THE OLD COACH-ROAD: SALISBURY TO BLANDFORD

It is thirty-eight and a half miles from Salisbury to Dorchester, the “Casterbridge” of the novels, along the old coach-road to Exeter. Speaking as an exploratory cyclist, I would ten times rather go the reverse way, from west to east, for the gradients are all against the westward traveller, and westerly winds are the prevailing airs during summer and autumn. It is, indeed, a terribly difficult road, exposed, and very trying in its long rises. One charming interlude there is, three miles from Salisbury, at the beautifully situated little village of Coombe Bissett, set down in the deep valley of an affluent of the Wiltshire Avon; but it is heartbreaking work climbing out of it again, up the inclines of Crowden Down. At eight miles’ distance from Salisbury the old Woodyates Inn, long since re-christened the “Shaftesbury Arms,” stands in a lonely situation beside the road, looking regretful for bygone coaching days. Its old name, deriving from “wood-gates,” indicated its position on the south-western marches of the wooded district of Cranborne Chase. When railways disestablished coaches and the road resumed its solitude, the old inn became for a time the home of William Day’s training establishment for racehorses. He tells, in his recollections, of the drinking habits of the old Wiltshire farmers in general, and of two in particular, who used to call at Woodyates when on their way to or from Salisbury. They would talk, over the fire and their glasses of grog, somewhat in this fashion of their drunken exploits when riding home horseback: “Well, John, I fell off ten times.” “Yes, Thomas, and I fell off a dozen times: you see, I rode the old black horse, and he always jerks me about so.” It was said that there was scarcely a yard of ground over the eight miles that these worthies had not fallen on to from their horses.

Pentridge

At the distance of a mile from the coach-road at this point, where, by the way, we leave Wilts and enter Dorset, is the Hardy landmark of “Trantridge,” to be identified with the little village of Pentridge set down on the map. It was to Trantridge that Tess came early in her career, from her home at Marnhull in the Vale of Blackmore, to take service with Mrs. Stoke-D’Urberville of The Slopes, relict of Mr. Simon Stoke, merchant or money-lender, who had unwarrantably assumed the name, the crest, and arms of the knightly D’Urbervilles—dead and gone and powerless to resent the affront. It would be useless to seek The Slopes, rising in all the glory of its new crimson brick “like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around”; but plain to see, not far away, is the “soft azure landscape of the Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England, of undoubted primÆval date.” It was in the Chase that the ruin of Tess was wrought by Alec D’Urberville.

The exceedingly rustic village of Pentridge nestles under the lee of a long, partly wooded hill, probably the “ridge” referred to in the place-name. In the little highly restored or rebuilt church with the stone spirelet is now to be seen, since August, 1902, when it was erected, the plain white marble tablet:

To the Memory of
ROBERT BROWNING,

of Woodyates, in this parish, who died Nov. 25th, 1746,
and is the first known forefather of
Robert Browning, the poet.

He was formerly footman and butler in the
Bankes family.

“All service ranks the same with God.”

Browning.

This Tablet
was erected by some of the poet’s friends and admirers
1902.

Much reflected glory doubtless accrues to “the Bankes family” from this tablet, which owes its being to the exertions of Dr. F. J. Furnivall. It seems that the poet’s ancestor, after severing his connection with the Bankes, became landlord of the Woodyates Inn, and churchwarden here.

This entrance to Dorsetshire is not so favourable an one as that, for example, from Somerset, by Templecombe and Stalbridge or Sherborne, where Dorset is indeed like unto the Land of Promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, where herds of cattle low musically in mead or byre, and the earth is alluvial—rich, deep, and sticky.

