Northwards out of Dorchester we come by favour of the long straight old Bristol road into the heart of the great Wessex dairying district of Blackmore Vale; but before reaching that region of green fatness we pass through the country associated in the minds of all readers of the Wessex novels with The Woodlanders. The road goes through the village of Charminster and in the valley of the little river Cerne, under the chalk downs that gradually rise as the decayed town of Cerne Abbas is approached. Just where the shoulders of those lofty chalk hills are at their highest and steepest, the stranger will see with that gasp of astonishment which is the proper meed of such a thing the gigantic figure of a man outlined upon the grass. This is the “Giant of Cerne,” who well deserves that name, for he is 180 feet high. He is represented wielding an immense club, which he flourishes over his head. The history of this singular figure is, like that of the several “White Horses” cut on hillsides in various parts of England, and like the famous “Long Man of Wilmington,” on the downs near Eastbourne, unknown. Whether the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Cerne traced his outlines, or whether, as legends declare, this was a work of the early pagan Saxons, and intended by them to represent their god, Heil, to whom human sacrifices were offered here, must ever be matters for conjecture.

If you would make acquaintance with a dead town, allow me to introduce you to Cerne Abbas. It is a weary, age-worn place, a little off the main road, and rapidly falling into decay. It suffered when the great abbey, of which the noble Perpendicular gatehouse remains, was dissolved; but it experienced a considerable revival in the great days for agriculture, when the Napoleonic wars sent up the price of corn and made the farmers happy. You may see the signs of this in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century houses in the place, with large shop-fronts. Those shop-fronts tell a tale, for they are for the greater part no longer shops, and serve as the immeasurably too large windows for sitting-rooms. The great final causes of the decline and fall of Cerne Abbas were the coming of railways, which rendered so many small towns and rural markets no longer necessary, and the failure of agriculture. So Cerne is dead. You will find no deader townlet in England. Therefore let us pace reverently her empty streets.

We now come between the hills to the pretty village of Minterne Magna, which is the “Great Hintock” of The Woodlanders. “Here,” says a rustic wag in that story, “you do see the world and life.” Not much, though, for although the old Bristol road is still an excellent highway, it is not precisely crowded. Beyond the extremely small village the road reaches the steep escarpment whence the great bastioned mid-Dorset heights go, in many places with dramatic steepness down into the far-spreading Blackmore Vale. The road itself naturally descends at the least steep place to the levels of Middlemarsh; but it is very well worth while to explore for some distance along the by-road to the left, which follows the very edge of this ridge. Here is the lofty height of High Stoy, with its great neighbours, Dogbury, Bulbarrow, and Nettlecombe Tout. Three miles along this byway brings you past the most striking scenery to the lofty down above Batcombe, passing on the way the lonely, mysterious stone pillar called “Cross-in-Hand,” associated with a dramatic episode in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It is described rather curiously in those pages as “the scene of a miracle or murder, or both.”

Beyond where Batcombe Church is seen, down in the profound vale, the road goes into a secluded region, where the three Melbury villages and that of Evershot cluster about the noble Melbury Park, seat of the Earl of Ilchester. The great mansion is the “King’s Hintock Court,” of that delightful story, “The First Countess of Wessex,” in A Group of Noble Dames. The tiny village of Melbury Osmund, the Hardyean “Little Hintock,” is described, aptly enough, by one of his characters as “such a small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if you don’t know where ’tis.”

Returning now from these Arcadian recesses, we descend by the old Bristol road into the vale at Middlemarsh, a part of that Vale of Blackmore which has been described with such complete justness as “This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry.... The atmosphere is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.” Dense scrub-woods are at first met as we gain the Marshwood level, and then die away as Holnest is reached—Holnest, with its little church quite dwarfed by the huge mausoleum erected by the late J.S.W.S. Erle-Drax for himself. Near at hand is Holnest Lodge, one of that eccentric squire’s residences, still with the tall column in front, crested by a bronze statue of himself, erected by himself to his own honour and glory, since no one else was in the least likely to do so much for him.

