SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
It is twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of The Woodlanders, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy Country. Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.
The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall find. But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy distance.
It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to Holnest, where, beside the road, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires. The old time squires were laws to themselves, and like none others. The product of generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have formed an excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style. He was “the Squire” to the very nth degree, with so extraordinary an idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge, he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself. An inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not only that he was very rich, but very mad as well. The sweeping drive is bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze, frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself. It is all very like a kind of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.
Long Burton
One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight. It is a huge building in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way with polished stones. Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum. Away back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and looking really smaller. The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his funeral rehearsed in front of the house. The more superstitious declare that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for the bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how, canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name than to Heaven without them. Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of TandstickÖr matches.
Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum
Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the country of The Woodlanders, where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels. The long ridge of the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening. To the left hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough efficacy, lose himself. Believe one who has been along the sometimes devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels. There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and a verse alluding to the origin of the name of “Vale of White Hart” given to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—
“When Julius CÆsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.
When Julius CÆsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.
Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for CÆsar’s sake.”
Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore
The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus darkly reflected. According to his account, corrected in details from other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting. Somewhat later, Sir John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge. The king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer. Another historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states that the whole county was laid under contribution. “Myself,” he says whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.” It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry VII.
The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing to “Giant’s Head,” ascends a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ of The Woodlanders, and the Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire TannhÄuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of her bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for the market.” Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is seen spreading out like an unrolled map.
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. There “in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”
The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” of The Woodlanders. Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription
“LE TEMPS PASSE
L’AMITIE RESTE
1888
IN MEMORIAM H.R.D.”
They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her husband, and the world went on as usual. Only Marty South remembered him and treasured his memory.
At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock, to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t know where ’tis.”
But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.
From just before Minterne Magna there is a left-hand turning which affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and going exposedly over the haggard downs. The two routes are locally known as the overhill and the underhill roads. The first-named is now little travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of the past. This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense story of The Three Strangers. On that route you see better than anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where “the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.” It is, by the same token, of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken by the most robust.
By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent. Presently, therefore, one reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” of Tess and other stories, situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture. From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside. There the fine tower of the church stands out against the sage-green coloration of the hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley, presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one of those respects by a closer acquaintance. For Cerne is a place very hardly treated by heartless circumstance.
Many centuries ago, in A.D. 987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint, Edmund the King and Martyr. It does not appear what became of the hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed might imagine. The hermit probably received due compensation for disturbance and went off somewhere else. However that may be, the abbey grew and flourished. Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he had been brought to see the error of his ways and that plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong. And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff” as the librettist of The Golden Legend makes the devil say of it.
In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from Weymouth, where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of the hills. It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII. The abbey disestablished, the town of course also suffered. How greatly we do not know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly stop at home.
Cerne AbbasAnd at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in general, but not to Cerne. It is still, to-day, remote from railways and is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which, when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then, in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and staggering buffet. Cerne is dead. There is (assuming for the moment positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the respect due to the departed. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and if there were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered. But there are no such things for utterance. It has all the romance of the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in it. It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse; earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face. Soulless Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse! Ah! my dear lady, your contempt is misplaced. I love these things better than you imagine, but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more. The abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its streets. A noble, highly decorated tower is that belonging to it, one of the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles, whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests. Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to passing admiration. It will be observed that there are shops—or things in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year. They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their shopkeeping. The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.
The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey
The Cerne Giant Prominent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that weird figure of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to Trendle or Giant’s Hill. The “Giant of Cerne” is a big fellow, well deserving his name, for he is 180 feet high. No one knows who cut him on the chalk of the hillside, but local tradition has long told how the figure commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the sheep of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of repletion, and was then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he lay by the enraged peasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his dimensions for the information of posterity. The prominence of his ribs, however, says little for the result of his feeding.
A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil, a god of the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut before A.D. 600. Fearful legends belong to it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the effigy is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt sacrifices to their god.
Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who cleaned him once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by them with indifference and left alone, and it is only the stranger who finds himself obsessed with a strange awe as he gazes upon this mystic relic of a prehistoric age. His minatory and uncouth appearance—for the relation of his head to his body is that of a pea to a melon—perhaps even more than his size, impresses the beholder. It should be said that he is merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines two feet broad and one foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white shape, to the sky. The club he wields is 120 feet long, and from seven to twenty-four feet broad.