Here is the more arid, elevated country of open down; chalky, and producing only coarse grass, pine-trees, bracken, and furze—a sheep-grazing, as opposed to a cattle-rearing, district. Dorset is indeed a greatly varied county in the character of its soils. The sheep-grazing districts may be said to be this of the north-east border, and those other stretches of lofty, almost waterless chalk downs, running due east and west, parallel with the coast, with a similarly lengthy, but broader, stretch in a like direction, from where the downs rise from the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, past Milton Abbas and Cerne Abbas, on to Beaminster. In between these are the valleys of the River Frome—the “Vale of Great Dairies” of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and the “Vale of Little Dairies” in the same story, otherwise Blackmore Vale. A glance at the map will show the River Frome flowing in its “green trough of sappiness and humidity” from the neighbourhood of Beaminster, past Chilfroom, Frome Vanchurch, and Frampton, which most obviously take their name from the stream, to Dorchester, Moreton, Wool, and Wareham, whence it pours its enriching waters into Poole Harbour; and another glance will discover the Vale of Little Dairies, or Blackmore, bounded by Blandford and Minterne Magna, and the heights of High Stoy on the south, and by Shaftesbury, Wincanton, and Sherborne on the north; including within its compass Stalbridge and Sturminster Newton, together with a host of small villages. The natural outlet of this last district—which, despite the name of “Little Dairies,” given to it in the pages of the novels, is a larger area than that of the Frome valley, and of course produces in the aggregation more—is the railway junction of Templecombe, which, beyond being a mere junction, is also an exceedingly busy and bustling place for the receipt of all this dairy produce of Blackmore.

Such are, roughly, the main agricultural divisions of Dorset, which is, to the hard-working farmer who is his own bailiff, with his family to aid in the dairy-work, still a county where ends may be made to meet, with a considerable selvedge or overlapping to sweeten his industry. Despite a very general belief current in towns, there are still considerable numbers of these families. The farmer and his wife have largely grown out of the rustic speech, and their sons and daughters—the daughters especially, the adaptive dears!—have got culture for leisure moments, but they are none the less practical for that. A generation ago, perhaps, things were not so pleasing, for the then would-be up-to-date attempted the absurdity of aping the leisured classes, while seeking to carry on farming and obtain a living by it. Such as those came to grief, and were rightly the butts of outside observers, as well as of moralists of their own class. A thorough-going farmer of that period, who saw the daughters of his neighbour going on the way to their music-lesson, reported his feelings and sayings as follows:

“While I and an’ my wife were out a-milken, they maidens went by, an’ I zaid to her, ‘Where be they maidens a-gwoin’?’ an’ she zaid, ‘Oh! they be a-gwoin’ to their music.’ An’ I zaid, ‘Oh! a-gwoin’ to their music at milken-time! That ’ull come to zom’ehat, that wull.’” And it doubtless did come to a pretty considerable deal, if—as a doctor might say—the course of the disease was normal.

Resuming the main road, which for the distance of a mile beyond Woodyates is identical with the old Roman road, the Via Iceniana, that ancient relic of a past civilisation may presently be seen parting company from the modern highway, and going off by itself, to the left, across the downs, making for the great fortified hill of Badbury Rings. It is known locally as the Achling Dyke, and is somewhat conspicuously elevated above the bracken, the gorse, and heather of these wilds.

Now, passing a few scattered cottages, we come—in fifteen miles from Coombe Bissett—to a village, the first on this lonely main road. Tarrant Hinton, this welcome village, stands on a sparkling little stream, without doubt the “tarrant,” or torrent, whence it and a small sisterhood of neighbouring settlements obtain a generic name. There are Tarrant Gunville, Tarrant Monkton, Tarrant Rawston, Tarrant Rushton, Tarrant Keynston, and Tarrant Crawford; and then, as below the last-named place the little stream falls into the Stour, there are no more Tarrants.

Eastbury

To Tarrant Gunville belongs Eastbury Park, a place of Hardyesque and romantic aspect; but, so far, not made the vehicle of any of his stories. It has, to be sure, a story of its own—a tale of vaulting ambition which fell on t’other side. Eastbury was built, like many another ponderous and overgrown mansion of the eighteenth century, by Vanbrugh, to the commission of George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, growing enormously rich by long-continued peculation, blossomed out as a patron of the arts and a friend of literature. But before his huge house could be completed he was gathered to his fathers and to judgment upon his illegitimate pickings, leaving all his wealth to his grandnephew, George Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord Melcombe, who lavished £140,000 on the completion of the works. Here he too became a patron, and entertained the literary men of his time until 1762, when, dying, the property went to Earl Temple, who, unable to afford the expense of maintaining the immense place, actually offered—and offered in vain—an income of £200 a year to any one who would reside at Eastbury and keep it in repair. As this bait failed, the great house was dismantled and demolished, piecemeal, in 1795, only one wing remaining to attest its former grandeur.

