WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER

To leave Weymouth by this route is to obtain some initial impressions of a very striking character: impressions, not slight or fleeting, of hilliness and of Weymouth’s modern growth. A specious and illusory flat quayside stretch of road, by the well-known swan-haunted Backwater, ends all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous inclination up through what was once the village, now the suburb, and a very packed and populous suburb, too, of East Chickerell. To this succeeds the Chickerell of the West; and so, in and out and round about, and up and down—but chiefly up—at last to Portisham, the first place of any Hardyean interest.

Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding height of Blackdown—locally “Black’on,” just as the name of the village is shortened to “Po’sham”—rising eight hundred and seventeen feet above the sea, is notable to us both from fiction and in facts. It appears in The Trumpet Major as the village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service under Admiral Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob be a character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical personage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s friend and comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in 1769, and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on Blackdown is erected. The house is the first on the left, at the cross-roads as you make for the village. In the garden belonging to it, on the opposite side of the road may still be seen a sundial, bearing the inscription:

Joseph Hardy, Esq.,
Kingston Russell. Lat. 50° 45'
1767
Fugio fuge.

Portisham

It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching Portisham, disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with the village church and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of the rolling down, covered in patches with furze, filling in the background. The beautiful old church has, happily, been left very much to itself, with the lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet scraped off. A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes curiosity:

“William Weare lies here in dust,
As thou and I and all men must.
Once plundered by Sabean force,
Some cald it war but others worse.
With confidence he pleads his cavse,
And Kings to be above those laws.
September’s eygth day died hee
When neare the date of 63
Anno domini 1670.”

Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of the epitaph to have been the Roundhead party, and “rebellion,” or perhaps “robbery,” to have been the worse thing than war some called it. The allusion is probably to some raid in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and were grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, in the passage where he claims “Kings to be above those laws,” to have cheerfully borne some other foray on the Royalists’ behalf.

The road out of Abbotsbury

Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very interesting place, remarkable for a hilltop chapel of St. Catherine anciently serving as a seamark, and for the remains of the Abbey; few, and chiefly worked into farmsteads and cottages, but including a great stone barn of the fifteenth century, as long as a cathedral, and very cathedral-like in its plan.

The great barn of Far from the Madding Crowd, scene of the sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn of Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with transepts. “It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. . . . The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions the precise requirements, both of beauty and ventilation. One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied.”

Sheep-shearing in Wessex

Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet, is the famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some thousands of swans have from ancient times had a home. Once belonging to the Church, in the persons of the old abbots of the Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury, the swans are now the property of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of the “First Countess of Wessex,” Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth in A Group of Noble Dames. Though long passed from the hands of any religious establishment, the ownership of the swans still points with the trifling alteration in the position of an apostrophe, to the fact that “the earth is the Lords’ and the fulness thereof.”

Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the left over sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent inland, to the right, lead in staggering drops and rises past Swyre and Puncknowle down to Burton Bradstock, and thence to the “unheard-of harbour” of West Bay.

West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in Fellow Townsmen, where they are called “Port Bredy,” from the little river, the Brit or Bredy, which here flows into the sea. West Bay is one of the oddest places on an odd and original coast. A mile and a half away from Bridport town, which is content to hide, sheltering away from the sea-breezes, it has always been about to become great, either as a commercial harbour or a seaside resort, or both, but has ended in not achieving greatness of any kind. No one who enjoys the sight of a quiet and picturesque place will sorrow at that.

Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and unstudied way. It owns a little harbour, with quays and an inn or two, and shipping that, daring greatly, has to be warped in between the narrow timbered pier-heads, where a furious sea is for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay; and away at one side it is shut in from the outside coast by some saucy-looking cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due to their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded down. The seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomime. It is an eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that characterises the shore of West Bay. A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in being broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny shingle, and are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of modern houses, whose architect is so often on their account professionally spoken of as a genius, that it becomes a duty to state, however convenient to the residents in them their plan may be, that their appearance in the view is the one pictorial drawback to West Bay.

