WEYMOUTH TO LULWORTH COVE

You cannot go far from Weymouth without a good deal of hill-climbing, but the longest stretch of level in this district, where levels are the exception and hills the rule, is by this route. It is not so very long, even then, for when you have passed the curving Esplanade and Lodmoor Marsh, and come to the foot of Jordan Hill, thought to have been the site of the Roman “Clavinium,” it is only two and a half miles. Preston stands on the top of a further hill, and is a place of great resort for brake-parties not greatly interested in literature. Turning to the left out of its street, opposite the Ship inn, we come to the pretty village—or hamlet, for no church is visible—of Sutton Poyntz, the “Overcombe” of The Trumpet Major. Its thatched stone cottages, charming tree-shaded stream and mill-pond, and old barns, all under the looming shadow of the downs, vividly recall the old-fashioned ways and talk, and the pleasant romance of Mr. Hardy’s only semi-historical novel; and you need not see, if you do not wish, the flagrant Vandalism of the Weymouth waterworks, hard by, and can if you will, turn your back upon the inn that will be interesting and picturesque some day, but now, rawly new, is an outrage upon, and a thing altogether out of key with, these old rustic surroundings.

Sutton Poyntz: The “Overcombe” of “The Trumpet Major”

Squawking ducks, hurrying across the dusty road and flouncing noisily into the clearly running stream, rooks cawing contentedly from their windy see-saw in the topmost branches of tall trees; and tired horses coming stolidly home from plough are the chief features of this “Overcombe,” where John Loveday had his mill, and his sons John and Bob, and Anne Garland and Matilda, and all the lovable, the hateful, or the merely contemptible characters in that sympathetic tale came and went. The mill—I am afraid it is not the mill, but one of somewhat later date—still grinds corn, and you can see it, bulking very largely between the trees, “the smooth millpond, over-full, and intruding into the hedge and into the road,” as mill-ponds will do, even in these later days of strict local government. But the days of European wars are gone. It is a hundred years since the last call of brave, tender, loyal John Loveday, the Trumpet Major, was silenced on a bloody battlefield in Spain, and well on toward the same tale of years since the press gangs, fellows to that which searched Overcombe Mill for Bob Loveday, impressed likely fellows for service on His Majesty’s ships:—the characters of The Trumpet Major belong wholly to a bygone age.

To the same age belonged the characters in The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion, a short story associated with Bincombe, a tiny village it requires no little exertion to reach; but you may win this way to it as easily—or at any rate, not more laboriously—than by any other route. It stands up among the downs, and in what Dorset folk would call an “outspan”—that is to say a remote hollow, recess or shelf amid them, where their sides are so steep that they give the appearance of some theatrical “back-cloth” to a romantic scene.

“Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp; here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the cavalry, and spots where the midden heaps lay are still to be observed. At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and thistles, the old trumpet and bugle-calls, the rattle of the halters; to help seeing rows of spectral tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery. From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the King’s German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that time.”

Bincombe

The story associated with this out-of-the-way place is one in its chief lines true to facts, for in an unmarked grave within the little churchyard, lie two young German soldiers, shot for desertion from the York Hussars, as quoted at the end of the story from the register:

“Matth: Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, and shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born in the town of Sarrbruk, Germany.”

“Christop Bless, belonging to His Majesty’s Regiment of York Hussars, who was shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born at Lothaargen, Alsatia.”

Returning from Bincombe and down again through Sutton Poyntz to Preston, we come to Osmington, with views down along on the right to Ringstead Bay; but, avoiding for the present the coast, strike inland, to Poxwell, the “Oxwell Hall” of The Trumpet Major. It is really three miles from “Overcombe,” and therefore not the close neighbour to the Lovedays it is made to be, for the purposes of the novel. The church stands beside of the road, the old manor-house, now a farmstead, the home of “Uncle Benjy,” miserly Squire Derriman, close by. In old days, back in 1634, when it was built, this curiously walled-in residence with its outer porter’s lodge, the physical and visible sign of an ever-present distrust of strangers, was a seat of the Henning family. That lodge still stands, obsolete as an avant-garde and gazebo for the timely spying out of unwelcome visitors, but very admirable for a summer-house, if the farmer had leisure for such things. But as he has not, but must continually “plough and sow, and reap and mow,” or see that others do so, the lodge is in every way a derelict. The farmer could perhaps add some testimony of his own respecting all those “romantic excellencies and practical drawbacks,” mentioned in the story, and existing in fact; but, farmers having a bent towards practicality, although they discuss, rather than practise it, it is to be supposed that he would place a stress upon the drawbacks, to the neglect of the romance.

