From Warmwell Cross the route into Dorchester may advantageously be varied by bearing to the right, through the very pretty village of West Stafford, where there is an interesting church, and an inn with a deprecatory set of verses, beginning:

Pleasant by-roads lead across tributaries of the Frome and into Stinsford, which is in the heart of the Hardy Country, about two miles from Dorchester. It is a secluded place amid massed woods and at the edge of the fine park surrounding Kingston House. Stinsford is the “Mellstock” of that sweet idyll Under the Greenwood Tree.

Beyond it we gain the highroad that leads down on the left into Dorchester. The right-hand route conducts up Yellowham Hill to Piddletown; or the stranger may on some summer day be well content to lose himself in the sylvan wilds in the valley of the Frome, through the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton, where the rustic cottage that was the birthplace of Thomas Hardy may be seen on the very verge of the open, under Ilsington Woods. There, where the blue wood-smoke from rustic chimneys ascends amid dense foliage, and where the swart heaths begin, he learned his “wood-notes wild.” Piddletown Church, with its monuments of the Martins of Athelhampton, and the fine Jacobean minstrel gallery, is well worth seeing, for its own sake and for its associations in the Wessex novels, in which it figures prominently as “Weatherbury.” At Lower Walterstone, about one mile north, is the beautiful Jacobean farmhouse described in Far from the Madding Crowd as the home of Bathsheba Everdene.

Coming into Dorchester, the road traverses the water-meadows of the Frome, over the spot called Ten Hatches, and across the little bridges that were the scene of Henchard’s despair, in The Mayor of Casterbridge. “Casterbridge,” as everyone familiar with Wessex knows, is Dorchester—and an excellent name, too, for this grave town of early British and Roman antecedents. It would be vain to pretend that Dorchester is picturesque. If you expect in it nodding gables, and half-timbered fifteenth-century buildings to be the note of it, you will experience a disappointment in seeing the real thing. For the general aspect of the town is one of Georgian four-square respectability, and sky-lines are apt to be horizontal instead of at acute angles. There are, however, older things by far at Dorchester. At Fordington, for instance, which is an integral part of the town, there have been discovered Roman remains, as, indeed, they have been plentifully unearthed all in and about the borough. The tympanum over the south door of the parish church is exceptionally well worth inspection. It is a very remarkable example of Norman sculpture, and represents the miraculous appearance of St. George on horseback at the Battle of DorylÆum. The figures are full of life and vigour, except those represented as being dead, and they look very dead indeed. St. George is shown in the act of thrusting his lance into the mouth of one of the enemy, who vainly endeavours to pluck it out. At the back are two others of the foe, stricken with fear at this horrible sight, and praying on their knees for mercy. The peculiar interest of this sculpture lies in the fact that all the actors in this scene are represented in Norman chain-mail.

There is an unmistakably “county-town” atmosphere in Dorchester, which is a distinctly urban place, and not now of that thinly-modified rusticity described long ago by Thomas Hardy: “The farmer’s boy could sit under his barleymow and pitch a stone into the window of the town clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa’ that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”

No, modern Dorchester is not like that, and its chief features—the noble elm avenues, that struck the traveller by road into and out of the town with admiration—have had their exquisite nobility qualified by time and change. Those grand avenues extended north, south, east, and west; but to-day they have in some cases disappeared, and in others have been obscured by suburban buildings, that have shut out the views of the fields from the pavements. Dorchester, however, is rich in notable things. As you enter it from Piddletown and Ten Hatches, and rise up along High East Street to Cornhill, which is the very centre of the town, you approach the grey old church of St. Peter, and note in the flagged space beneath the tower the bronze statue of William Barnes, the “Dorset poet,” 1801–1886, with a verse aptly chosen from his own writings:

Thus appropriately, in the olden Wessex folk-speech he did so much to preserve, is the memory of the amiable “Pa’son Barnes” kept alive.

