DORCHESTER TO CROSS-IN-HAND, MELBURY, AND YEOVIL

A good many outlying literary landmarks of the Wessex novels may be cleared up by leaving Dorchester by Charminster, and then, at a fork in the road just past Wolveton, taking the left-hand turning and following for awhile the valley road along the course of the river Frome. Not for long, however, if it is desired to keep strictly to those landmarks, do we pursue this easy course, for in another couple of miles, by Grimstone station, we shall have to bear to the right hand and make for what is known in Mr. Hardy’s pages as “Long Ash Lane,” along whose almost interminable course Farmer Darton and his friend rode, to the wooing of Sally Hall, at Great Hintock, in that short story, Interlopers at the Knap.

Long Ash Lane—in some editions of the novels styled “Holloway Lane”—is the middle one of three roads past Grimstone station. Those on either side lead severally to Maiden Newton—the “Chalk Newton” of Tess of the D’Urbervilles—and to Sydling St. Nicholas; but this is, as described in that story, “a monotonous track, without a village or hamlet for many miles, and with very seldom a turning.” For its own sake, it will therefore be easily seen, Long Ash Lane is not an altogether desirable route. It is an ancient Roman road, running eventually to Yeovil and Ilchester; passing near by, but not touching, and always out of sight of several small villages on its lengthy way. Darton and Johns found it weariful as they rode, the hedgerow twigs on either side “currycombing their whiskers,” as Mr. Hardy delightfully says; and wayfarers on foot, tired out, believe at last that it will never end:

“Unapprised wayfarers, who are too old, or too young, or in other respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but who, nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully ahead: ‘Once at the top of that hill, and I must surely see the end of Long Ash Lane!’ But they reach the hill-top, and Long Ash Lane stretches in front mercilessly as before.”

After many miles this tiresome road at last comes in touch with modern life, for Evershot station and the hamlet of Holywell are placed directly beside it. Here we may turn right, or turn left, or go onward, sure in all directions of finding many scenes to be identified with the novels. Turning to the right, a road not altogether dissimilar in its loneliness from Long Ash Lane is found, but differing from it in the one essential respect of ascending the ridge of lofty downs overlooking the Vale of Blackmoor, and thus, while to the right hand disclosing a dull expanse of table-land, on the left opening out a romantic view, bounded only by distance and the inadequacies of human eyesight. This is the road along which Tess was travelling—in the reverse direction—from Dole’s Ash Farm at Plush, the “Flintcombe Ash” of those tragical pages, to Beaminster or “Emminster,” to visit the parents of Angel Clare, her husband, when she came to that ill-fated meeting with Alec D’Urberville at the spot we now approach, Cross-in-Hand:

“At length the road touched the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand.’ Of all spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.”

The history and meaning of this lonely pillar on the solitary ridgeway road are unknown. Thought by some to mark the old-time bounds of property under the sway of the Abbot of Cerne, others have considered it to be the relic of a wayside cross, while others yet have held it to be a place of meeting of the tenants and feudatories of the old abbey, and the hollow in the stone to have been the receptacle for their tribute. But, “whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.”

Here it was that Tess, on her way to Flintcombe Ash, was surprised by the converted Alec D’Urberville, already shaken in his new-found grace and preaching mission at sight of her, and here he made her swear upon it never to tempt him by her charms or ways. “This was once a Holy Cross,” said he. “Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments.” It was not very reassuring to Tess when, leaving the spot of this singular rencounter and asking a rustic if the stone were not a Holy Cross, he replied, “Cross—no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, miss. It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor, who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.”

Cross-in-Hand

This pillar, “the scene of a miracle or murder, or both,” stands some five feet in height, and rises from the unfenced grassy selvedge of the road, where the blackberry bushes and bracken grow, on the verge of the down that breaks precipitously away to the vale where Yetminster lies. The rude bowl-shaped capital of the mystic stone has the coarse semblance of a hand, displayed in the manner of the Bloody Hand of Ulster.

Batcombe

Deep down below, in midst of the narrowest lanes, lies the sequestered village of Batcombe, from which this down immediately above takes its name. The church stands almost in the shadow of the hills. This also is a place of marvellous legends, for a battered old Gothic tomb in the churchyard, innocent of inscription, standing near the north wall of the church, is, according to old tales the resting-place of one “Conjuring Minterne,” a devil-compeller and astrologer of sorts, who was originally buried half in and half out of the church, for fear his master, “the horny man,” as a character in one of Mr. Hardy’s romances calls Old Nick, should have him, if buried otherwise. One would like to learn more about “Conjuring Minterne” and his strange tricks, but history is silent.

Returning to Evershot, or, as it is styled in the sources of our pilgrimage, “Evershead,” we come to Melbury Park, the seat of the Earl of Ilchester, and the principal scene of that charming story, The First Countess of Wessex, in the collection of “A Group of Noble Dames.” The great house of oddly diversified architecture, stands in the midst of this nobly wooded and strikingly varied domain, but can readily be seen, for the carriage-drive is a public right of way. This is the broad roadway through the park described in the passage where Tupcombe, riding towards “King’s Hintock Court”—as Mr. Hardy disguises the identity of the place—from Mells, on Squire Dornell’s errand, saw it stretching ahead “like an unrolled deal shaving.”Like most of the stories of those noble dames, this romance of Betty Dornell, the First Countess of Wessex, is founded upon actual people, and largely upon their real doings. Squire Dornell of Falls Park—really Mells Park—was in real life that Thomas Horner who in 1713 married Susannah Strangways, heiress of the Strangways family and owner of Melbury Sampford; and their only child was Elizabeth, born in 1723, who in 1736, in her thirteenth year, almost precisely as in the story, was married to Stephen Fox, afterwards Earl of Ilchester, who died in 1776. The Countess died in 1792.

