbelled out at intervals from the string-course, and have a very pleasing effect.

Crowning the seaward hill of Saint Catherine, that rises in terraced slopes populous with rabbits, is an ancient chapel, small but immensely strong, built to withstand the winds that blow with tremendous violence from the sea. It commands wide-spreading views, to Portland on the one hand, to Lyme Regis and the Cliffs of Beer on the other, and inland stretch the rolling hills and wide downs of this impressive county.

How to seize the characteristics of Dorsetshire when you have fared from end to end of the county only along the bold and cliff-girt scenery of its seaward side, from Purbeck Hills, by the Abbotsbury uplands, to the impressive heights of Golden-cap and Stonebarrow? How to pluck out the heart of its mystery and weird beauty when its heaths and inland vales are matters of reading only? Yet it should seem that Dorset is a Hampshire purged of mere pensiveness, more varied, more dramatic than its eastern neighbour, with a drama that rises to moving tragedies—fit scenes for that blood-drowned rebellion that began upon the beach at Lyme, and so surged through pastoral Somerset to be finally quelled by Monmouth’s capture in the vicinity of Wimborne. But a mile or so apart from those trim modern excrescences of the sea-board, the “watering-places,” risen and rising, the stolid county folk (Teutons chiefly) lead lives little touched with modernism in the fat valleys folded between the swelling shoulders of camp-crowned hills, whereon the Romans and the Britons, the Celt, the Saxon, and the Dane, have waged wars of extermination. Here, in that dim Wessex, were fought many battles in hand-to-hand fashion, and the sublimated memory of them, blurred and fantastic, lingers yet in traditions, even in turns of speech and place-names. The Dorset folk have a name for the rich red bloom of the wallflower that seems significant. They call them “bloody warriors.”

Before we left Abbotsbury we visited the Swannery, where many hundreds of swans, the property of the Earl of Ilchester, are kept. There has been a swannery here for over eight hundred years, and, in addition, a decoy for wild duck.

It is a fine breezy walk, but rough and tiring, from here to Burton Bradstock, along the coast—eight miles of a ribbon-like path, that winds along the landward side of the Chesil Beach. By the time we reached that village we had had more than enough of it, and crossed the little river Bredy into the highroad. At the end of another mile and a half that road runs steeply down into West Bay, the port and harbour of Bridport, a desolate place of infinite sand, where the sea comes banging in furiously upon the wooden jetties at the harbour mouth. Up the marshy valley can just be seen the roof-tops of Bridport, and at the back of them hills, with hills again to right and left. Indeed, this is a stretch of country calculated to make sad within him the heart of the cyclist, for hills abound, and however fair the country-side may be to an unprejudiced observer, ’tis little short of a wonder when a land of hills and dales is other than a howling wilderness to the perspiring wheelman, bent over his handles in an agony of pedalling. Such an one we met fighting against the inevitable when last we journeyed this way. The inevitable, it should be said in this connection, resolved itself into a dismount, and a moist and gasping halt by the dusty hedgerow. Well, we left the poor soul, and encumbered only with our knapsacks, breasted the steep down that forms a short cut to Chideock. Here cycles may not go by any manner of means.

The village of Chideock lay in a valley at some distance, a village of the kind that lines the highroad, with one long street, rising from the hollow, half-way to the brow of the succeeding hill. All around lay the huge hills of this hilly land, with Golden Cap, truncated, like another Table Mountain, seaward.

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