3 9002 06773 "I give thefe Books 1 for the, founding of a. (Aclhgt in this CoUnyv BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME Ann S. Farnam Fund THE DORSET COAST WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Brighton Road : Old Times and New on a Classic Highway. The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries : To day and in Days of Old. The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike. The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway. The Exeter Road : The Story of the West of England Highway. The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols. The Norwich Road : An East Anglian Highway. The Holyhead Road : The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols. The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway. The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road : Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike. Cycle Rides Round London. A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction. Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols. The Ingoldsby Country : Literary Landmarks of " The Ingoldsby Legends." The Hardy Country : Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels. The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road. Two Vols. The Hastings Road. [In the Press. fiooaa?jpMp THE DORSET COAST CHARLES G. HARPER ' In this land they heard nothing, saw nothing, smelt nothing, tasted nothing that CHAPTER XVII ,'lTl" ' the burning cliff — osmington — preston — lodmoor marsh ." .. ' 1 57 " ... Akj . a\i ---.j ,;?'./: CHAPTER XVIII WEYMOUTH . A A' , ". . . .172 '¦.¦ "¦ • ¦.:/(./".' T ,.G'i '.'.'¦'. CHAPTER XIX WEYMOUTH (continued)'' . A . . . .187 CHAPTER XX THE CHESIL BEACH— THE ISLE OF1 PORTLAND — c.. STORMS AND WRECKS .. .... . ;y; ¦: , -.>,. IQ4 b x CONTENTS CHAPTER XXI PAGE PORTLAND CASTLE — FORTUNE'S WELL — CHESIL VILLAGE • 2I4 CHAPTER XXII THE CONVICT PRISON — CHURCH HOPE COVE- PORTLAND BILL. 228 CHAPTER XXIII ABBOTSBURY 243 CHAPTER XXIV SWYRE — BURTON BRADSTOCK 258 CHAPTER XXV BRIDPORT TOWN 267 CHAPTER XXVI WEST BAY 276 CHAPTER XXVII ¦ WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH 285 / CONTENTS xi CHAPTER XXVIII PAGE LYME REGIS — EARLY HISTORY — THE MONMOUTH REBELLION .... • • 3°3 CHAPTER XXIX REVIVAL OF LYME — THE COBB — THE FISHERMEN 314 CHAPTER XXX LYME SMUGGLERS — BUDDLE BRIDGE — THE DEVON BORDER 327 INDEX 334 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Durdle Door Map of Dorset Coast The Dorset Coast . The Guildhall, Poole . Kinson Church-tower, and Smuggler's Grave Corfe Castle from Scotland Heath Branksea Island . Interior : Studland Church The Agglestone Littlesea The Cliffs at Parson's Barn . Old Harry and His Wife Parson's Barn .... Old Swanage: The "Figurehead" Inn The Old Fish Shop .... The Lock-up ... . . High Street and Town Hall, Swanage The Wellington Memorial, Swanage . Tilly Whim Caves The "Great Globe" .... St. Aldhelm's Head .... xiii FrontispieceFacing p. I PAGE i 233337 4i 51 5558 60 61 65 7i 72 7377 81 90 93 Hi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiv PAGE St. Aldhelm's Chapel "3 Chapman's Pool n5 Smedmore .... • ¦ • I24 Kimmeridge Bay . . . • l32 Worbarrow Bay . . . .... T35 The Coastwise Road .... . I36 Lulworth Castle and the Heaths . . • 137 Arishmill i Gap . . . . '43 The Fossil Forest, Lulworth . 148 Lulworth Cove . . . 149 Man-o'-War Bay . . . . 151 Horsefall Cliffs . . -155 Ringstead Bay, and Whitenose . 159 Old Cottages in Ringstead Bay . 163 Lodmoor Marsh . . . ... 167 A Quaint Corner in Weymouth, showing the Cannon-ball — a Relic of the Siege of 1644 ... . 177 The Isle of Portland, from Wyke . . 195 Wreck of the Patria on the Chesil Beach . ... 209 Old Cottage at Chesil ... ... . 223 A Rough Sea on the Chesil Beach . . . 225 A Cottage at Easton . 230 Wakeham, and the Gates of Pennsylvania Castle . . 233 The Home of "Avice," in the "Pursuit of the Well-beloved" . 235 The Coast of Portland . . . . 236 The Race . . 238 Pennsylvania Castle, and the Ruins of Portland Church . 239 St. Catherine's Chapel, Abbotsbury . . . 245 Swyre, and Puncknowle Knob . . ... 261 The Monument, Lee Lane 271 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv PAGE The Old "Castle" Inn 274 West Bay 281 Eype's Mouth, and Golden Cap ... . . 287 Device on the Tower, Whitechurch Canonicorum . 291 Whitechurch Canonicorum .... . . 293 The Shrine of St. Wita . . ... 296 Charmouth ... ... 299 Lyme Regis . . .... 304 Lyme Regis . . . . 307 The Quay, Lyme Regis .... . . 316 A Heavy Sea at Lyme Regis ... . . 319 Buddie Bridge 328 Old Houses on the Buddie, Resorts of Old-time Smugglers . 331 CHAPTER I A GENERAL VIEW The coast of Dorsetshire is not easily overpraised, nor without difficulty explored, for it combines beauty, ruggedness, and general inaccessibility, each in a very high degree. Here and there, where an infrequent seaside resort is set down in some cleft of the tremendous cliffs of this highly picturesque coast, its natural wildness is annulled ; but such places are few, and when Swanage, Weymouth, West Bay, and Lyme Regis have been named, you have the artificialities of this seashore wholly enumerated. When we consider what modern times have done to the 1 1 THE DORSET COAST seashores of Sussex, of Kent, and even those remoter littorals of Devon and Cornwall, this is remarkable indeed. The coast of Dorset, disregarding its bays, creeks, harbours, and inlets, stretches forty-five miles, measured direct on the map ; but the traveller who seeks to explore its every nook will have covered, before the completion of his enter prise, not fewer than eighty-five miles, from Poole Head, on the west of Bournemouth, to Ware Cliffs, outside Lyme Regis. Those who seek to explore the coast of Dorset by one method of progression are like to be un successful, and the present writer has only suc ceeded in winning to its innermost recesses by dint of the several means of cycling, walking, and sailing. The cyclist's lot, in especial, is an arduous one, though by no means without the compensa tions tending to balance the trials that arise from extravagantly steep gradients, flinty roads, and speciously alluring tracks that lead along likely paths, to presently bring the Columbus of the coast to some dead-end of tangled blackberry jungle in an undercliff, where even coastguards fear to tread. Cycling, in fine, here has excitements all its own, and when the explorer is particularly keen on keeping intimate touch with the coast scenery, not infrequently resolves itself into a walking tour, with the bicycle itself as a helpless rather than helpful companion, which has to be painfully pushed up steep paths, lifted over stiles, wheeled across sheep-downs, and carried through A GENERAL VIEW 3 unbridged brooks ; a companion, moreover, lending nothing illuminative, in the way of conversation, to the pleasures and hardships of the way. Would one, therefore, utterly eschew that wonderful invention when planning an exploration of this coast ? By no means. Only you must needs be a cyclist of stamina, endurance, and determination ; not like Hamlet, " fat and scant of breath," nor yet one of those whose ambition is all for speed. A proportion of pluck, too, comes not amiss, and added to it, of course, expertness, so that the trackless, roadless, steep and grassy sheep-downs which might otherwise have to be wearifully walked, under the rays of a vertical July or August sun, may be coasted. It will be gathered, in the course of these remarks, that, on the whole, the Dorset coast is scarcely to be intimately seen by the lady cyclist, who must take it in small doses, rather than in long expeditions. It is remarkable how studiously the good roads, and often, indeed, any kind of roads, avoid this most delightful of coasts; remarkable, but not strange, for a coast-line largely characterised as this is by cliffs of great altitudes, backed by steeply swooping downs, with but an occasional port, and the market-towns for the most part inland, has never yet had any need of coastwise highways. To these circumstances we owe what may be regarded in these times, when a near future of a continuous " sea front " and an uninterrupted line of modish seaside holiday 4 THE DORSET COAST resorts appears to be within view, as the exceptional good fortune of Dorsetshire, along whose towering bastioned heights, and by whose salty margin it is yet possible to wander a whole day among unspoiled solitudes or through villages still primi tive, meeting not another of your own tourist kind, and foregathering only with villagers, fisher men, and coastguards. You may lose yourself, with the greatest ease and dispatch again and again in these wilds, and so it be summer and the weather propitious it is small matter you do so, for what harm can there hap in being lost in Arcady ? But, indeed, there is something for all tastes on the Dorset coast ; for all, with but one, and that a highly important, reservation. The Dorset seaboard does not include among its varied attrac tions any very populous place of popular resort. Weymouth is its most considerable town, and there the summer crowds do congregate to some extent, but by comparison with some seaside towns that rise insistently in one's memory, Weymouth is extremely staid. There the road is flat, by way of interlude, and follows the curving margin of Weymouth Bay with exceptional fidelity. There the explorer, coming westward, from dis tricts where the tall cliffs generally