WAREHAM TO WOOL AND BERE REGIS

Leaving Wareham by West Street, where there is a “Pure Drop” inn, perhaps suggesting the sign of the public where John Durbeyfield boozed, at far-away Marlott, a valley road leads by East Stoke to the remains of Bindon Abbey.

The ruins of Bindon Abbey are few and formless, standing in tree-grown and unkempt grounds, where a black and green stagnant moat surrounds a curious circular mound. Those who demolished Bindon Abbey did their work thoroughly, for little is left of it save the bases of columns and the foundations of walls, in which archÆological societies see darkly the ground plan of the old Cistercian monastery. A few stone slabs and coffins remain, among them a stone with the indent of a vanished life-sized brass to an abbot. The inscription survives, in bold Lombardic characters—

ABBAS RICARDUS DE MANERS HIC TUMULATUR
APPŒNAS TARDUS DEUS HUNC SALVANS
TUEATUR.

Close by is the stone sarcophagus in which Angel Clare, sleep-walking from Woolbridge House (which is represented in the story as being much nearer to this spot than it really is), laid Tess. Near the ruin, beside the Frome, is Bindon Abbey Mill, where Angel Clare proposed to learn milling.

The Abbot’s Coffin, Bindon Abbey Here that thing not greatly in accord with monastic remains and hallowed vestiges of the olden times—a railway station—comes within sight and hearing at the end of Wool village. Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business, mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk-churns, driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of London’s great populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on the borders of the rushy river Frome. The property at one time belonged to the neighbouring Abbey of Bindon, from which it came to Sir Thomas Poynings, and then to John Turberville. Garrisoned as a strategic point during the Civil Wars, its history since that period is an obscure and stagnant one. Long since passed from Turberville hands, it now belongs to the Erle-Drax family of Charborough Park and Holnest. The air of bodeful tragedy that naturally enwraps the place and has made many a passenger in the passing trains exclaim at sight of it, “what a fitting home for a story!” has at last been justified in its selection by the novelist as the scene of Tess’s confession to her husband. It was here the newly married pair were to have spent their honeymoon. “They drove by the level road along the valley, to a distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned away from the village to the left, and over the great Elizabethan bridge, which gives the place half its name. Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had engaged lodgings, whose external features are so well known to all travellers through the Frome Valley; once portion of a fine manorial residence, and the property and seat of a D’Urberville, but since its partial demolition, a farm-house.”

It is not altogether remarkable that Clare found the “mouldy old habitation” somewhat depressing to his dear one; and she was altogether startled and frightened at “those horrid women,” whose portraits are actually, as in the pages of the novel they are said to be, on the walls of the staircase: “two life-size portraits on panels built into the masonry. As all visitors are aware, these paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.” They are indeed unprepossessing dames. One is growing indistinguishable, but the other still wickedly leers at you, glancing from the tail of her eye, as though challenging admiration. A painted round or oval decorative frame surrounds these Turberville portraits, for such they are, and so they were explained to be to Clare, who uneasily recognised their likeness in an exaggerated form, to his own darling. All the old D’Urberville vices of lawless cunning, mediÆval ferocity, and callous heartlessness are reflected in those sinister portraits, which seemed to him to hold up a distorting mirror to the woman he had married, and certainly proved themselves of her kin.

Woolbridge House

A farm-house the place remains, the ground-floor rooms stone-flagged and chilly to modern notions, the fireplaces vast and cavernous as they are wont to be in such old houses. It is perhaps more romantic seen in the middle distance than when made the subject of closer study. But it is of course the home of a ghost story, and a very fine and aristocratic ghost-story too, made the subject of an allusion in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It seems that in that very long ago, generally referred to in fairy stories as “once upon a time,” there was a Turberville whose unholy passions so broke all bounds of restraint that he murdered a guest while the two of them were riding in the Turberville family coach. But as the guest was himself one of the family, it were a more judicial thing, perhaps, to divide the blame. This incident in the annals of a race who very improperly often figured as sheriffs and such-like guardians of law and order, took place on the road between Wool and Bere, and we are asked to believe that there are those who have heard the wheels of the blood-stained family coach traversing this route. One or two are said to have seen it, but they are persons proved to own some mixture of that blood, for to none other is this pleasing spectacle of a black midnight coach and demon horses vouchsafed. But stay! Not so pleasing after all, this proof of ancestry, for to them it is a warning of impending disaster and dissolution.

