The Wessex of which I shall treat in these gossiping pages is that Wessex of romance and of the great dairy-farms, which has been little touched by the influence of railways. Hampshire and Wiltshire—Winchester and Salisbury—have become too closely in touch with London to stand so fully upon the ancient ways as does Dorset, with the greater part of its north-western neighbour, Somerset. But in these rural territories the countryman still talks the old broad Do’set and Zummerzet speech, in which the letter “o” in every possible circumstance becomes “a,” as you will perceive in that old rhyme beginning:

And they think, too, the olden thoughts.

Nothing can give one a greater sense of the difference between the exploited modernized coast-line and the real old Wessex than the journey from up-to-date Bournemouth to Poole, that olden nest of smugglers, and thence across to the untamed heaths and to Wareham. In this way, then, we will begin our exploration of Wessex.

Wareham is a little town which has been left to drowse peacefully in its old days. Nothing has happened in Wareham since its almost complete destruction by fire (1762), an event which here as distinctly marks an era as does the Great Fire of London in the City. It not only rubricates the local table of events with a glowing finger, but the rebuilding necessary after it has set a specious stamp of modernity upon the place, to which its long and troubled history and its two ancient churches give an emphatic denial. Mr. Hardy styles Wareham “Anglebury,” and it is a name which well befits a town whose story is so greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the older kingdom of Wessex. The original founders of Wareham, who were probably antecedent to the Anglo-Saxons, were very properly afraid of overseas rovers, who might sail into Poole Harbour and attack them, and they raised around the place those huge ditches and embankments which remain to this day to astonish the stranger, and are known as the “walls of Wareham.” Covered with grass, the summit of them forms an interesting ramble. But these defences never did confer upon Wareham the desired security. Its early story is one of continual capture, and it had been burnt so often that the inhabitants had at last feared to rebuild it and live there again; and it was a deserted place William the Conqueror found. He caused a castle to be built, but that fortress in its long career again and again invited siege and plunder, until it was at last destroyed in the troubles between Charles I. and his Parliament. The last pitiful scene was in 1685, when three rebels in the Monmouth rising were hanged on the famous walls, at a corner still known as “Bloody Bank.” The chief architectural interest is centred upon the ancient church of St. Martin, a curiously-proportioned building, standing piquantly beside the road outside the town, to the north, on a little bank or terrace. The antiquary perceives by a mere glance at its stilted narrow and lofty proportions that it is Saxon, and the interior discloses a lofty nave of stern unornamental appearance, with characteristic Saxon chancel arch, the whole closely resembling the interior of the Saxon church of Bradford-on-Avon. The Church of St. Mary, at the other extremity of the town, possesses a hexagonal leaden font, one of the twenty-seven leaden fonts in England.

Six miles north-west of Wareham we come to Bere Regis, a place very notable in the Hardy literature, for it is the “Kingsbere” of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and the “Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill” of Far from the Madding Crowd. Before ever it acquired the kingly prefix or suffix, it was merely “Bere,” a word which explained its situation amid underwoods and copses. I have all the will in the world to describe Bere Regis as “picturesque”; but it is not that. It is an old rather grim and grey village that has had troubles—not romantic troubles, please to understand, but economic ones. It has a “past”—neither scandalous nor noble, but just the past of a place that has seen better days and has suffered—suffered, truly, in the peculiarly Dorset way, from fire. How many times the dry thatch of the cottages has gone up in flame and smoke I know not; only I know—and all may see—that experience has not made the villagers wise, for it is a long street of thatched cottages yet; and here and there is the ruin of one more recently burnt in like manner. The scattered heaps remain untouched, for it is not worth the while to rebuild in Bere Regis. That is why the heavily-thatched roofs, with little bedroom windows peering out like weary-lidded eyes, look to me grim and sad. The church is fine, and owes much of its beauty to the ancient Turberville family, something to the Abbey of Tarent, and most of all to Cardinal Morton, a native of this parish. He is said to have given the noble—indeed, the extraordinarily noble—elaborately carved, painted and gilded roof of the nave, which by itself would make the artistic reputation of a church. It is really not a West of England roof at all, but distinctly of the East Anglian type, and there are legends that explain the bringing of it here. However that may be, it is a bold and striking object; the hammer-beams carved into the huge shapes of Bishops, Cardinals, and pilgrims, with immense round faces carved on the bosses, which look down upon you with fat, complacent smiles. Add to this the fact that the figures are painted with flesh-tints and the costumes vividly coloured, and it will be guessed that this is a remarkable work. Here are interesting carved fifteenth-century bench-ends, and on two of the Transitional Norman pillars extraordinary sculptures of heads—one tugging open its mouth, the other with hand to forehead. They are popularly said to be “Toothache” and “Headache,” but were probably intended to symbolize the divine gifts of speech and sight. Battered old Purbeck marble tombs of the bygone Turbervilles are seen here.

Bere Regis is a fine point whence to explore into what Mr. Thomas Hardy styles “Egdon Heath.” By that name the wild stretch of moorlands marked on the maps as “Bere Heath,” “Hyde Heath,” “Decoy Heath,” etc., is understood, chiefly between Wareham on the east and Dorchester on the west, and roughly bounded on the south by the River Frome. It is not merely a wild, but also a very beautiful, region, on whose borders the novelist himself, the creator of so many alluring rustics, and the true begetter of the Hardy Country, was born, at Upper Bockhampton, 1840. Nature reigns, unchallenged, on these swarthy moors of brown and purple. He tells us, truly, how this country figures in Domesday. “Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary wilderness—‘Bruaria.’” Leland, writing in the reign of Henry VII., describes this tract as “overgrown with heth and mosse”; and as it was in the eleventh and in the sixteenth centuries, so it remains in the twentieth. In these untamed scenes the sombre novel of The Return of the Native is set.