descend sheer into the sea, finds the first considerable stretch of beach, a foretaste of that famous Chesil Beach beginning to the westward of Portland, and continuing for a long straight stretch of eighteen miles to beyond West Bay, where the yellow A GENERAL VIEW 5 sand cliffs give a complete change from the Port land stone, the oily shale, and the chalk between Swanage and Weymouth, and at last end in the grand climax of Eype and Golden Cap, by Lyme Regis. CHAPTER II SANDBANKS AND NORTH HAVEN " The land of Beulah lies beyond the Delectable Mountains," and the fair land of Dorset is seen by the Bournemouth visitor, spread out to his view as, taking his walks westward by Alum Chine and the cliffs at Poole Head, he looks down upon Poole Harbour, and out to where the great downs and purple heaths rise beyond it, glowing in the westering sun. Bournemouth comes into the picture because one most conveniently begins the exploration of the Dorset coast from it. From that wholly modern marine pleasure city, impudently planted on the hoary heaths of the Hampshire seaboard, one steps unconsciously into Dorset, and comes almost instantly from the exploited and ravaged Chines, now kerbed and furnished with gas-lamps, seats, and other appliances of civilisation, to the natural margin of the shore. Only the half-tamed beauties of Branksome Chine and of the Canford Cliffs Chines remind the wayfarer by the sad sea waves of the encroach ments of the builder and the insatiate greed of the landowner. They, it is true, are in Dorset, for SANDBANKS AND NORTH HAVEN 7 in looking upon the maps on which the customary buff tint of Hampshire marches on the westward with the mauve of Dorset, the Dorsetshire coast is seen to begin in apparently arbitrary fashion, two miles from the shores of that natural divi sion, Poole Harbour; the boundary line running through Canford Heath to Boundary Chine, at the extremity of Canford Cliffs, slightly to the westward of that better-known landmark, Alum Chine. This seemingly objectless and arbitrary selection of a frontier has, however, a reason which, although not apparent to the eye, is none the less a very valid one. The line, in fact, is drawn at the eastern boundary of the ancient and extensive manor of Canford, which, once the property of that famous historical character, John of Gaunt, who seems to have had a finger in almost every desirable pie, is now the possession of Lord Wimborne. There is no escaping the fact, for every cottage on the property bears my lord's monogram, done on a terra-cotta tablet, the colour of unbaked dough, looking very pallid and indigestible ; and no doubt it would be placed upon the villas of Parkstone and Branksome too, if it were thought the residents would endure the badge. The manor of Canford is thus wholly in Dorset shire, and Poole Harbour, geographically speak ing, the dividing-line, is in like manner included within its bounds. The loveliest and least conventionalised of the numerous chines, where the cliffs of sand and shale break away to the sea, is that of Branksome, 8 THE DORSET COAST where the landscape gardener has done less than elsewhere, and the streamlets running out of the heaths, and the solemn pines that croon lullabies in their minor key have been left very much to themselves. There are ferny glades in Branksome Chine, and aromatic resinous odours of the in digenous woods, which recall, better than anything else now to be seen in Bournemouth, what the site of Bournemouth was before the building of a great town affrighted nature and abolished most of the health-giving sylvan beauties that originally made the fortune of the place. At the foot of one of these crumbling sand cliffs a few remains are yet visible of " Simpson's Folly," a house whose foundations were literally and actually laid in the sands, and whose concrete walls met with the fate apportioned to houses built in such a foothold. The rash Simpson, a man of small means, settled at Bournemouth many years ago, and being desirous of having a house as close to the sea as possible, built this " Folly " little above high-water mark — of heavy concrete walling. The sea, however, soon undermined his house and rendered it uninhabitable. The Poole authorities, too, represented to this squatter on what looked like a " No Man's Land" that he had infringed their rights. The house, by this time grown dangerous, was then blown up by gunpowder. Westward, the cliffs end abruptly at Poole Head, where the entrance to Poole Harbour once opened. Beyond that point, instead of the SANDBANKS AND NORTH HAVEN g sea that once rolled through, is a stretch of a mile of blown sand, heaped fantastically, leading to the once solitary point of North Haven. These first two miles of the Dorsetshire coast form a very singular walk from Bournemouth ; lonely until the last few years, but now becoming dotted with crazy bungalows, and, in summer at least, well frequented. It is the district well known in Bournemouth and Poole as " Sand banks," a name which fits it — in that most ex pressive of similes — " like a glove." The Dorset coast, from the Hampshire border to the entrance to Poole Harbour at North Haven, may be said to be two miles long and a hundred yards broad, with one side facing the open sea of the Channel, and the other looking inwards, upon the inland sea of the harbour. It is, in short, a long spit of sand thrown up by many centuries of winds and waves, partly across the originally broad entrance to that inlet. Once, in the long ago, before the beginnings of history, it was merely a movable bar, covered with every flood tide and shifting with every storm, but now so heaped up and solid that it is looked upon as permanent. And permanent it is likely to remain, unless some exceptional hurricane, such as is rarely experienced in this part of the world, arises. Meanwhile, Nature is patiently striving to anchor it more securely in its place by growing coarse grass on the tumbled ridges and hollows, and an uncon ventional company of summer squatters have settled down in the wilderness and built a most io THE DORSET COAST squalid concourse of huts just above high- water mark. Here their domestic arrangements are fully exposed to public gaze, and their ragged towels and bathing costumes, and their patched stockings, flaunt all day long in the playful breeze, greatly scandalising the passers-by. The word " bungalow," covers, like charity, a multitude of sins. A bungalow may be anything, from a small one-floored palace to a large packing- case. At " Sandbanks " it is the packing-case order of architecture that prevails, and thoroughly typical of the settlement in general is one called " The Castle," but more descriptively to be named " the Egg-chest." Another is formed of an old railway carriage, but, whatever the build, squalor reigns uncontested. Gardens in the sand are entirely out of the question, and, in any case, the Sandbanks population seem as reckless of gardens, as of tidiness and the ordinary conven tions of civilisation. To this lonely stretch of blown sand come people who desire to make unconventional holiday, to be enlarged for awhile from the obligations of twentieth-century civilisa tion, to hve as they please ; and thus we shall, perhaps, not be assuming too much if we assume what we see as we pass by to be their ideal. Obviously, then, their ideal is a collarless and tieless, unbraced, unbuttoned, unshaven and un shorn life ; and to go down at heel all their days, and to breakfast, dine and tea off table-linen a fortnight in use, is evidently what they understand by enjoyment. SANDBANKS AND NORTH HAVEN n The domestic arrangements of all are frankly open to view, and the curious may observe that Brown, who would shudder to think his next-door neighbour at his suburban home knew anything of his way of life, has a rasher of bacon frizzling in the open air, in a frying pan, on a primitive fireplace made of half-a-dozen bricks, outside his weatherboarded shanty, while his neighbour is completing his morning toilet in public, and the domestic linen of both establishments is either fluttering from poles, or spread out to dry on the sand, or on a handy furze-bush. Sandbanks is a little too far removed from the Bournemouth or Poole shops for the butcher to call very often or very regularly, and so the bungalow folk return to an earlier and simpler life by way of those ultimate efforts of a highly organised civilisation — tinned provisions. Here they squat and pig together during the brief months of summer, each establishment the centre of a httle patch of soiled sand embanked within a rising wall of empty tins, bottles and potsherds, which will some distant day, I doubt not, be unearthed by future antiquaries and deposited in the museums of the twenty-fifth or thirtieth century. Such is the approach to North Haven, the sand-spit whence the pilgrim is put across the quarter of a mile or less of deep sea water forming the entrance to Poole Harbour. There, over looking both the open sea and the beautiful stretch of water penetrating far inland, stands 12 THE DORSET COAST the North Haven hotel, threatened in these latter days by encroachments of the sea, which so long since gave, and now seems to be by way of taking away again. To attempt a stoppage of this inconsiderate and unexpected change of policy on the part of the inconstant elements, a poor old derelict barque has been filled with stone and brought to this point and sunk at high