OVER THE HILLS, BEYOND THE RAINBOW

Beyond the rainbow is Fairyland, but no one has ever penetrated to that country, save in dreams, to which nothing is impossible. There is also a Rainbow-land in Dorsetshire, certainly not impossible of achievement, but still a district of which no one knows anything, saving only those who live in it, and those sturdy fellows, the carriers, the Marco Polos and Livingstones of this age and country, who every week or so travel from it to the nearest market-town, and back again. The carriers are men of strange speech and dress. Although sturdy, they move slowly both in body and mind; and their tilt-carts are as slow as themselves, and as dusty and travel-worn as the caravans of any African expedition. The Rainbow country of Dorset is, in fact, a country innocent of railways. It is comprised within a rough circle made by tracing a course from Bere Regis to Piddletrenthide, Cerne Abbas, Minterne Magna, Holnest, Sherborne, Milborne Port, Stalbridge, Sturminster Newton, and Blandford, and is not only in parts extremely hilly, but includes Bulbarrow, one of the highest hills in Dorsetshire, 927 feet above sea-level, and Nettlecombe Tout; among a fine diversified array of lesser eminences. There is thus some considerable difficulty in travelling out of it, and a very widespread disinclination to penetrate into what may, not without considerable warranty, be termed its “wilds.”

Bingham’s Melcombe

Wise men, who study maps, and from the tracks of watercourses deduce easier, or at any rate, rather less arduous, routes, may find a means of winning to this Rainbow country by turning off the Piddletown and Bere Regis road at Burlestone, and thence making along the slight valley of the Chesil Bourne or Divelish stream. The small village of Dewlish on the map points to the amazing colonial energy of the Roman, for here, in a district that even we moderns are accustomed to think remote, was found a fine Roman pavement, many years ago. In another two miles and a half the valley closes in, and the neighbourhood of those big brothers, Bulbarrow and Nettlecombe Tout, is evident from their smaller kindred, on either hand.

Here, under the shelter of the everlasting hills, and in a “lew” warm hollow surrounded by benignant trees that lovingly shut it in, is Bingham’s Melcombe. A little pebbly brook, the Chesil Bourne, prattles down the combe, sheep-bells sound from the hillsides, cattle low in the meadows, and rooks scold and gibber, or lazily caw, in over-arching elms; otherwise, all is still, for much more than even the rustic scenes of Mr. Hardy’s especially farming story, Bingham’s Melcombe is “far from the madding crowd,” and there is nothing of it but a farmstead, the tiny church, and the little gem of an ancient manor-house. For all that Bingham’s Melcombe is so insignificant, it has sent out at least one distinguished man. Fluellen boasted that there were “good men porn at Monmouth,” and here was born that Sir Richard Bingham who earns the praise of Fuller, as being “a brave soldier and fortis et felix in all his undertakings.” He lies, as a brave soldier should, but all brave soldiers cannot, in Westminster Abbey. The Binghams of Bingham’s Melcombe came from a younger son of the Binghams of Sutton Bingham in Somersetshire, and early allied themselves with prominent families. The ducally crowned lion rampant of the Turbervilles quartered on their ancestral shield owes its place there to the marriage of Robert Bingham, about the reign of Henry III., or Edward I., with the daughter and heiress of Robert Turberville.

These long-descended Binghams maintained their hold upon this lovely old home of theirs from the middle of the thirteenth century until recently. Now it has passed into other hands. A member of the family, Canon Bingham, was the original of the “Parson Tringham,” the learned antiquary, who, in the opening pages of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, so indiscreetly informs old John Durbeyfield, the haggler, of his distinguished ancestry.

The manor-house of Bingham’s Melcombe, within its courtyard, is a perfect example of a sixteenth-century country residence. The courtyard, entered by a gatehouse, discloses stone-gabled buildings at the sides, with the highly carved and decorated projecting gable of the hall in front; displaying with a wealth of mantling the Bingham coat of arms, the whole overgrown with trailing roses.

A wild, chalky country, very knobbly and with constant hills and dales, leads away to westward, past Melcombe Horsey, to the hamlet and starved hillside farms of Plush, where flints abound, water is scarce, and farmers are obliged to depend largely upon the “dew-ponds” made on the arid downs. Here is Dole’s Ash farm, the original of “Flintcomb Ash,” the “starve-acre place” where Tess toiled among the other weariful hands in the great swede-fields, “a hundred odd acres in one patch,” with not a tree in sight: Rainbow-land is not all fertile and roseate. The farm, as Mr. Hardy describes it, is situated “above stony lanchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes,” and is at the other extreme from the fertility and sheltered beauty of the Valley of the Frome, the “Vale of Great Dairies.”

Very different from the forbidding westerly range from Bingham’s Melcombe is the country immediately to the east. There the village of Milton Abbas lies enfolded between the richly wooded hills, where the little Mill Bourne rises, at the foot of an alarming but wonderfully picturesque descent; and the woodland shade comes to the back door of every cottage.