Poxwell Manor

Pursuing the road onwards from Poxwell, we come, in a mile and a half, to the cross-roads at “Warm’ell Cross,” leading on the left to Dorchester, on the right to Wareham, and straight ahead across the remotenesses of “Egdon Heath,” to Moreton station. Here we turn to the right, and so miss the village of Warmwell, whence the cross roads take their name. It is not by any means, to the ordinary traveller, a remarkable crossing of the roads, but it has associations for the pilgrim stored with the literary lore of the Hardy Country, for it was here, in the story of The Distracted Preacher, that Mr. Stockdale, the Wesleyan minister of Nether Mynton, by the aid of their voices, crying “Hoi—hoi—hoi! Help, help!” discovered Will Latimer and the exciseman tied to the trees by the smuggler friends of his Lizzie. Turning here to the right, Owermoigne itself—the “Nether Mynton” of that tale of smuggled spirits and religious scruples—is reached in another mile; the church and its tiny village of thatched rusticity standing shyly, as such a smuggler’s haunt should do, off the broad high road and down a little stumbly and rutty lane. The body of the church has been rebuilt since Lizzie Newberry and her friends stored “the stuff” in the tower and the churchyard, but that churchyard remains the same, as also does the tower from whose battlements the “free traders” spied upon the excisemen, searching for those hidden tubs.

From this road there is a better distant view of the great equestrian effigy of George III., cut in the chalky southern slopes of the downs, than from any other point. He looks impressive, in the ghostly sort, seen across the bare slopes, where perhaps an occasional farmstead or barton, or a row of wheat-ricks, accentuates the solitude and at the same time gives scale to the chalky effigies of His Majesty and that very elegant horse of his, showing how very large this horse and rider really are. The gallant Trumpet Major told about the making of this memorial, as he and Anne Garland walked among the flowering peas, and described what this “huge picture of the king on horseback in the earth of the hill” was to be like: “The King’s head is to be as big as our mill-pond, and his body as big as this garden; he and the horse will cover more than an acre.”

And here he is to this day, very spirited and martial, with his cocked hat and marshal’s baton.

Owermoigne: The Smugglers’ Haunt in “The Distracted Preacher”

It is, however, a weariful business to arrive in the neighbourhood of him, for those chalk downs are just as inhospitable in the sun as they are in the storms of winter, the only difference lying between being fried on their shelterless sides when the thermometer registers ninety degrees, or frozen when the mercury sinks towards zero.Some two miles of highway along the verge of Egdon Heath bring us to a right-hand turning, leading past Winfrith Newburgh by a somewhat more shaded route up over the crest of these chalky ranges, and then with several turnings, steeply down, and at length, “by and large”—as sailors say—to the village of West Lulworth, which lies at the inland end of a coombe, the better part of a mile from Lulworth Cove.

Lulworth Cove

To Lulworth—or as he terms it, Lullstead—Cove, Mr. Hardy returns again and again. It is the “small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs” where Troy bathed and was supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the spots where The Distracted Preacher’s parishioners landed their smuggled spirit-tubs, and upon its milk-white shores of limestone pebbles the lifeless bodies of Stephen Hardcombe and his companion were found. It was the first meeting-place of Cytherea Graye and Edward Springrove; and was, again, that “three-quarter round Cove” where, “screened from every mortal eye,” save his own, Solomon Selby observed Bonaparte questing along the darkling shore for a suitable place where his flotilla might land in his projected invasion of England.

Lulworth Cove. The coastgard station

Lulworth Cove is an almost perfect circle, eaten out of the limestone in the long ago by the sea, in an unusually geometrical manner. Bindon Hill frowns down upon it, and in summer the circle of light-blue water laughs saucily back, in little sparkling ripples, just as though there were no storms in nature and no cruel rock-bound coast outside. The Cove is, if you be classically minded, a Bath of the Naiads; and, if less imaginative, is at any rate a delightful spot that even in these tidied-up and ordered days, when every little seaside cove has its hair brushed and face scrubbed, and is made always to look its Sunday best, persists in being littered with a longshore fishing and boating medley of anchors and lobster-pots, ropes, chains and windlasses, infinitely more pleasing to right-thinking persons—by whom I indicate those who think with myself—than the neatest of promenades and seats. True, they have rebuilt or enlarged the Cove Hotel and red-brick manifestations of a growing favour with visitors are springing up beside the old thatched cottages; but Lulworth—Cove or village—is not spoiled yet. The Coastguard Station, perched on what looks like a hazardous pinnacle of cliff, with the wild chasm of Stair Hole to one side of it and the sheer drop into the Cove on the other, is the most striking feature, looking down from landward, of this curious place, which has not its fellow anywhere else, and is the sunniest, the ruggedest, and certainly the most treeless place along the Dorset coast.

To those who have persevered along the roads into Lulworth, the prospect of again climbing those hills is perhaps a little grim, and they should so contrive to time their arrival and departure that they comfortably fit in with the return to Weymouth of the excursion steamer plying in the tourist season between the two places.

Lytchett Heath

The Equestrian Effigy of George III

Entrance to Charborough Park