water, against the sea wall and the timber piles which the tides are threatening. According to the expert opinion of the ferryman who puts passengers across the harbour-mouth for sixpence apiece, and threepence for the bicycle, this attempt at a breakwater is not a success. In that case, it is an ill prospect for the future of the North Haven hotel, which of late years has had a considerable vogue among yachtsmen and those amateurs of the quiet life who do not go to the length of camping upon the sands. CHAPTER III POOLE From Bournemouth to Poole by high road is four miles and a half, covered nowadays by electric trams, and lined by a continuous row of houses and shops which, in their sordid air of latter-day commercialism, do not add to the delights of the outskirts of this seaside resort of pines and sands. In a mile and a half from Bournemouth Central station the frontiers of Hampshire are crossed, and Dorsetshire entered at the spot still called County Gates, although no turnpike or other gates now remain to mark the meeting of those territories. All these long fines of houses are excrescences. They are not the natural growth of the district, but only the homes and the trade establishments of the parasitical fringe of wage-earning and business-conducting populations, attracted origin ally to Bournemouth by the prospect of gains from the numbers of select and wealthy vale tudinarians, whose ailments first caused what Mr. Thomas Hardy calls " this glittering pleasure- city " to arise. Poole, however, to which we are coming, is 14 THE DORSET COAST a very different place ; a Place with a Past, a past still unmistakably delineated on its old face. And not merely a Past, but several pasts ; for it is a town of many ups and downs, including the melancholy visitation of the Black Death in 1349, when it was almost depopulated and the ships were left rotting in the water, for lack of hands to work them. Local memories still point out the spot called " the Baiter," at the back of the High Street, where the victims of that pestilence were buried. Poole's character in the old days was the direct and inevitable product of its geographical sur roundings. Its very name is eloquently descrip tive ; a survival, identical in meaning and pro nunciation with, and only different in spelling from, the " Pwll " it was first named by the Brito- Welsh, who were driven out by the Saxons in the vague " ever so long ago." The " pool " thus alluded to is, of course, the harbour on whose shores it sits ; and what could such a place, situated in such a maze of watery and oozy culs-de-sac, have been in the old, full-blooded days but the nest of pirates and smugglers it was. Surrounded with every facility for the suc cessful conduct of those now decayed businesses, to say nothing of those of the Newfoundland and timber trades, and suchlike tame and law-abiding pursuits, Poole was, in the modern phrasing, the victim of its environment. This is not to say that Poole snivelled over its sins. It did nothing of the kind, but waxed rich on week days POOLE 15 and went to church or chapel on Sundays, and pietisticaUy enjoyed itself without any twinges of conscience. For it did by no means peddle in wickednesses, but did its smuggling and pirating on a large scale ; and everybody knows, or should be made to know, that while it is very wrong indeed to sin (so to speak) by retail, it is quite venial, if not indeed highly meritorious, to do wrong by wholesale. The proceedings of our police-courts and those of the higher courts of justice prove as much in these times of ours, day by day. It was nothing out of the way for Poole ship masters to do what Captain Michael Hankinson, of the schooner " Julia," did in 1787. He was supposed to be on a coasting trip, but history finds him off the French coast near Ushant, holding up the French whaler " Pierre et Jeanne," with a rich cargo of oil. For a coasting schooner he and his men were singularly well armed with dirks and cutlasses and flint-lock pistols, which, although they did not often go off, and only by rare chance ever hit anybody when they did, even on land, and much less when fired from the heaving thwarts of a boat at sea, were handy, when taken by the muzzle, to hit a man over the head and stun him. It seems hard lines to be away in the whaling grounds for three seasons, pursuing and harpooning Leviathan over stormy waters, and up to your neck day and night in stinking blubber, trying down his fat into oil, then to be seized near home on the return voyage, 16 THE DORSET COAST put in a boat and sent adrift while your ship and your fortune aboard her are filched by some filibustering blackguard ; but that was the way the world wagged in the eighteenth century. Sometimes these things were done in time of war, and sometimes in peace, and I do not suppose for a moment that this filibustering was confined to one side of the Channel. Only it is quite certain that between French pirates of this kind and English, the English had the advantage. And Captain Hankinson was a pious man, too. I think he and his crew between them had probably dropped an odd Frenchman or two into the sea, instead of into their boat, but that troubled him little or not at all, and he lifted up his voice in the Wesleyan Communion at Poole the next Sunday with a calm conscience and much thank fulness for the measure in which Heaven had prospered his enterprise. All these delightful people disappear from the stage shortly after the Battle of Waterloo brought peace to distracted Europe, and seas and lands began to be policed and the bread taken out of the mouths of men earning a more or less honest living. When sailors ceased to wear petticoats, worsted caps, pigtails and earrings, and dropped the custom of carrying a small armoury of lethal weapons in their belts, piracy on the high seas and smuggling faded, pewked and withered, and Poole merchants, by some odd coincidence, no longer seemed able to afford the building of huge mansions or to lead the POOLE 17 stately lives to which they had been accustomed. The age of romance was dead, and by the time the American Civil War between North and South had broken out in 1865, and fortunes were to be made by the enterprising in blockade-running to Charlestown, Savannah and other places, those who at Poole had done doughty deeds were dead too, and had left no worthy successors. The opportunity — the last flicker of seafaring melo drama — was lost, so far as Poole was concerned. Poole, however, is not dead, nor bankrupt, nor even in these days down on its luck. It cannot be spoken of, nor hardly dare we even think of it, in the same category with Liverpool or Glasgow ; but it is one of a good many South coast trading ports that hold their own sufficiently well, even though they do not increase. While building is to be done in and around the town of Bournemouth in particular, and the county of Dorset in general, Swedish and Norwegian timber, doors, window-frames and battens will come by sea to Poole, and while Staffordshire, Germany, and the whole wide world make china and crockery-ware, the china-clay that is dug so plentifully yonder, in the heaths across the harbour, will be shipped from Poole to foreign ports. Coals, too, enter the harbour in no inconsiderable quantities, as the artist who seeks to sketch on or near the quays when a collier is discharging very soon becomes unpleasantly aware. With all this, however, the mile-long High 3 18 THE DORSET COAST Street of Poole is on six days of the week peculiarly empty, but the Poole that by day is generally quiet, and not infrequently dull, is on Saturday nights a very Saturnalia, calculated to greatly shock the good, respectable neighbouring folk of Bournemouth, who do by no means know of, or, knowing, would be horrified at, the thronging jollification going on scarce four miles from their quiet groves. To the stranger, looking upon Saturday night Poole with curious, meditative and astonished eyes, it would seem as though the townsfolk with one accord reserved the whole of their week's marketing and shopping of every kind until the very week's end, and then, simul taneously with the falling of night and the lighting of the shops, sallied forth en masse, to purchase and to enjoy themselves. It is a bourgeois kind of enjoyment, infinitely distressing to the Bourne mouth frame of mind, and the smell of the fried- fish shops is very insistent ; but what Bourne mouth thinks matters not one jot to Poole, which is in Dorset, while " Bourne " — as Poole people commonly style it — is in Hampshire. " Poole it wer' a market town When Bourne it wer' a furzy down," as some of the Poole oldsters down by the quay will recite, with evident enjoyment ; the more evident in that there are those almost old enough to remember when that " furzy down " existed, and Bournemouth itself did not. And they tell you, too — being just a little jealous of Bourne- POOLE 19 mouth and its pretensions — that if it had not been for that little matter of an intervening county boundary, Bournemouth would long since have been annexed by Poole, and been made sub ject to its Mayor and Corporation, which you can believe or not just as you please. Those Might Have Beens of history, how interesting and speculative they are ! But we are wandering from the busy scenes of Poole's Saturday night, which I think are only to be appreciated at their full by the cyclist who comes at dark from the obscurities of Bourne