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 the mediÆval graciousness of the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the last scene of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In the last chapter of that strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city two persons walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of grief. They were Angel Clare, the husband, and ’Liza-Lu, the sister of poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower of that inimical building. They witnessed this proof that “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess,” not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen “as in an isometric drawing” set down in its vale of Itchen, “the broad cathedral tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St. Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.”

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 sun is setting and the landscape fades away in purple twilight, the explorer becomes obsessed, against all reason, with the weird notion that the many centuries of civilisation are but a dream and the distant ages come back again. To this bareness the pleasant little town of Stockbridge, situated delightfully in the valley of the Anton, is a gracious interlude. In its old churchyard the curious may still see the whimsical epitaph to John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s Head” inn, who died, aged 67, in 1802:

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.

Some ten miles north of Stockbridge, on the road past Andover, and overlooking the valley of the Anton, is Weyhill, a Hardy landmark of especial importance, for it is the point whence starts that fine tale, The Mayor of Casterbridge, described in its sub-title as “The Life and Death of a Man of Character.” It is a pleasant country of soft riverain features by which you who seek to make pilgrimage to this spot shall fare, coming into the quiet, cheerful little market-town of Andover, and thenceforward near by the villages which owe their curiously feminine names to their baptismal river, the Anton. There you shall find Abbot’s Ann and Little Ann, and I daresay, if you seek long enough, Mary Ann also. Weyhill, a hamlet in the parish of Penton Mewsey, is a place—although to look at it, you might not suspect so—of hoary antiquity, and its Fair—still famous, and still the largest in England—old enough to be the subject of comment in Piers Plowman’s Vision, in the line:

At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair.

Alas that such things should be! this old-time six-days’ annual market is now reduced to four. It is held between October 10th and 13th, and divided into the Sheep, Horse, Hops, Cheese, Statute or Hiring, and Pleasure Fairs. On each of these days the three miles’ stretch of road from Andover is thronged with innumerable wayfarers and made unutterably dusty by the cabs and flys and the dense flocks of sheep and cattle on their way to the Fair ground.

There are quaint survivals at Weyhill Fair. An umbrella-seller may still, with every recurrent year, be seen selling the most bulgeous and antique umbrellas, some of them almost archaic enough to belong to the days of Jonas Hanway, who introduced the use of such things in the eighteenth century; and unheard-of village industries display their produce to the astonished gaze. Here, for example, you see an exhibit of modern malt-shovels, together with the maker of them, the “W. Choules from Penton” whose name is painted up over his unassuming corner; and although the Londoner has probably never heard of, and certainly never seen, malt-shovels, the making of them is obviously still a living industry.

Greatly to the stranger’s surprise, Weyhill, although in fact situated above the valley of the Anton, does not appear to be situated on a hill at all. The road to “Weydon Priors,” by which name it figures in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is indeed, as the novelist sufficiently hints, of no very marked features. It is “a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly,” and at times other than Fair-time is as quiet a country road—for a high road—as you shall meet; and, except for that one week in the year, Weyhill is as a derelict village. There, on a grassy tableland, stand, deserted for fifty-one weeks out of every fifty-two, the whitewashed booths and rows of sheds that annually for a brief space do so strenuous a trade, and scarce a human being comes into view. Even now, just as in the beginning of the story, Weyhill does not grow: “Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon.”

Weyhill Fair

It is on the last day of the old six-days’ Fair, in 1829, that the story opens, with a man and woman—the woman carrying a child—walking along this dusty road. That they were man and wife was, according to the novelist’s sardonic humour, plain to see, for they carried along with them a “stale familiarity, like a nimbus.” The man was the hay-trusser, Michael Henchard, whose after rise to be Mayor of Casterbridge and whose final fall are chronicled in the story. This opening scene is merely in the nature of a prologue, disclosing the itinerant hay-trusser seeking work, coming to the Fair and there selling his wife for five guineas to the only bidder, a sailor—the second chapter resuming the march of events eighteen years later.