WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY

Wimborne shall here be the starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route, that in its south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the one north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth. It follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its conclusion brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury is built.

There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the easeful and the toilsome. You may elect to go directly up-along, to the height frowned down upon by the greater height of Badbury Rings, or may go more circuitously but by more level ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. On the first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies Kingston Lacy, the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph Bankes in 1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic relics. Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those keys of Corfe Castle, held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes in the two sieges she withstood.

A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the shoulders of what has been identified as Mons Badonicus—Badbury Rings—the scene of the overwhelming victory gained in A.D. 520, over Cerdic and his Saxons by King Arthur and his Britons. In later years, when at last Saxon dominion had spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons themselves encamped where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes occupied this inhospitable height. It is now tufted with a clump of fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a lowering sky, looks a fitting scene for any national portent of evil.

They are less impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. There the farmer reaps his heavy crops of hay and cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps again, and history is only a matter of comparison between this year of a poor harvest, when prices are high and marketable produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the horn of Ceres was full and prices low. No matter what the yield, there is ever a something to dash the farmer’s cup from his expectant lips.

At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road branches off from our route, going to Bere Regis and Dorchester. This is the road made at the suggestion of Mr. Erle-Drax of Charborough Park, whose property, it may be supposed, gained in some way from it. Charborough Park is one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower of Two on a Tower were drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of two miles from our route.

It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main entrance-lodge of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a long-continued brick boundary-wall that must have cost a small fortune, and decorated at intervals with arches surmounted by effigies of stags and lions. Time has dealt very severely with some of the squire’s stags, shorn here and there of a limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to the gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of it, even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its own, in the revelation that these imposing “stone” decorations are really of plaster, and hollow.

The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature that breaks the long, straight perspective of this undeviating road, seems to have been erected by the squire as a species of permanent self-advertising hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed: “This road from Wimborne to Dorchester was projected and completed through the instrumentality of J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842.” CÆsar himself could have done no more than was performed by this magnate of the many names, and could not with greater magnificence have suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary influence procured, the public purse paid for.

There is this essential difference between Charborough Park and “Welland House.” Charborough is very closely guarded from intrusion, and none who cannot show a real reason for entering is allowed through the jealously closed and locked gates of the lodges.

The residence of Lady Constantine was, however, very readily accessible, and, “as is occasionally the case with old-fashioned manors, possessed none of the exclusiveness found in some aristocratic settlements. The parishioners looked upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare, particularly for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passed the squire’s mansion, with due considerations as to the scenic effect of the same from the manor windows.” So much to show the composite nature of the scene drawn in Two on a Tower.

The tower—the “Rings Hill Speer” of the story—stands in the park, at a considerable distance from the house on the other side of a gentle dip, but well within sight of the drawing-room windows. In between, across the turf and disappearing into the woodlands to right and left, roam the deer that so plentifully inhabit this beautiful domain. The tower is approached by roomy stone staircases, now overgrown with grass, moss, and fungi, and so far from it or its approaches being in “the Tuscan order of architecture,” they are designed in a most distinctive and aggressive Strawberry Hill Gothic manner. Built originally by Major Drax in 1796, and struck by lightning, it was rebuilt in 1839.

Returning now from this interlude and regaining Bailey Corner, we come to Sturminster Marshall, a place that now, for all the dignity of its name, is just a rustic village, with only that name and an ancient church that was the “Stour Minster” of the Earls of Pembroke, the Earls Marshal of England, to affirm its vanished importance. Its village green, bordered with scattered cottages, has a maypole, painted, like a barber’s pole, with vivid bands of red, white, and blue.

An expedition from this point, across the Stour to Shapwick, although a roundabout pilgrimage, is not likely to be an unrewarded exertion, for that is a village which, although unknown to the greater world, has a local fame that, so long as rustic satire lives, will assuredly not be allowed to die.

The Tower, Charborough Park Shapwick is not remote from the sea, but it might be a midland village (and exceptionally ignorant at that) if we are to believe the legend which accounts for the local name of “Shapwick Wheel-offs,” by which its villagers are known. According to this injurious tale, a shepherd, watching his sheep on Shapwick Down at some period unspecified—let us call it, as the children do, “once upon a time,” or “ever so long ago”—found a live crab, or lobster, that had fallen out of an itinerant fishmonger’s cart. He was so alarmed at the sight of the strange thing that he hurried into the village with the news of it, and brought all the people out to see. With them was the oldest inhabitant, a “tar’ble wold man,” incapable of locomotion, brought in a wheelbarrow to pronounce, out of the wisdom his accumulated years gave him, what this unknown monster might be. When his ancient eyes lighted upon it, or rather, in the Do’set speech: “When a sin ’en, a carled out, tar’ble feared on ’en, ‘wheel I off, my sonnies, wheel I off.’” So they wheeled him off, accordingly, well pleased to leave that mysterious thing to itself.