mouth's suburban roads. Wheeling his hazardous way along the course of the unhallowed electric tramway lines and down the steep, unexpected descent of Constitution Hill, where the wicked closeness of the lines to the edges of the road and the murderous roughness of the roadway itself nearly end his earthly career, he reaches the level again and bursts upon Poole's thronged streets at Longfleet. It is something of a revelation to him who has hitherto known Poole at any other time than Saturday night to see how really populous a place it is. Here, at the entrance to the High Street, a level crossing outside the railway station, opened and shut at frequent intervals, spans the main road, and is besieged by hundreds of people anxious to pass. Beyond it, pavements and roadway are alike thronged, and wheeled traffic is hard put to it to progress, even at a walking pace. The seafaring character of Poole is manifest in the guernseys and broad- 20 THE DORSET COAST brimmed felt hats of the fisherfolk, and the pilot-jackets and peaked cloth caps of the blue water merchant sailors. The womenfolk are, as ever in these days, less characteristic ; wholly ^characteristic one might rather say, and, when not ordinarily housewifely, are smartly and fashionably dressed. Not a fisherman's daughter among them all but wears a stylish hat, a smart frock, and a pretty blouse, and they mostly contrive — at least by gaslight — to look pretty and ladylike. But sometimes their conversation rather terribly shatters the illusion. It belongs rather to the barge than the drawing-room ; as when one, with the figure of a sylph, the face of an angel, and the dress of a lady, spoiled the effect, within earshot of the present chronicler by asking, "Where the hell's Lizzie ? " CHAPTER IV OLD-TIME POOLE The town, like most old towns inhabited from time to time by prosperous men duly thankful for their prosperity, has numerous almshouses : one of them, a little boxlike tenement in Carter's Lane, decorated with crowned heads of a man and a woman, placed in an alcove, is a gruesome little den, and the heads look horribly tragical. The Guildhall and market-house, built in 1761, by the joint efforts of Joseph Gulston, junior, and Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Calcraft, members of Parhament for town and county, as an inscrip tion particularly informs us, is characteristically Georgian, and one of the most striking things in Poole. The market-house portion is on the street level, while the Guildhall rooms are situated above, approached by flights of steps ingeniously arranged more with an eye to decorative effect than to convenience. The Guildhall belongs to a time when Poole was still a highly prosperous port, when fortunes were made in the Newfoundland trade and in the Baltic by the merchants whose great mansions are still a feature of the town. 22 THE DORSET COAST To read of those times is almost like the reading of a novel by that master, Sir Walter Besant. In that era the Mayor of Poole was officially something more than a mere landlubber of a mayor ; he was an admiral as well, for to Poole belonged, and possibly it does still, the over- lordship and right of admiralty in the harbour. It is true that the mayor was an admiral without a fleet, a flagship, or even a captain's gig or a jolly-boat, and as he never by any chance " sailed the ocean blue," he was immune from sea-sickness, and his sea-legs were not worth talking about. But once in a way the Mayor used to wake up to the dignities of his office and embark upon a " perambulation " of his domains. It was a ceremony that could be performed at will. Some mayors were content to do without it ; to others it formed a welcome excuse for a water frolic. Several of these are recorded, particularly one which took place in 1629, when the " Admiral," joined by " mistress mayoress," and a party of ladies from the town, voyaged to the distant shores of Arne, two miles away ; and there, a tent having been erected with the oars and sails of the boat in which they had come, on the margin of the water, at Shag Rock, by " Radcliffe-atte- Well," was asserted the sovereignty of Poole over that wild spot. This solemn ceremony was fol lowed by a lighter mood, the young men kicking their hats about — or, more likely, each other's hats—" in a kind of f ootballe . ' ' This was probably followed by a kind of punched nose and black THE GUILDHALL, , POOLE. OLD-TIME POOLE 25 eye, administered by some aggrieved owner of a much-kicked hat, although the records say nothing of such things. To render this boundary of Poole's jurisdiction memorable to them, two boys were then taken by the hand and led up to their knees in the water, after which the hats, in an access of joy, were once more kicked about, and the company returned. Mention has already been made of the old mansions of Poole, and indeed nothing strikes the stranger more forcibly than the number, the size, and often the architectural beauty of these fine old residences of the old local merchant princes. They range in order of date from about the middle of the seventeenth to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and exhibit a gradual and progressive increase of size and decadence in artistic merit, down to the mammoth boxes of bricks, with plain rectangular apertures for doors and windows, they became towards the close of the highly inartistic period of George the Third's reign. Those old merchants are gone ; their wealth in some cases dissipated by the prodigal sons of saving fathers, in other instances lost on those same seas whence it was originally gathered. Sometimes it has been retained and has been carried by marriage into county families ; and yet again, anchored safely by investment in land, which always remains, despite agricultural depression, while all else decays, it has occa- 4 26 THE DORSET COAST sionally served in the founding of new territorial families. Railways finally brought the race of Poole merchants to an end, and although money is still scraped off the quays by wharfingers, coal- merchants and the like, it is largely by com panies, rather than, as of yore, by individuals ; and, as we see at many another port, it is not spent, as of old it was, in the place where it is made. There are few nowadays to whom these vast old mansions are attractive. Occasionally they are occupied by doctors and lawyers, but they are, in any case, too large for modern ideas, and the occupier may not infrequently be compared with a mite residing in a Stilton cheese. It costs a small fortune to adequately furnish houses of this calibre, and entails the services of a ruinously large staff of servants to keep them in order. Hence the neglect which so harrows the souls of the amateurs of architecture, who with dismay see these fine old buildings going to decay, or given over to meaner uses. It is not lack of appreciation, but partly inadequacy of means, and in some degree the change of social manners, which leaves the old houses to a humbler fate than that for which they were built. The old merchants entertained largely, and built with those needs present in their minds. It was the custom of their age to live in state, but that way of hfe is now entirely altered. Nowadays, enter taining on the grand scale is largely done at OLD-TIME POOLE 27 hotels and public places, and we have no use for huge salons in our houses. The largest of these old houses, an enormous pile of brick, large enough for a warehouse, facing the High Street, is now occupied as offices and exhibition-rooms of the local gasworks. On its pediment may yet be seen, boldly displayed, the coat of arms of that merchant-prince who built it, but whose name is long since forgotten. Sometimes those wealthy traders secluded them selves in houses built within courtyards, enclosed behind high brick walls. Such a house is to be seen in a narrow lane turning off the High Street, opposite the London Hotel. It is now put to a use certainly never contemplated by the builder of it, for it is occupied by a Young Women's Christian Association. The churches of Poole are weird and wonderful structures, difficult to classify. St. Paul's, in the High Street, has a classic portico in white brick, with a Netherlandish belfry. St. James's church, with a mediaeval tower, has a typically eighteenth-century body, but built early in the nineteenth century, generously furnished with capacious galleries. It stands near the waterside, and is neighboured by many specimens of the old mansions already described, rich in carved and moulded doorways, and finely designed fan lights. Surrounding streets are oddly named Bayhog Lane — what is a bayhog ? — West Butts Street, telling of some long-vanished archery ground, Bowling Green Alley, and New Orchard, 28 THE DORSET COAST all marking some bygone great expansion of Poole's original boundaries, and the building upon old-time fields and orchards. Poole is a place of ancient fame, or infamy, for it was in the old days a nest of pirates, and down to days not so very old was a home of smugglers ; but, although its story is so very full-flavoured and was so chokefull of incident, comparatively little of it has come down to us. There have been " histories " of Poole published, but there is scarce the scuttling of a ship mentioned in them, and hardly the illegal landing of a pound of tea, or a keg of spirits, chronicled ; so that those chronicles are as little racy as are the biographies of public