Milton Abbas is a remarkable place, and owes its long lines of regularly spaced cottages, all of the same design, to the autocratic whim of Joseph Damer, Baron Milton and first Earl of Dorchester, who (then a commoner) purchased the large and beautiful estate in 1752, and, demolishing the old village, which rose humbly on the outskirts of the magnificent abbey, rebuilt it, a mile away, in 1786. Milton Abbas is, indeed, the precursor of many recent “model” villages, and typical of the highhanded ways of the eighteenth-century landed gentry, who could not endure the sight of a cottage from the windows of their mansions; and so forthwith, in the manner of Eastern potentates, whisked whole villages and populations away from between the wind and their gentility. Each cottage is built four-square, with thatched roof and equidistant doors and windows, all in the Doll’s House or Noah’s Ark order of architecture, and there is scarce a pin to choose between any of them. Half-way down the street is the almshouse, and opposite is the church, and from their presence it will be seen that Lord Dorchester’s village-transplanting was complete and highly methodical. Now that time has weathered his model village, and the chestnut trees planted between the cottages have grown up, Milton Abbas is a not unpleasing curiosity.

Milton Abbas

But Milton Park, beyond the village, contains the greatest surprise, in the almost perfect condition of the surviving abbey church, rising in all the stately bulk and beautiful elaboration of a cathedral; beside the great mansion built for Lord Dorchester in 1771 by Sir William Chambers, familiar to Londoners as the architect of Somerset House.

Milton Abbas, an early “Model” Village

That explorer of this Wessex unknown country, this Land Beyond the Rainbow, who, setting forth uninstructed in what he shall find, comes all unwittingly upon this generally unheard-of abbey, is greatly to be envied, for it is to him as much of a surprise as though its existence had never been breathed beyond the rim of the hills down in whose hollows it lies hid; and to him falls the exquisite pleasure of what is nothing less than a discovery. Coming into the park, all unsuspectingly, the abbey church is disclosed against a wooded background of hills, strikingly like the first glimpse of Wells Cathedral, underneath the Mendips.

Milton Abbey, the “Middleton Abbey” of The Woodlanders, was founded so early as A.D. 933, by Athelstan, and in thirty years from that date became a Benedictine monastery. Nothing, however, of that early time has survived, and the great building we now see belongs to the period between 1322 and 1492, when it was gradually rebuilt, after having been struck by lightning and wholly destroyed in 1309. But the noble building rising so beautifully from the gravel drives and trim lawns of this park is but a completed portion of an intended design. It consists of choir, tower, and north and south transepts, and extends a total length of 132 feet. Had not the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 put an end to this lovely retreat of the Benedictine fraternity, a nave would have been added. To Sir John Tregonwell, King’s Proctor in the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Aragon, fell what may reasonably be called this fine piece of “spoil”; for the price of one thousand pounds at which he bought the monkish estates of Milton Abbas can scarce be regarded as adequate purchase money. Coming at last into the hands of Joseph Damer, the domestic offices of the monastery, which had until then survived in almost perfect condition, were with one exception utterly destroyed, and the existing mansion built in a bastard “Gothic” style, as understood by Chambers. The sole exception is the grand Abbot’s Hall, enshrined within that eighteenth-century building, and entered from the farther side of the great quadrangle. Now in use as a drawing-room, there is probably no more stately room of that description in existence. It has the combined interest and beauty of size, loftiness and exquisite workmanship in stone and carved wood, with antiquity.

Abbot Milton’s Rebus, Milton Abbey The abbey church stands immediately to the south of the mansion, separated from it only by lawns and a drive, and is used as a chapel by the present owner of the estate, a nephew of the late Baron Hambro, who restored it at great cost under the professional advice of that arch-restorer, Sir Gilbert Scott. The solitude, the size and beauty of the interior, are very impressive. Here is a place of worship like a cathedral, used for the prayers of a private household, and if you can by any means manage to forget the grotesque disproportion of ancient size and magnificence to modern use, you will feel very reverent indeed.

Milton Abbey

There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful time-server, Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails of his public conduct in those times of quick-change, between the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman Catholic, he managed to enrich himself at the expense of the old religion’s misfortunes, and to die at peace with all men, although in the possession of property belonging to others. There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monument by Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775. It represents her in the costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously over her. A quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be seen on one of the walls, in the shape of the sculptured rebus of one Abbot William Middleton, with the Arabic date, 1514, and the device of a mill on a tun, or barrel. Thus did the strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish fancies and puns in stone.

Turnworth House

A sign of the times may be noted, in the restoration and re-dedication of the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on the hilltop to the east of the abbey. When the monastery was dissolved, the chapel of course fell out of use, and so remained until recently. It had in turn been used as a pigeon-house, a labourer’s cottage, a carpenter’s shop, and a lumber-room, and was falling into complete decay when Mr. Everard Hambro in 1903 decided to restore it. The varied Saxon, Norman, and Perpendicular architecture was accordingly repaired, and the building reconsecrated on St. Catherine’s night of the same year.

Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winterborne Stickland, two of the eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream that flows into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to another Woodlanders landmark, Turnworth House, the “Great Hintock House,” where Mrs. Charmond, fascinator of the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived. It is situated just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell:

“To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole. But the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds’-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . . The front of the house was an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . . Above the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys.”

From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of Durweston, Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy: a facilis descensus, as well in spirit as in the matter of gradients, for thus you come out of the untravelled and the unknown into the well-worn tracks and intimate life of every day.