THE ISLE OF PORTLAND

To the generality of untravelled folk, Portland is nothing but a quarry and a prison. It is both and more. It is, for one additional thing, a fortress, in these times grown to a considerable strength, and, for another, is a singular outlying corner of England tethered to the mainland only by that seemingly precarious stretch of pebbles, the Chesil Beach. As Weymouth is peculiarly the scene of The Trumpet Major, so Portland, the “Isle of Slingers,” as Mr. Hardy calls it, is especially, though not with absolute exclusiveness, the district of The Well Beloved.

There is a choice of ways to Portland. You may go by the high road—and a very steep up and down road it is, too—past Wyke, or may proceed by the crumbling clifflets past Sandsfoot Castle, one of those blockhouse coastward fortresses stretching from Deal and Sandown Castles, in Kent, along the whole of the south coast, to this point, whose building we owe to the panic that possessed the nation in the time of Henry VIII.: one of those periodic fears of a French invasion that from time to time have troubled the powers that be. Two of the long series were placed in this neighbourhood; the so-styled “Portland Castle” at the base of the Isle of Portland itself, and this craggy ruin of Sandsfoot, roofless and rough and more cliff-like than the cliffs themselves, at the mainland extremity of this sheltered inlet, wherein, in days of yore, an enemy might conceivably have effected a lodgment. For the defence of this fort, when new-builded in the Eighth Harry’s time, there were to be provided “the nombre of xv hable footmen, well furneyshed for the warres, as appertayneth,” together with some “harchers” duly furnished, or “harmed” as the summons might have put it, with their “bows and harrowes.” Alas! poor overworked letter H!

Sandsfoot CastleIt is here, in the story of The Well Beloved, that Jocelyn Pierston, the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance, elects to bid farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland went on her way to Portland Bill, “along the coast road to Portland.” When she had reached the waters of the Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over, and from thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the summer sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow pebbles of the Chesil Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of eternity. It is but a flat road, less than two miles long, but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far off as ever, and the way is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing amid the pebbles is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a landmark, and a chance boat or capstan a monument.

But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches Portland and Fortune’s Well, referred to in that story of the Portlanders as “the Street of Wells.” The well—a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old sort, where you wished for your heart’s desire, and perhaps obtained the boon in the course of a lifetime—by striving and labouring for it—is behind that substantial inn, the Portland Arms, and it is a cynical commentary upon this and all such legends of faËry that, while the Portlanders in general, and the people of Fortune’s Well in particular, can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like enough not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know anything at all of the magic spring, of where it is, or that the place took its name from the existence of such a thing.

One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting circumstances of this so-called “Isle” of Portland, is calculated to impress the stranger with astonishment. Its giant forts; its great convict establishment, “the retreat, at their country’s expense, of geniuses from a distance,” the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble beach that tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of “Isle” a misnomer, are all fitting things for amazement; but no one previously uninformed on the point is at all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages and hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim, forbidding, “solid and single block of limestone four miles long.” Eleven thousand souls live and move and have their being on what the uninstructed, gazing across the Roads from Weymouth, might be excused for thinking a penitential rock, reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for convicts and those whose business it is to keep them in order. The number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a surprise. Entering upon this happily styled “Gibraltar of Wessex,” there is in the foreground, by the railway-station, Chesilton; succeeded by Fortune’s Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great elevated, treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle, Reforne. Beyond the prison and the prison quarries, come Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and Southwell; all stony and hard-featured and like nothing else but each other. To-day an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs from Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself; but otherwise, all the circumstances of the place still fully show how the Portlanders came to be that oddly different race from the mainlanders they are shown to be in the pages of The Well Beloved, and in the writings of innumerable authors.

Portland was to the ancients the Isle of Vindilis, the “Vindelia” of Richard of Cirencester; and Roman roads are surviving on it to this day, notwithstanding the blasting and quarrying activities of this vast bed of building-stone, whence much of the material for Sir Christopher Wren’s City of London churches came, and despite the business of fortification that has abolished many merely antiquarian interests. You, indeed, cannot get away from stone, here on Portland; physically, in historic allusions, and in matters of present-day business. The story of the Isle begins with it, with those ancient inhabitants, the Baleares, slingers of stones, who made excellent defence of their unfertile home with the inexhaustible natural ammunition; and quarrying is now, after the passing of many centuries, its one industry. It is to be supposed, without any extravagance of assumption, that the Portlanders of to-day are the descendants of those ancient Baleares, and, certainly until quite recent times, they maintained the aloofness and marked individuality to be expected from such an ancestry. To them the mainlanders were foreigners, or, as themselves would say, “kimberlins”; a flighty, mercurial and none too scrupulous people, calling themselves Englishmen, who lived on the adjacent island of Great Britain and were only to be dealt with cautiously, and then solely on matters of business connected with the selling of stone, or maybe of fish, caught in Deadman’s Bay. For the true Portlanders, like their home, are grey and unsmiling, and reflect their surroundings, even as do those inhabitants of more sheltered and fertile places; and still, although things be in these later days of railway communication and a kind of quick-change and “general-post” all over the country somewhat altered, a stranger, who by force of circumstances—pleasure is out of the question—comes to live here, will find himself as uncongenial as oil is to water.