men written by their relatives. Poole has naturally been affected in some degree by the proximity of its modish neighbour, Bournemouth, and nowadays boasts a park. A pretty, and an unusual park, this of Poole, laid out with the usual shrubs and winding walks along which you walk three miles to progress one, in the usual landscape-gardening style ; but with the unusual feature of a marine lake, formed by damming an inlet of this plentifully indented harbour, in such a manner that it receives the waters of the flood-tide and retains them at the ebb. Stately swans inhabit the lake, and give it an additional note of beauty. From the east gates of this park a pretty run by gravelly roads leads around the shores of the harbour, past Lilliput Hill, whence there is a fine view inland, across the harbour and OLD-TIME POOLE 29 the heaths beyond it, toward the great hills of Corfe. In the foreground is the long jetty of the South- Western Pottery Works, and on the left of it that of the local sailing club. Yellow in the distance is the long spit known as Sandbanks, whose sands are, however, found, on approach, to be quite white. Between that point and this there stretches a shore road, level with the water and protected from it by a long embankment and wall ; a kind of poor relation of the London Victoria Embankment, done in plaster, with both the wall and the lamp-posts which decorate it at regular intervals in a sorry state of disrepair and rust. CHAPTER V THE SMUGGLERS OF POOLE The smugglers of Poole are famous in the long history of smuggling days. Their operations were favoured not only by the intricate channels of the harbour, but by the wildness of the uninhabited heaths which stretched from the waterside, far inland. Their smuggling of all kinds of dutiable goods into the country was conducted on a very large scale, by organised gangs, who were not merely chance confederates, but were leagued together in a businesslike way, in vast enterprises, and set about their business in no very secret fashion. Their importing organisation and their arrangements for distributing the goods far inland, were perfect through long practice, and the whole countryside, save the magistrates and others, who, from their official positions, were obliged to be hostile, was actively or passively in league with them. The Revenue authorities grew almost powerless in face of the large and armed bodies of men, horsed and provided with pistols and cutlasses, who protected the landing of exciseable goods which never yielded to Caesar, and were very often compelled by the dictates of prudence 3° THE SMUGGLERS OF POOLE 31 to look on at a distance, afraid for their very lives to interfere, while rich consignments of dutiable goods were put ashore by the " free-traders," as the smugglers styled themselves, not only under cover of night, but frequently, with the greatest impudence, in the broad eye of day. The daring deeds of the Poole smugglers culminated in 1747 in an armed attack made by them on the Poole custom house. It arose from the success at sea of the Swift privateer, which had captured a heavy consignment of tea shipped in the Septem ber of that year from Guernsey, and had lodged it in the custom-house on Poole Quay. This capture meant a great financial disaster for the smugglers, who had already paid the Guernsey shippers for the consignment, and they determined not to lose their property, if by any means they could recover it. Accordingly, a body of no fewer than sixty of them, armed and mounted, set out from Charlton Forest for Poole, posting half of their number on the roads to keep watch. The other thirty pushed on, and reached Poole on the night of October 6th. Taking the Custom House officers wholly by surprise, they broke open the building and seized all the tea stored there, with the trifling exception of one bag, weighing five pounds. The next morning this audacious band re turned at leisure, through Fordingbridge, in sight of hundreds of people, and safely distributed the tea in their usual channels of business. Here we are done with them, but it may be noted that 32 THE DORSET COAST it was this stirring affair which led to the barbarous incidents of the " murders by smugglers," that even yet cast an historic gloom over Rowlands Castle and the Portsmouth Road in the neighbour hood of Rake. Those murders, committed by smugglers and their friends, not only, in their hateful details, disclose the lonely nature of the country, but prove the sympathy of the peasantry with those illegal traders and the terrible vengeance they were ready to wreak upon informers. Five miles inland from Poole, at the tiny village of Kinson, across Canford Heath, within the Dorset boundary, in a district even yet more remote and lonely than its mere distance in miles would indicate, is a striking memorial of those times, in the shape of a tombstone to the memory of one of these daring smugglers. Robert Trot- man, who is thus commemorated, lost his life in 1765, in an encounter with the revenue officers along the then lonely shore. " Murder," the tombstone calls it, and the epitaph, with others of like sentiments and language, at different points of the coasts of England, thus shows how the different professions of smuggler and revenue officer were popularly regarded in those " good old days." Kinson was in those times a district particularly well affected towards the " free-traders," and the vicar himself must have been one of those many parsons who, while knowing nothing, were never surprised to find a keg of hollands or brandy THE SMUGGLERS OF POOLE 33 placed in their pulpits by way of thank-offering for the use of the belfry as a storehouse of smuggled goods that had never, and would never, pay duty to King George. Those good, unquestioning clerics took the goods the gods provided and, v- KINSON CHURCH-TOWER, AND SMUGGLER'S GRAVE. without a qualm, either of conscience or of stomach, consumed them with much satisfaction. Here at Kinson the sturdy old tower used by the smugglers remains, while the body of the church has in modern times been rebuilt. It is a quite 5 34 THE DORSET COAST remarkable tower, less notable for its beauty than for its extraordinary broad-based massiveness, and for the size and rugged character of the blocks of rich brown ferruginous sandstone of which it is built. CHAPTER VI POOLE HARBOUR Poole Harbour forms a striking feature on the map, and is seven miles in length by five miles wide. To know it thoroughly is a liberal education in channels, currents, creeks, inlets, islets, water, sands and mud, for to circumnavigate it, exploring all its indentations, means a journey of thirty-five miles in deep water and shallow, sometimes bowling along with a breeze, gunwale at a level with the tide, at others poling warily up oozy creeks where the mud lies thick, and again ground ing on shallows in the scour of the tides, where the sands are clean and sharp. For there is not so much fairway in Poole Harbour as the maps would seem to indicate, and a very considerable selvedge of mud is always stretched in advance of these greatly indented shores, to impede any but the slightest of skiffs or the flat-bottomed punts and canoes of the "eel-peckers," who, setting out from Poole or Wareham armed with long tridents, shaped like that with which Britannia, on our copper coinage, is seen to be ruling the waves, have considerable sport, in a mud-larking way, and earn a very good living too, 25 36 THE DORSET COAST There is no better way of exploring the rami fications of the harbour, nor indeed any other so good or so thorough, than that of engaging an eel-pecker and his craft at Wareham. With such an one we drop down the current of the Frome from Wareham Bridge for over a mile before the harbour is reached, but the banks have in the meanwhile gradually receded. It is so smooth and calm here that it is with some difficulty we realise that it was hereabouts that the Wareham and Poole passage-boat was blown over by the wind, October 2, 1806, and thirteen of the fifteen persons on board drowned. Reach after reach of the greatly winding river is passed, opening out newer beauties of form and colour at every bend. Here it is the purple heather of the heaths, coming down to the very water's edge ; there a distant romantic view of Corfe Castle, its ruined walls notched and jagged against the skyline, like the complicated wards of some monstrous key. In some places little clean-washed yellow beaches spread out alluringly and invite one to play at Robinson Crusoe and uninhabited islands ; in others the river runs under steep earthy banks, where the water-vole scrambles and splashes. In one place a rose-red clifflet, set about with bright yellow gorse, forms a feast of colour at a bend of the river, and in a still backwater the bulrushes grow. We hug the right-hand bank, leaving Holton Mere, or Shore Lake, away on the left, where the shallows and pine-fringed flats of Lytchett Bay POOLE HARBOUR 37 stretch beyond the railway, and, passing Brixes and Giggers Isles, Hyde Quay, and Russel Quay, round the cape of Patchins Point. Here the Wych Channel we have been navigating sweeps inland and brings us to the clean beach of Shipstal, which it scours of the almost ubiquitous mud. We have now come seven or eight miles from A rMM w*A A AAA:. WBSBzJa-*- A: j CORFE CASTLE FROM SCOTLAND HEATH. Wareham, guided by an expert over thinly covered flats where an amateur must have stuck fast many a