In less than five miles we come into Sherborne, that pleasant old town which still bears some considerable traces of that cathedral-city dignity of which it was deprived so long ago as 1078. It is situated in a little vale of its own, the Vale of that Scir burne, or clear, sparkling brook, which made the spot seem so desirable to the monks who were settled here by King Ina as early as A.D. 705. That stream originated the place-name, while losing its own, for it is identical with the River Yeo, or Ivel, which in turn gives a name to Yeovil town, anciently called “Ivell.”

The great glory of Sherborne is, of course, its noble abbey church, standing in its own precincts, reached through a low-browed archway out of the main street, past the beautiful old “Monks’ Conduit.” This minster-like church—really a minster in the technical sense of the word, it having been the church of a Benedictine monastery—is grouped with the buildings of the Grammar School, itself founded by Edward VI. from the spoils of that dissolved religious house, and having its home in the old domestic buildings of those Black Monks. It is a stately grouping. The great church itself is of the loveliest form and colour. Externally presenting the appearance of a Late Perpendicular building, with architectural details exhibiting the approach of the Renaissance, the interior discloses, particularly in the transepts, the fact that the core of the building is actually in great degree Norman, and that the late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century work is practically a refacing in a later fashion. But the choir is a rebuilding, effected after the fire of 1437—a fire which still shows its traces in the reddened patches on the golden-yellow Ham Hill sandstone, whose lovely tints contribute so greatly to the beauty of the soaring architecture of clerestory and delicate fan vaulting. Sherborne, history will not forget, gave a lead in modern times to the passion for historical pageants, inaugurated here in the great Sherborne Pageant held in the grounds of Sherborne Castle Park, 1905. There, amid the ruins of the ancient Bishop’s Castle, the story of the town for over a thousand years was retold.

Some five miles west is Yeovil, that great dairying centre; that neat and prosperous town, looking so bright and cheerful with its houses of the yellow Ham Hill stone, a sandstone that reveals itself in the wayside cuttings as you descend towards it down Babylon Hill. But Yeovil has little of antiquity to show the visitor, except those two old inns, the George and the Castle, which face one another in High Street, for it has rebuilt itself pretty thoroughly.

Sixteen miles eastward of Sherborne stands the hill-top town of Shaftesbury, to which railways do not come, and from whose eyrie all modern developments turn aside. The milestones tell a strange tale of so many miles to “Shaston,” and it is not always that the traveller understands Shaftesbury to be indicated under that disguise, but as such it still remains in rustic speech. The novelist tells us, in one voice with the ascertained history of the place, how Shaftesbury was originally the British “Caer Palladour.” It possessed three mints, twelve satellite churches, attendant upon a magnificent abbey, and many other architectural glories, for which the stucco-fronted eighteenth and early nineteenth century houses which now constitute the main part of the town are a sorry exchange. All those magnificences have disappeared, like the baseless fabric of a vision; and antiquaries to-day, grubbing in trenches and turning over potato-patches, can do little more than retrieve a few shattered stones and broken tiles that hint of the vanished abbey’s former existence. Three parish churches remain, and form a very generous provision for the small place that Shaftesbury long since became. But if, architecturally speaking, the town is so negligible, the distant views, both of it and from it, are grand. Blackmore Vale is disclosed perhaps to its greatest advantage from these heights, in that southward view between St. Peter’s Church and the massive time-stained buttresses on the right hand, which mark the precincts of the long-abolished abbey. The road descends from this point, incredibly steep, and quite impossible for anything on wheels, seeing that it goes down in a series of gigantic sett-paved stairs. Framed in thus romantically, the view across the most beautiful part of the Vale of Blackmore extends far away until it melts in a blue vagueness.

The streets of Shaftesbury have names a good deal more picturesque than the houses that front upon them. That of “Bimport” is an example. In that quiet thoroughfare is the house styled in Jude the Obscure “Old Grove’s Place.” It is easily recognizable by reason of its projecting porch.