The outlook of the old Portlanders upon strangers was justified to them, in a way, when the great prison was built and the gangs of convicts began to be a feature of the Isle. They, who thus by force of circumstances over which they had no control, took up a hard-working and frugal existence upon the Isle, were specimens of the “kimberlins”; and the prejudices, if not quite the ignorance, of the islanders saw in them representative specimens of all “Outlanders.”

When you come toilsomely uphill from Fortune’s Well, out upon the stony plateau that is Portland, you presently become conscious of the contiguity of that great convict establishment, in the appearance of notice-boards, warning all and sundry of the penalties awaiting those who aid prisoners to escape. Such an offence, you learn, “shall be treated as a felony, not subject to any bail or mainprize” (whatever that may be). But any “free person” finding money, letters, or clothing, or anything that may be supposed to have been left to facilitate the escape of prisoners shall be rewarded, unless such person shall be proved to have entered into collusion, etc., etc., and so forth.

What, however, one especially desires to call attention to is the delicious expression, “free person.” Obviously, to the official minds ruling Portland “free persons” owe their freedom, not to any virtues they possess, but to their luck in not being found out. One, being a “free person,” has, therefore, after reading this notice, an uneasy suspicion that freedom is, in the eye of those authorities, a wholly undeserved accident, and that if every one—saving, of course, officials—had their deserts, they would be cutting and hauling stone out yonder, with the gangs in those yellow jackets and knickerbockers plentifully decorated with a pleasing design in broad arrows.

Being merely a “free person,” without prejudice in one’s favour in the eyes of the armed warders who abound here, it behoves one to walk circumspectly on Portland.

A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its quarries. It is another “sermon in stones,” quite as effective as the sermons preached by those other stones referred to in the lines

. . . books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything,

and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly sophisticated one: “Thou shalt not steal—or, if you must, do it outside the cognisance of the criminal laws!”

But this only in passing. Literary landmarks have fortunately, no points of contact with burglars, fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of companies. We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised in The Well Beloved as “Sylvania Castle,” the residence of Jocelyn Pierston in that story. Coming to it, past the cottage of Avice, down that street innocent of vegetation, the thickets of trees surrounding the Castle (which is not a castle, but only a castellated mansion built in 1800 by Wyatt, in true Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the Isle) are seen, closing in the view. A tree is something more than a tree on stony, wind-swept Portland. Any tree here is a landmark, and a grove of trees a feature; and thus, in the thickets and cliffside undergrowths of “Sylvania Castle,” that justify the name and give the lie to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious.

Bow and Arrow Castle

Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to happen here. The first Avice was courted by him in the churchyard down below, where a landslip has swept away the little church that gave to Church Hope Cove its name, and Avice the third eloped with another—that Another who with that capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the scenes in most plays—down the steep lane that runs beneath the archways of “Rufus’,” or Bow and Arrow, Castle on to the rocks beside the raging sea.

By lengthy cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill, whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the topgallants, and at last the admiral’s flag of the Victory drop down towards, and into, the watery distance. Offshore is the Shambles lightship that gave a refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre.

This “wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory,” called Portland Bill, with its two lighthouses looking down upon shoals and rapid currents of extraordinary danger to mariners, obtains its name from the beak-like end of the Isle which “stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel.” Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving accounts would have us believe that it derives from this being the site of propitiatory Baal fires in far-off pagan times; and, if we like to carry on the fancy, we may draw comparisons between the fires of the shivering superstitious terrors of those old heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams maintained here in modern times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of “they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.”

Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to Fortune’s Well and Chesilton is made chiefly along high ground disclosing a comprehensive and beautiful view of the whole westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where the many miles of the Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy distance, and the heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport and Lyme Regis, pierce the skies.