time. The expert is thirsty with his labours, and while we step ashore prepares to discuss the contents of the stone jar and the basket he has brought with him. And let it here be said that, for professional "eel-pecker," sports man after wild fowl, or mere explorer in search of the picturesque, not out for killing, it is quite 38 THE DORSET COAST necessary, in visiting the ins and outs of Poole Harbour, to bring one's own food and drink, for as well might Robinson Crusoe on Juan Fernandez have expected to find an hotel on that isle as the stranger to discover inns or any place of refresh ment on these deserted quays, or up these winding creeks, where that other expert fisherman, the heron, looking little more substantial than a shadow, stands still and quiet in the water, on one leg, waiting for eels, and rarely disturbed by the keels of infrequent boats. It is with an almost proprietary air that one steps ashore at Shipstal, to explore the little village of Arne, which stands so prominently away on its fir-crowned bluff, for the place has an air of solitude and being forgotten — or perhaps never even having been discovered — by the world, and seems to want an owner, as much as some coral strand of the South Seas. Coming into Arne, although it becomes quite evident that it was found, a very long while ago, you cannot lose the feeling that it is still merely an outpost, held precariously against the forces of Nature, for its few tilled and hedged fields, where they are not surrounded by creeks, are met by the savage, untamed heath that seems so large and makes the little fields look so small. Here, too, is the ancient chapel of Arne, first raised in the thirteenth century, which sufficiently shows us that, however small may be the intakes from the heath, they must in some cases go back nearly eight hundred years. Eight centuries of struggle with the hungry POOLE HARBOUR 39 innutritious soil of the heath — what a vista of back-breaking effort and patient labour ! Long Isle and Round Isle, two insignificant islets of this Poole archipelago, are passed on our way to the inlets of Middlebere Passage and Wych Lake, where we find a party of gunners out shooting mallard, under the wooded lea of Fitz- worth Point. At Middlebere an iron tramway comes down out of the heath from near Corfe, bringing down the china clay shipped from the " banker " or quay, in flat-bottomed barges, to the waiting ships lying off Poole. Round the Point of Fitzworth yachts and boats are lying on the ooze, not deserted, as might at first sight be supposed, but laid up to the orders of absent owners, and moored to stakes in the mud, against such time as they may be wanted. A caretaker or two, leading very much the solitary life of the old hermits, may be discerned aboard ; and one by his hailing us does indeed bring his reclusion vividly to mind. " Halloo ! " he calls, to our " eel-pecker " pilot, " any news over to Poole ? " " We a'n't come from Poole," answers our Wareham man, shortly, for there is a jealousy between the two places ; " we've dropped down the Channel from Wareham, and there's nothin' in the way o' news there." "Never wer'," says the caretaker, disappointed, and disappears from view. The next headland, after Fitzworth, is Ower, another passage across the harbour, time out of 40 THE DORSET COAST mind, for clay dug out of the heaths of Middlebere, Wych, and Fitzworth, and once the chief port of the Isle of Purbeck. It was anciently the princi pal, if indeed not the only, quay for the exportation of stone and marble, as in fact its very name would imply ; for it signifies " Over," or the passage, pre-eminently. The timber brought from the New Forest and used in the building of that grim Royal Castle of Corfe, looming greyly yonder, across the heath, was landed here, and the remains of deep tracks and paved fords leading across the waste from Ower to the town of Corfe, show that traffic by this route must once have been considerable. But the exportation of stone from this quay ceased about 1710, and was transferred to Swanage. Furzy and Green Isles, and the long low Point of Goathorn now lie in front of us, with the heavily wooded mass of Branksea Island on the left. To visit Branksea is very like visiting the realm of some jealous island potentate, for it is private property, and landing is not supposed to be permitted, except by favour. It is a very considerable place, measuring a mile and a quarter in length, by about three-quarters of a mile broad. Its real name, long since abandoned for the present more aristocratic variant, is Brownsea, a corruption of Bruno's-ey, or Bruno's Island ; but who was that Bruno ? History is dumb on that point. It was once a possession of Cerne Abbey, and inhabited by a hermit whose duty and sole reason for existence (and a very POOLE HARBOUR 4i excellent reason too) was the tending of a beacon by which vessels coming into Poole were safely guided up the fairway. He was, in short, the direct ancestor of our present lighthouse-keepers. From that ancient religious ownership Brown- sea passed, with the dissolution of the monasteries, into private hands, and has many times changed ownership. On it, facing the entrance to the harbour, stands the Castle, now the beautiful BRANKSEA ISLAND. residence of Mr. Van Raalte, which embodies architecture of almost all periods, from that of Henry the Eighth, when the blockhouse castle was first built, down to that of a few years ago, when it was largely rebuilt, after a fire. The old owners of the island little suspected what possi bilities of wealth lay hid in its soil, nor did Colonel Waugh, who shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century purchased the estate, know when he bought it that Brownsea was practically 6 42 THE DORSET COAST a solid lump of china clay, going in places to a depth of seventy feet. When the discovery was made, the island was thoroughly exploited, and pits were dug, a pier built for the shipment of the clay, and a pottery founded. During his ownership, Colonel Waugh also added a hundred acres to the domain, by embanking and reclaiming from the sea. Then he became involved in financial difficulties, and the estate was sold. If we follow the late Lord Salisbury's advice to scared politicians, and " consult large maps," we shall find that Poole Harbour has almost sufficient islands, capes, creeks, promontories, and miscellaneous geographical features — all provided with names — to furnish forth a place ten times its size, and we shall not complete the circuit of it before passing Clavel Point, Goathorn, Newton Bay, Green Isle, Greenland Quay, Brands Bay, Redhorn, Redhorn Lake, South Haven, Stone Isle, North Haven, Lilliput, and Salterns. Thence we come to Poole town, and end beyond it in that Walhalla of mud and slime, Holes Bay. CHAPTER VII STUDLAND A few minutes in a row-boat suffice to bring the passenger across from North Haven to South Haven, where he is landed on a lonely spit of sand, innocent even of bungalows ; and there, with the sea on one hand, and the hummocky and heathery warrens on the other, interspersed with marshes and brackish lakes, where myriads of sea-fowl and wild duck nest and breed, he feels as though marooned far from the civilised world. The isolation, however, has charms, rather than terrors, in summer time, and these solitudes would form an ideal pitch for a camping party. The same idea has occurred to others, as the explorer will find on his way, for near Studland he will see the tents of a Church Lads' Brigade, pitched on the heath. It is close upon three miles from South Haven to Studland by the sands, the direct, and indeed the only way. " Keep on by the water-side," says the ferryman, and by that infallible method there is no mistaking. There is really no haven at all at South Haven, only a little sheltered reach within the sandspit, 43 44 THE DORSET COAST where the now ruined South Haven inn once stood in receipt of custom in those vanished days before steam, when vessels lay for days, and even weeks, becalmed in the harbour, and there was always a company of sailors in its bar, whistling for a wind, and wetting their whistles the livelong day. In those times there was also a considerable traffic across the ferry to and from Swanage, and the inn, therefore, did a very comfortable business indeed. If I were a novelist, I would certainly annex the site of it for some salt romance of love-lorn maid and deeds of derring-do in the days of smuggling and the Napoleonic wars. Even in more recent times there remained something of romance at South Haven, for the former coastguard station here was nothing less than an old gun-boat that had done duty in Napier's expedition to the Baltic in 1854, during the war with Russia. It came back unharmed from that not particularly glorious incident in the annals of the British navy, and was run ashore here among the sands, as a makeshift home for those who keep watch and ward over the coasts. Here it remained until 1879, when the existing permanent buildings for the coastguard, \ at North Haven, were built. The old relic was then sold, and fell into the hands of a canny Poole shipbuilder, who repaired and altered it, and sent it afloat once more, as a coasting schooner. It probably still sails the neighbouring coasts. From this lonely tongue of sand, keeping to STUDLAND 45 the wet margin, it is the most delightful of cycle rides to Studland; the Isle of Wight, looming faintly in the