Woolbridge House: Entrance Front

That is a terribly dusty road which, in six miles, leads from Woolbridge to Bere Regis, across the heaths: in some summers—experto crede—so astonishingly deep in dust that it is not only impossible to ride a bicycle over it, but scarce possible to walk. But this heath road is as variable as the moods of a woman. It will be of this complexion at one time, and at another entirely different. It is perhaps only when this desirable difference rules that one appreciates the scenery it passes through; scenery wholly of buff sand, purple heather, furze, and bracken, whose colours are by distance blended into that rich purple brown termed, in The Return of the Native, “swart.” For this is the district of that gloomy tale, perhaps at once the most powerful and painful in its tragic intensity of all the Wessex novels, and one in which the element of scenery adds most strikingly to the unfolding of futilities and disasters. “Bere Heath” it is, according to the chartographers of the Ordnance Survey, but to ourselves who are on literary pilgrimage bent, it is Egdon Heath whose “swart abrupt slopes” are here seen on every side, now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral tumuli, now dipping into hollows where the rainwater collects in marshy pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken much longer than the parched growths, at the crests of these rises; and again spreading out into little scrubby plains.

Mr. Hardy, who has translated the reticent solemnity of Egdon Heath into such poignant romance, has said how pleasant it is to think or dream that some spot in these extensive wilds may be the heath of Lear, that traditionary King of Wessex whose sorrows Shakespeare has made the subject of tragedy; and he has himself, in The Return of the Native, made these heaths the stage whereon a tragedy is enacted that itself bids fair to become a classic little less classical than the works of Shakespeare. True it is that his tragedy is in the rustic kind, and none of the characters in it far above the homespun sort, but the stricken worm feels as great a pang as when a giant dies, and the woes of Mrs. Yeobright, of Clym, and of Eustacia and Damon Wildeve are none the less thrilling than those of that

“. . . very foolish fond old man
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,”

whose wanderings are the theme of Shakespeare’s muse.

Gallows Hill, Egdon Heath

The Return of the Native is a story of days as well as nights, of fair weather and foul, of sunshine and darkness, but it is in essence the story of a darkened stage. The description of Egdon in the opening chapter is the keynote of a mournful fugue:—

“The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening: it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

“In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.”

An artist who should come to Egdon, intent upon studying its colour-scheme, would be nonplussed by the more than usual fickleness and instability of its daylight hues. Shrouded in the black repose of night, its tone is a thing of some permanence, but under the effects of sunshine he finds it now purple, now raw sienna, shading off into Prout’s Brown, and again rising to glints and fleeting stripes of rich golden yellow. It would be the despair of one who worked in the slow analytic manner of a Birket Foster, but the joy of an impressionist like a Whistler.

Chamberlain’s Bridge

The extremely rich and beautiful colouring of Wool and Bere Heaths deepens with the setting of the sun to a velvety blackness and gives to the fir-crowned hills melodramatic and tragical significances. Such an one is Gallows Hill, where the road goes in a hollow formed by the massive shoulders of the tree-studded height. Here, the gossips say, with the incertitude of rustic indifference, a man hanged himself, or was hanged. When or why he committed what we have the authority of conventional old-time journalism for calling “the rash deed,” does not—in the same language—“transpire.” But certainly he selected a romantic spot for ending, for from the ragged crest, underneath one of those “clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tops are like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted castles of enchantment,” the moorland, under the different local names of Hyde Heath, Decoy Heath, and Gore Heath, but all one to the eye, goes stretching away some ten miles, to Poole Harbour, seen from this view-point, on moonlit nights, glancing like a mirror in a field of black velvet.

Rye Hill, Bere RegisA juicy interlude to the summer dryness of these wastes is that dip in the road where one comes to the river Piddle at Chamberlain’s Bridge, a battered old red brick pont that, by the aid of the quietly gliding stream and the dark, boding mass of fir-crowned Mat Hill in the background, makes a memorable picture. Only when Bere Regis comes within sight are the solitudes of Egdon left behind. Steeply down goes the way into the village, down Rye Hill, past the remarkably picturesque old thatched cottage illustrated here, perched on its steep roadside bank, and so at last on to the level where Bere Church is glimpsed, standing four-square and handsome in advance of the long street, backed by dense clumps of that tree, the fir, which has so strong an affection for these sandy heaths. Here then is the introduction to the “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of the Wessex novels, the “half-dead townlet . . . the spot of all spots in the world which could be considered the D’Urbervilles’ home, since they had resided there for full five hundred years.”