But traces of that grandeur are not wanting, from the iron railings, stone piers, and decorative kerbs, carved boldly with an acanthus-leaved design, that conduct into the demesne, to the magnificent clumps of beeches and other forest trees studding the sward of what was the park; and that remaining wing itself, still disclosing in its arcade, or loggia, something of Vanbrugh’s design.

Eastbury, of course, is haunted—so much is to be expected of such a place; but those who have seen the headless coachman and his ghostly four-in-hand issuing from the park gates, or returning, are growing scarce, and times are become so sceptical that even they cannot obtain credence. So, with a sigh for the decay of belief, we will e’en on through Pimperne down to Blandford, which good town, of fine dignified classic architectural presence, the coach-road enters in a timid back-doors manner, down a narrow byway.

Blandford is further dignified by that curious pedantic Latinity very marked in many Dorsetshire place-names. In this manner it is made to figure as “Blandford Forum,” a rendering of “Blandford Market.” In Mr. Thomas Hardy’s pages it is “Shottsford Forum,” and so appears in his story of Barbara of the House of Grebe, in Far from the Madding Crowd, and again in The Woodlanders, wherein it is stated, from the mouth of a rustic character, that “Shottsford is Shottsford still: you can’t victual your carcass there unless you’ve got money, and you can’t buy a cup of genuine there, whether or no”; this last a sad drawback from the amenities of a delightful town. But there is a very excellent pump, and an historic, in the broad High Street, whereon, cast in enduring iron, it may be read how a certain John Bastard, a “considerable sharer” in the great calamity by which Blandford was burnt in 1731, “humbly erected this monument, in grateful Acknowledgement of the Divine Mercy, That has since raised this Town, Like the Phoenix from its Ashes, to its present flourishing and beautiful State.” That, it will be allowed, is rather a fine, curly, and romantic way of putting it. A rider to this inscription goes on to say that in 1899 the Corporation of Blandford converted the pump into a drinking-fountain, and that the Blandford Waterworks Company, not halting in good deeds, gratuitously supplies the water.

The pilgrim who, arriving in Blandford hot, dusty and thirsty, and perhaps mindful of that alleged impossibility of buying a cup of genuine, essays to drink from the fountain, is at first surprised at the keen interest taken in his proceedings by a quickly collecting group of urchins. Their curiosity appears to be in the nature of surprise at the sight of a grown man drinking water, but light is shed upon it when, pressing hard the obstinate knob that releases the fount, the thing suddenly gives way and squirts half a pint or so up his sleeve. This is a never-failing form of entertainment to the youth of Blandford, and a cheap one.

Not once, but several times has Blandford been destroyed by fire. It owed these disasters to the old Dorsetshire fashion of thatched roofs, and only in time, by dint of repeated happenings in this sort, learned wisdom. This light dawned at the time when the classic revival in architecture was flourishing, and thus, as already hinted, Blandford’s High Street is wholly of that character. Classicism does not often make for beauty in English towns, but here the general effect is admirable, and although the stone of the fine church-tower—designed in the same taste—is of a jaundiced greenish-yellow hue, it is a noble feature.

Blandford’s natives have sometimes won to a great deal more than local fame; witness Alfred Stevens, the designer of the Wellington monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, who was born in 1817, in Salisbury Street, that back-doors coach-road entrance into the town already mentioned. Willowes, the unhappy husband of Barbara, of the House of Grebe, was a descendant of one of the old families of glass-painters of Shottsford mentioned in that story, and more particularly referred to by Aubrey, the antiquary, who says: “Before the Reformation, I believe there was no country or great town in England but had glasse painters. Old Harding of Blandford in Dorsetshire, where I went to schoole, was the only country glasse painter that ever I knew. Upon play daies I was wont to visit his shop and furnaces. He dyed about 1643, aged about 83 or more.” That craft has long since died out from the town.

Blandford Forum

A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone. Here a dense overarching canopy of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises. The entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the present writer has by chance discovered for himself. You, at the cost of some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and be rid of you.

But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge. A former Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw, R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.