distance, fairylike and looking scarce so substantial as the fleecy white clouds, in the opalesque tints of sea and sky ; and, ahead, the soft earthy projection of Red Cliff, with, beyond it, the hard, chalky mass of Handfast Point, where the white pillars of chalk standing out, islanded in the sea, and long known as " Old Harry and his Wife and Daughter," were familiar landmarks to generations of holiday-makers. "Were," I say, because Old Harry himself has gone, flung down at last by old age and constitutional decay, aided by the fury of a winter gale. Long had he been growing weatherworn and, perceptibly thinner and distinctly feminine in the waist, looked more like an Old Harriet, while his wife and daughter never owned any waists at all, but bulged where such things should be. Old Harry's wife, too, is sadly fading away, but his daughter seems likely to outlast many a season yet. One comes, expectant of the worst, into Stud land, prepared, after having for some years past seen the insistent advertisements of the " Studland Bay Estate " displayed at many railway stations, to see this charmingly old-world village of well- remembered days of yore given over to the builder and bedevilled with commonplace and brand-new villas. But very little change is noticeable from what Studland was twenty years ago. You who come to it by these yellow sands 46 THE DORSET COAST still enter by scrambling up a rugged, tangled rise that is rather more than a bank, and something less than a cliff, and thence progressing by what seems more like the pebbly bed of a dried-up torrent than a path, to what one can even now only by courtesy term the " roads " of the place. Do not, I beg you, mistake me. I do not abuse this scrambling entrance, would not replace that pathway by a straighter and a smoother, and would by no means mitigate the knobbly and uneven nature of those roads. That would be the beginning of the end of Studland as a natural and unconventional village, strangely left over to us, almost untouched, from other days. Nature has kindly set a great gulf between Studland and modernity ; a gulf that is not with pecuniary advantage to be bridged by railway or other engineers. The peculiar configuration of the surrounding country wills it that Studland shall not grow, for while the journey from Bourne mouth by Sandbanks, across the mouth of Poole Harbour and along the sands of Studland Bay, is but seven or eight miles, and but six by sea, it is one that occupies a considerable space of time, and is not throughout the whole twelve months of the calendar so enjoyable as it is on an August day ; while by railway from Bournemouth to Swanage, the nearest railway station, the distance is close upon twenty-four miles, with a walk or drive of three miles across hilly country STUDLAND 47 on top of that. It is for reasons such as these that the alluring advertisements of the " Studland Bay Estate " grow yellow with age, while the imaginary roads and promenades pictured on them remain, and are likely to indefinitely remain, imaginary. Studland is so unusually beautiful a place, of a type of beauty so rarely seen within reach of the ravening winds of the sea-coast, that it would be the pity of pities were its natural features abated. It is a little bit of snugly-wooded inland scenery brought down to the margin of the Channel for change of air, and kept in countenance by favour of the great hills of Ballard Down that shut it in to the south, and so prevent the cruel winds of the north, not, certainly, from blowing upon it, but from racing through. Sea- woods, growing luxuriantly to where the earth and its clothing of grass meet the sands, come, uninjured, almost to high- water mark, as rarely ever thev do, save in the still and mellow coombes of Devonshire and Cornwall. Elms are the chief trees of Studland. They line every winding road, and overshadow almost every one of the thatched rustic cottages that give this fishing village the altogether deceptive appearance of a wholly agricultural community. Even the coastguard knows more about cab bages, broad beans, scarlet-runners, and garden produce in general than of passing ships and the stirring lore of the sea. He looks very nautical, but so would an actor, dressed for the part, in 48 THE DORSET COAST melodrama. Indeed, his makeshift cabin, built apparently of driftwood, roofed with tarred felt, and planted picturesquely on the low, brambly rise from the shore, looks so uncommonly like a set scene from a bygone Adelphi drama, that you sorely miss the action and the limelight that are unquestionably its due. In the centre of Studland, if such a maze of winding roads may be said to own a centre, the base of the demolished mediaeval village cross is still to be seen, resting partly on a grassy mound and partly against the trunk of a huge tree which has, in its slow growth, gradually tilted the massive stone almost on edge. It is typical of Studland that it has remained here, untouched, ever since the fanatics of rabid Puritan times destroyed the shaft and left the socket. Studland, although a part of the Isle of Purbeck, whose very name is, or ought to be, synonymous with stone, is not a stony place. It stands midway between the Bagshot sands of the flat heaths bordering Poole Harbour, and the series of Portland oolitic stone beds that begin on the way to Swanage. Hence the great luxuriance of its vegetation, and the thoroughly agricultural look of its surroundings. But though the look and the scent of Studland be rather of the lea, the fields and fallows, than of the sea that now whispers, and now roars at its skirts, and in its winter rages will even tear and mumble great mouthfuls of those pigmy, earthy cliffs away, the dedication of its little, but sturdy, STUDLAND 49 Norman church smacks sufficiently of its seashore situation, for it is named after St. Nicholas, who is patron of fisherfolk, and not of fisherfolk alone, but traditionally of thieves and pawnbrokers as well. It is a humorously assorted concourse. This particular St. Nicholas is St. Nicholas of Myra, who flourished in the fourth century of the Christian era, and was a saint from his birth upwards. Most saints have achieved sanctity by works, but the distinction fell to St. Nicholas by grace, for, according to the staggering legend, directly he was born and was placed in a basin to be washed, he stood upright, and so remained for two hours, gazing to heaven in an ecstatic rapture ! He began to fast from his cradle, and, like the " Precocious Baby " in the Bab Ballads, did many other things marvellous in infants, but commonly expected of grown-up persons. His parents, overshadowed by their wonderful off spring, died when he was yet young, and left him the possessor of a comfortable fortune. Wealth, however, did not spoil him. Hearing that the unnatural father of three maidens was about to sell them into a life of shame, he secretly flung a bag of gold through the window, as a dowry for the first, and repeated the gifts for the second and third. He was thus originally pictured holding three purses, or bags of gold, which in the course of time and the changes in symbolism became three golden balls, first adopted as the arms of Lombardy, and now familiar as the sign of the pawnbrokers. 7 50 THE DORSET COAST St. Nicholas then set out on a voyage from Lycia for the Holy Land, and was nearly wrecked in a violent storm that arose in the midst of the passage. The legends are clearly disposed to have us believe that the vessel would certainly have been lost had it not been for his presence aboard, for when he prayed the storm at once subsided, and Alexandria was safely reached. Returning from the Holy Land, the captain — not the same skipper, we may readily believe, who had witnessed this marvel — refused to make for the port to which he had agreed to convey his passenger, but put about for another instead, with the inevitable result that winds and waves con tended against him, and he was obliged to run for the harbour to which he was under contract to sail. It is as a queller of storms that St. Nicholas is, or was, so great a favourite with fishermen, and how very real his power in this direction seemed to our ancestors is clearly proved by the large number of churches by the seashore dedicated to their protector. Studland church is a fine Norman work. A squat stone church of the sturdiest it is, set within a wooded churchyard, with a broad-based and heavy tower, ten times too solidly built for any real necessity. An architect would probably de clare his professional opinion that it shows evi dences of its original builders having intended to carry it to a much greater height ; but more than eight hundred years have passed, and the projected stages have never been added, Gro- ¦) trai^o-*!