Tomb of “Conjuring Minterne”But this passage of family history is best set forth in the manner customary to genealogists:

Family tree of Thomas Horner of Mells [174]

The father of the first Countess of Wessex was, it is curious to know, descended from Little Jack Horner, that paragon of selfishness who sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, and who, the familiar nursery rhyme goes on to tell us,

“Put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, What a good boy am I!”

The nursery rhyme was that, and something more. It was, in fact a satire upon that John Horner who, upon the dissolution of the monasteries, purchased for much less than it was worth the confiscated Mells estate of Glastonbury Abbey. This prize, the “plum” of the rhyme, is said to have been worth £10,000. The Horners, represented by Sir John Horner, espoused the side of the Parliament in the war with Charles I. but they have kept their plum, at every hazard and in all chances, and Mells Park is still in the family.

Melbury House

Leland tells how the house of Melbury Park was built in the sixteenth century by Sir Giles Strangways, but portions of the great T-shaped building have at later times been added, notably the wing built in the time of Queen Anne. The whole heterogeneous pile, dominated by a church-like, six-sided central tower, occupies a raised grassy site looking upon a lake on whose opposite shore is the little manorial church of Melbury Sampford, plentifully stored with monuments of Strangways and Fox-Strangways, and in especial notable for that to the courtly and equable husband of Betty Dornell. His epitaph, by the hand of his widow, describes him as the most desirable of husbands.

Near this stone is interred
Stephen, Earl of Ilchester,
who died at Melbury
Sept. 26, A.D. MDCCLXXVI., aged LXXII.
He was the eighth son of Sir Stephen Fox, knight.
He married Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Horner,
of Mells, in the county of Somerset, esquire,
heiress-general to the family of
Strangways of Melbury, in the county of Dorset,
by whom he had Henry Thomas, his eldest son,
now Earl of Ilchester
(who succeeds him in honours and estate)
and a numerous offspring.
As a small token of her great affection
to the best of husbands, fathers, friends,
his disconsolate widow inscribes this marble,

Sacred to his memory.

Hush’d be the voice of bards who heroes praise,
And high o’er glory’s sun their pÆans raise;
And let an artless Muse a friend review,
Whose tranquil Life one blameless tenour knew,
By Nature form’d to please, of happiest mien,
Just, friendly, chearful, affable, serene;
Engaging Manners, cultivated Mind,
Adorn’d by Letters and in Courts refin’d,
His blooming honours long approv’d he bore,
And added lustre to that gem he wore;
Grac’d with all pow’rs to shine, he left parade,
And unambitious lov’d the sylvan shade;
The choice by Heav’n applauded stood confess’d
And all his Days with all its blessing bless’d;
Living belov’d, lamented in his end,
Unfading Bliss his mortal change attend.

At the other extremity of the park is the small and secluded village of Melbury Osmund, the “Little Hintock” of The Woodlanders, “one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world, where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than meditation.” It lies among vast hills and profound hollows, whose huge convexities and corresponding concavities render this a district to be more comfortably ridden by the horseman than walked, and one to be explored by the cyclist only with great and exhausting labour.

By perspiring perseverance, however, Yeovil and Somerset, or, speaking by the card, “Ivell” and “Outer Wessex” may be reached at last, by way of the strangely-entitled village of Ryme Intrinsica, whose name, so spelled on the map, is, with considerable incertitude both as to spelling and meaning, said to be properly written “Entrenseca” or “Entrensicca.” Local theories, disregarding altogether the inexplicable “Ryme,” and expending themselves upon the preposterous Latinity of the second part of the name, have come to some sort of agreement that it denotes a dry place on a ridge placed between two watered vales; and those curious enough to look for it on a large-scale map will perceive readily enough that, whatever the comparative dryness of the ridge it does occupy, it is certainly so flanked by the low-lying lands in which flow two tributaries of the river Yeo.Hutchins, the county historian, on the other hand, gives a wholly different explanation of the name. Spelling the “Intrinseca” with an “e,” instead of the final “i,” he says it is so called, Ryme Intrinseca, or “In Ryme,” in contradistinction to an outlying portion of the old manor, away down in the parish of Long Bredy, and styled Ryme Extrinsecus, or “Out Ryme.”

At any rate, Ryme Intrinsica looks scarcely the place to be dolled out in so classical a style. It is too Saxon, too rustic and homespun in all its circumstances of thatch, rickyards, dairies, and pigsties; and its little church is not in any way corroborative of this dignity.

Yeovil, whose name has so bucolic a sound that it would seem to be, above all other places, the home most suitable for yeomen, is the “Ivell” of the Wessex novels, but finds only scattered allusions in them, and touches far from intimate. Cope, the curate, who in the story For Conscience’ Sake married the conscience-smitten Millborne’s daughter when at last the father effaced himself, was curate at Ivell; and it was at the “Castle” inn of the same town that the brothers Halborough called for their drunken father, in the harrowing embarrassments of A Tragedy of two Ambitions, but those are the nearest approaches to be discovered.