The microscopic shingle—for shingle it is—of West Bay has for centuries been the enemy of the place and has practically strangled it. There are heaped up wastes of it everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily carries some of it away, as a sample, about his person, in his shoes or his hair, or in his pockets. The more of it removed in this, or indeed in any other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes, unasked, into the houses; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at last you seek repose between the sheets, there it is again. These wastes are part of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset coast, the Chesil Beach, which runs eighteen miles from this point along the perfectly unbroken shores of the Bay to Chesilton and Portland. The “Chesil” is just the “Pebble” beach: that old word for pebbles being found elsewhere in Dorsetshire, and at Chislehurst, among other places. A pecularity of it is that by insensible degrees it grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly direction, ending as very large pebbles at Portland. The fishermen of this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to guide them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the point by handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile of the particular spot.

West Bay, Bridport

The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old one. In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament empowering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and flourishing state whence it had declined. The preamble stated that by reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants had been swept away and the haven choked. But although the Legislature had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate whence the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged. Mr. Hardy in Fellow Townsmen thus describes West Bay: “A gap appeared in the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade. Between these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior valley, being a mere layer of blown sand. But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed. There were but few houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief features of the settlement.”

The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the corporate town of Bridport, which, after long remaining, as far as the casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of neighbouring residents who, residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.

Bridport was, in those days when it remained a busy place, a town keenly interested in the flax, hemp, twine, and rope industries; and rope and twine walks, where the old methods are even yet in use, are still features of its less prominent lanes and alleys, but the unobservant and the incurious, who to be sure form the majority of travellers, might pass, and do pass, through Bridport, without thinking it any other than a quiet market town, dependent solely upon surrounding agricultural needs and weekly village shopping.

When hemp was grown in the neighbourhood of Bridport, in those bustling days when the manufacturers of the town supplied the King’s Navy with ropes, and criminals were suspended by this staple article of the town, the expression “stabbed with a Bridport dagger,” was a pretty, or at least a symbolical, way of saying that a man had been hanged. It was a figure of speech that quite escaped that matter-of-fact antiquary, Leland, when in the time of Henry VIII. he came to Bridport and stolidly noted down: “At Bridport be made good daggers.”

One is disposed to sympathise with Leland in that egregious error of his, for which he and his memory have been laughed at for more than three hundred and fifty years. How his shade must writhe at the shame of it! He was, doubtless, tired and bored, for some reason or another, when he reached Bridport, and to his undoing, took things on trust. And nowadays, every one who writes the very leastest scrap on Bridport has his fling at the poor old fellow; and I—conscience tells me—insincerely do the same, under a miserably inadequate cloak of pretended sympathy!

High Street and Town Hall, Bridport

Barnet, whose baulked love is the theme of Fellow Townsmen, was descended from the hemp and rope-merchants of Bridport, as the story, in several allusions, tells us.

South Street, leading from the Harbour Road into the right and left course of the main street, contains most of the very few buildings of any great age. Among them is the little Gothic, gabled building now a workmen’s club, but once the “Castle” inn. Here, too, is the church, ancient enough, but restored in 1860, when the two bays were added to the nave; probably the incident referred to by Mr. Hardy: “The church had had such a tremendous practical joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be scarce recognisable by its dearest old friends.”

There is, in this otherwise rather bald interior of Bridport church, a curious mural tablet to the “Memory of Edward Coker, Gent. Second son of Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder, Slayne at the Bull Inn, in Bridpur^t. June the 14^th AÑ. DÕ. 1685, by one Venner, who was a Officer unde^r the late Dvke of Mvnmovt^h in that Rebellion.”

The Bull inn stands yet in the main street, but modernised. It is the original of the “Black Bull” in Fellow Townsmen.

Six miles due north of Bridport lies the little town of Beaminster, the “hill-surrounded little town” of which Angel Clare’s father was vicar. “Sweet Be’mi’ster” says Barnes:

“Sweet Be’mi’ster, that bist abound
By green and woody hills all round,”

and in truth those hills that surround it are set about this quiet agricultural town in a manner that fairly astounds the traveller. No railway reaches “Emminster,” as it is named in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and, looking upon those mighty natural turrets and domes that beset it, the traveller is of opinion that no railway ever will. Nearing Beaminster at cockshut time, when the birds have all gone to bed, when the sky is hot in the west with the burnished copper of the after-glow, and a cold blue and green, with pale stars appearing, fills the eastern firmament, the scenery is something awesome and approaching an Alpine sublimity. Then the twilight streets of this quiet place in the basin-like hollow begin to take an hospitable look, and the tall red stone tower of the church, that looks so nobly aloof in day, assumes a welcoming paternal benignancy. It is a toilsome winning to Beaminster, but, when won, worth the trouble of it.