As may well be supposed, the Shapwick folk are by no means proud of their nickname, and it is therefore a little surprising to find an old and very elaborate weathervane in the village, surmounting the roof of a barn, and giving, in a quaintly silhouetted group, a pictorial representation of the scene. It seems that there were originally three more figures, behind the barrow, but they have disappeared. Perhaps this is evidence of attempts on the part of Shapwick folk to destroy the record of their shame.

A succession of pretty villages—Spetisbury, Charlton Marshall, Blandford St. Mary—enlivens the five miles of road between Sturminster Marshall and Blandford; and then Blandford itself, already described, is entered. Passing through it, and skirting the grounds of Bryanstone, the Stour, more beautiful than earlier on the route, is crossed, and the twin villages of Durweston and Stourpaine, one on either bank, are glimpsed. Then comes the large village of Shillingstone, still steadfastly rural, despite its size, and keeping to the ancient ways more markedly than Sturminster Marshall, for it not only shares with that village the peculiarity of owning a maypole, but a maypole of exceptional height, and one still dressed and decorated with every spring. This tall pole, tapering like the mast of a ship, is a hundred and ten feet in height, and most carefully guarded with wire stays against destruction by the stormy winds that in winter sweep down the valley of the Stour.

Weather-Vane at Shapwick: The “Shapwick Monster”

If we were to name the Shillingstone maypole in accordance with the date of its annual garlanding, it would rather be a “Junepole,” for it is on the 9th of that month that the pretty old ceremony and its attendant merrymakings are held. This apparently arbitrary selection of a date is explained by the old May Day games and rejoicings having been held on May 29th, in the years after the Restoration of Charles II. in 1660; and by the change from Old Style to New, more than a hundred and fifty years later. That change, taking away eleven days, converted what would have been May 29th into June 9th; and thus by gradual change this survival of the ancient pagan festival of Floralia is held when May Day has itself passed and become a memory.

The pole has several times been restored. Its present appearance is due to the restoration of October 1868, but the arrow vane with which it was then surmounted appears to have been blown down, and its improving mottoes—“Tanquam sagitta” (Like as an arrow), and “Sic et nos” (So even we)—lost. Another Latin inscription is Englished thus:

“Their maypole, decayed by age, the rector and inhabitants of Shillingstone, keeping their yearly May Games with all due observance, have carefully restored it on the ninth day of June 1850:

“The fading garland mourns how short life’s day,
The towering maypole heavenward points the way.
Read thou the lesson—seek to gather now
Undying wreaths to twine a deathless brow.”

All very pious and proper, no doubt, but wofully lacking in the May Day spirit of the joy of life, and more fitting to the “Memento mori” fashion of the neighbouring churchyard.

In this old church of Shillingstone—or “Shilling-Okeford,” as from the old manorial lords it was once named—the pilgrim may see by the evidence of an old tablet how a certain William Keen, a merchant of London, fleeing terror-struck from the Great Plague, was overtaken by it and died here in 1666.

The reader, versed in the oddities of place-names, will perhaps not require the assurance that the name of Shillingstone has nothing whatever to do with shillings; but if he doubts, let it at once be said that it was so called long before that coin was known. It was originally “Oakford” and became “Schelin’s Oakford,” or “Schelin’s Town,” when the manor was in Norman times given to an ancestor of those who for centuries later continued to hold it and in more elaborate fashion styled themselves Eschellings.

The Maypole, Shillingstone

Down over intervening hills the road, for a little space forsaking its character of a valley route, comes beside the stream again at Piddleford—or, as the Post Office authorities prefer to call it “Fiddleford”—on the way to Sturminster Newton, the “Stourcastle” of Tess. This is the place mentioned at the opening of the story, to which Tess was driving the load of beehives from Marnhull at night, when the lantern went out and the mailcart dashing into the trap, killed the horse, Prince; thus starting the tragical chain of events that led at last to Winchester gaol.

Sturminster Newton: The White Hart Inn

Of Sturminster Newton, impressively styled on ordnance maps “Sturminster Newton Castle,” Leland says: “The townlette is no greate thing, and the building of it is mene,” and, although it would not occur to a modern writer to adopt that term, certainly there is little that is notable about it. There is no “minster,” no “castle,” and no “new town,” and little to say, save that an ancient six-arched bridge crosses the weedy Stour and that the battered stump of the market cross in the main street seems in its decay to typify the history of the market itself. As the church has been rebuilt, and as the castle on the outskirts is now little more than a memory, the only resort is to turn for some point of interest to that quaintly thatched old inn, the White Hart, very much older than the tablet, “W. M. P. 1708,” on its front would lead many to suppose. It was probably restored at that date, after those troublous times had passed in which the cross, just opposite, lost its shaft, and when, in the fighting in the streets between the Parliamentary dragoons and the associated clubmen of the west, this house and others were fired and Sturminster Newton very generally given over to the horrors of a brutal conflict between troops trained to arms and a peasantry unskilled in the use of the weapons with which they had hastily equipped themselves. But, unprofessional soldiers though they were, the clubmen at Sturminster gave an excellent account of themselves, killing and wounding a number of the dragoons, and taking sixteen others prisoners.