Much else is changed, but still on market-days the country-folk come pouring into what they to this day call “Darchester.” They come into it chiefly by carrier’s cart, or by dogcarts and other road vehicles, just as of yore; and although the market-day assemblage of carriers’ tilt-carts is an astonishing survival in numerous old English towns, there are nowhere to be seen so astonishingly many as here; and the occupants of them are not infrequently such genuine old crusted characters as you read of, and wag the same old Wessex tongue. For the rest, Dorchester has the Roman encampment of Poundbury and the amphitheatre of Maumbury to show; in High West Street is the house, duly marked, where the infamous Judge Jeffreys lodged when on his Assize of Blood in 1685, and in the Town Hall his chair is shown. While some things have changed, other trivial details have remained the same for considerably over a century. Thus, Rowlandson in 1797 made a drawing of King George III. being driven in a post-chaise to the “King’s Arms.” The “King’s Arms” Hotel still stands where it did, and looks in every respect the selfsame place, which is itself a remarkable proof of the abiding nature of our institutions; but what is yet more remarkable is the fact that the selfsame, indubitable individual old flower-pots are on the roof of the portico yet. In the face of the destiny of all flower-pots to be resolved at some time into potsherds, and in view of the many times when the roof of that portico must have been used, on election and other occasions, as a convenient place whence to harangue excited crowds, their survival is strange indeed.

For the rest, a gruesome little cottage will be found by taking the road out of High West Street known as Glydepath Lane, and following it to a fine damp situation near the river. It is only gruesome when you know its old story; otherwise it is a quite idyllic little thatched cottage, and stands in a nice garden. But it is handy to Dorchester Gaol, and it was the hangman’s cottage. In this same street is a mingled grim and stately great early eighteenth-century mansion, known as Colyton House. The hideously battered keystone mask in the blocked-up archway of one of its outbuildings has been appropriated, and made literary capital of, by Mr. Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge. “High Place Hall,” the home of Lucetta, Henchard’s lady-love in that story, is really a house at the corner of South Street and Durngate Street, but he transfers the unlovely thing from Colyton House to it. He has an extraordinary aptitude for seeing something malignant and inimical in lifeless objects, and you are almost persuaded that there was some malevolence in this that wrought Henchard’s ruin.

Comparatively few are those who explore from Dorchester along the old Exeter road to Bridport, for the scenery is wild and the road lonely and steep. Well, then, what of that? Those places are few indeed where level roads accompany rugged scenery. Explore those fourteen miles. Truly they will reward the amateur of scenery: the lofty ridge whose summit is reached three parts of the way revealing widespreading views out to sea on the left, and over wonderful hills and vales inland on the right. You have a taste of what this route is like immediately after leaving Dorchester and its western avenue behind, for cresting the sky-line of the downs on the left are the giant prehistoric earthworks of Maiden Castle, glooming darkly upon the road. Who delved the deep and lofty ditches and embankments, the amazing concentric and overlapping circles enclosing the vast camp on yonder height? Nay, who among the ancient peoples that warred in Britain from the earliest prehistoric times until the dawn of history did not have a hand in that immense fortification and camp of refuge? It was old when the Romans came and added their quota of spade-work to it. But this at least we may deduce from those cyclopean earthworks: that those who made them and added to them must have been horribly afraid, thus to seek the defensive so diligently, instead of going out to battle in the open. Unquestionably, ancient warfares must have raged along this way, for prehistoric tumuli are plentiful along the downs as we progress.

Passing Bridehead Park, a road leads steeply down on the left to Longbredy, where will be found the deserted old manor-house of Kingston Russell, whence the Russells, Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity in 1502, in the person of the courtly and ingratiating John Russell. Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy was also born here, and under the same roof died John Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic, some thirty years ago. Approaching Bridport, a stone at the corner of the hedgerow in Lee Lane on the right commemorates what Fuller styles the “Miraculous Divergence,” the escape of Charles II., September 23, 1651, when he baffled his pursuers by turning out of the main road at this point.

Bridport town stands upon its sponsorial little river, Brit, about one and a half miles from the sea, at West Bay. There, on the exposed seashore of what is often styled “Deadman’s Bay,” the river slides into the Channel. West Bay is the queerest of places. It has a small harbour, formed by locking up the river behind lock-gates, and two parallel wooden jetties start hazardously out from the beach. In and out of this harbour small sailing-vessels make their way; and certain scattered cottages, the Bridport Arms Inn, and some few recent houses, all standing in the sands and minute gravel of the Chesil Beach, which ends here, make believe that West Bay is a seaside resort. On either side of it the cliffs rise to great heights, and are partly of a friable, earthy nature, yellow in hue.