^. INTERIOR : STUDLAND CHURCH. STUDLAND 53 tesque corbels, in the shape of twin horseheads and wild boars apparently engaged in eating penny rolls, are the only attempts at ornamenting the severely plain exterior. The interior appears to show a very excellent reason why the heavy tower was not carried to a greater height, for it will be seen that the further chancel arch over which the tower is situated is, with the walling above it, disastrously cracked, and the stones of the arch itself very considerably dropped. It is an alarming sight, but usage leaves the parish ioners calm, and the clergyman conducts the services in a quite unconcerned manner ; as why should he not, for the crack has been there, and has not widened, since the memory of man, and is, indeed, probably that original subsidence of the better part of a thousand years ago which warned the builders to carry their tower no higher. Memories of the stirring times of the Napoleonic wars, when England was desperately struggling with a world in arms and patriotism was not a discredited virtue, sneered at by those who have it not as "the last expression of selfishness," are awakened by sight of the tombstone to Sergeant Lawrence, that stands close by the door of Studland church. His epitaph is a record of good service for his country in the blood-red fields of Spain, and in that final chapter in the warlike history of his troubled age, the field of Waterloo, where he and his brave comrades helped to lay the dread spectre of war for the little breathing- space ,of one generation. 54 THE DORSET COAST Thus, boldly displayed, runs his distinguished record, for those to read who will : — "To the Honoured Memory of Sergeant William Lawrence (of the 40th Regiment Foot) who after a long and eventful life in the service of his country peacefully ended his days at Studland November nth, 1869. He served with his distinguished Regiment in the war in South America, 1805, and through the whole of the Peninsular War, 1808-18 13. He received a silver medal and no less than ten clasps for the battles in which he was engaged Rolica, Vimiera, Talavera, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz (in which desperate assault, being one of the volunteers for the forlorn hope, he was most severely wounded) Vittoria, Pyrenees, Nivelles, Orthes, Toulouse. He also fought at the glorious victory of Waterloo June 1 8th, 1815. While still serving with his Regiment during the occupation of Paris by the Allied Armies Sergeant Lawrence married Clotilde Clairet at St. Germain-en-Laye, who died Sept. 20, 1853, and was buried beneath this spot." How true the poet's words, " Love rules the field, the camp, the grove." Let us hope Clotilde never yielded to the temptation of revenging upon the gallant sergeant the victories of Wellington and his lieutenants over her nation. Not far from Studland, by distances as measured on the map, but seeming to the explorer STUDLAND 55 who stumbles over the deeply-rutted tracks of the heather-covered waste more than double the mile it purports to be, is that rock of dark Satanic legend, the Agglestone, situated on Studland Heath, where it drops down to the flats and meres that border Poole Harbour. As usual, there' are various theories as to the name of this odd relic THE AGGLESTONE. of the denudation of rocks by aeons of time. Some have styled it the " Haggerstone," or Witchstone, and to such as still know it by the alternative of the " Devil's Nightcap," this seems quite in sympathy with the numerous weird tales that have centred about its curious shape and lonely position. The folktale of how the Devil, jealous of the building of Corfe Castle, flung the Agglestone at it from the Isle of Wight, and missed it, seems 56 THE DORSET COAST too childish to be even mentioned with patience in these materialistic times. The name, however, most certainly derives from the Saxon " helig," holy. That people looked upon it with the very natural awe of a primitive race, and considered that some supernatural agency must have fashioned it. We know better, but, well assured of its matter-of-fact origin though we be, its strange fantastic outline, perched upon its isolated mount, in midst of this solitude, is awesome when the grey twilight shuts down upon the day and resolves the rock into the likeness of some obscene crouching monster, brooding upon this amphibious district of sands, bogs, and brackish meres. The measurements of the Agglestone make it 32 ft. by 16J ft. in diameter and 16 ft. in height, with a calculated weight of four hundred tons. It is a great block of that ferruginous sandstone of the " Bagshot " series of which all the neigh bouring heaths are formed and is a survival of some bygone fury of the sea and inland waters, which have been unable to destroy this particularly hard nut. Parallel cases are found all over the country, the " Toad Rock " at Tunbridge Wells being in shape very like the Agglestone ; and a little more weathering of the pedestal of rock and earth on which it rests would have converted it into a rocking-stone, of which the Buckstone in the Forest of Dean and the Logan Rock on the Cornish coast between Penzance and Land's End are well-known examples. Numerouslhillocks of this same character are STUDLAND 57 to be found by the tourist who, with heavy boots, cares to flounder amid these solitudes, but they have, with the exception of the Puckstone, lost their crowning rocks. The Puckstone is a smaller Agglestone, and is named after the fairy sprite in old mythology who finds a prominent place in Shakespeare. Puck, indeed, is well represented in Hants and Dorset, for Puck's Down was the original name of that eastern district of Bourne mouth now vulgarised as Pokesdown, while Pox- well, near Weymouth, marks the site of some forgotten magic spring dedicated to him. From the knoll of the Agglestone one looks down, like Moses, upon a promised land. Not that it is a land of milk and honey which you spy from this Pisgah height, for it is but a waste of sands, heather, coarse grass and water, infinitely barren ; but this is an all-embracing view, such as Moses must have commanded — with the fertility left out. The district would be the despair of the farmer, as, on the other hand, it is the delight of the wildfowler, who murderously stalks beside the pools and makes havoc with the teal and moor- fowl that swarm in these fastnesses. From this point Branksea Island appears for the most part a blue-black blot, dumped down in a lake of quicksilver, while the sea comes in upon the right hand along a span of sands stretched hke the arc of a bow. In midst of the sage-green growths is Littlesea, with the look in that setting of a splash of quicksilver left over from that basin in which Branksea swims. 8 58 THE DORSET COAST But Littlesea is found to be considerably larger when you draw near, and is a beautiful spot, in the wild and untamed sort, with banks of tall sedge and sullen waters where all manner of shy winged things find a nesting-place. One Photo by IV. Pouncy, Dorchester. LITTLESEA. does not explore the shores of Littlesea with any approach to thoroughness (except in very dry seasons) unless equipped with waders or boots of similar build, for the ground is treacherous and quashy. Hence the unspoiled wildness of the place, still rich in botanical rarities, such as the Osmund a regalis fern, and unusual varieties of spleen-wort and marsh-loving plants. CHAPTER VIII PARSON'S BARN — OLD HARRY HEAD — THE ISLE OF PURBECK There is no way of adequately seeing the curious coast scenery between Studland and Swanage save by taking a boat from one or other of those places. You may come by cliff-paths to the verge and look down upon the disappearing wife and still extant daughter of the defunct Old Harry, and may even scramble down to the shore and perceive at low tide how the sea has encrusted their skirts most elegantly with winkles, limpets, and mussels, and draped them with heavy flounces of seaweed, but not in this manner shall you come to a proper appreciation of Ballard Head, where the chalky wall rises direct from the waves to a height of three hundred feet. Fully equipped with oars and a sail, and under the guidance of a Swanage boatman, the whole range of cliffs may be explored on a calm day. Here every stage in the formation of those islanded columns, pillars, or chimneys of chalk will be observed, and you cannot but find it a curious process. Waves, rain, heat and cold, frost and thaw between them search out the weaker places in 59 6o THE DORSET COAST the chalk, and by slow, but sure and steady, degrees hollow them out into larger or smaller caverns whose floor is the restless tide and whose roof may be at any height you please, from just above flood-level to nearly the height of the cliffs themselves. The largest natural cavern existing here at the present time is that of Parson's Barn, whose roof is between fifty and sixty feet above the water. Parson's Barn at low tide THE CLIFFS AT PARSON'S BARN has a cold, shivery little pebbly beach of its own, interspersed here and there with fragments of chalk fallen from the roof. Who first gave this tremendous cavern its name ? Was it, as some would contend, a sympathiser with the clergy, who so styled it because of its emptiness, or was it not rather a savage satirist, who, thinking of the rich tithes of yore, named it for its size ? The name has thus, it will be seen, its justification to two schools of thought. OLD HARRY AND HIS WIFE. PARSON'S BARN 6 o For long stretches of cliff scenery at this point, the walls of chalk are alternately hollowed out or fashioned into projections, the remnants of many caves finally destroyed by waves and weather. Those forces are the staunchest of allies, and work on a plan of campaign worthy of the most enlightened and scientific of engineers. The process of attack upon the coast is slow, but simple and effective. The sea carves the chalk into caverns, and the rains and the natural drainage of the soil above, send water down through the turf of the cliff-top to the roofs of the holes thus made, rotting the chalk and finally causing the roof to fall in. The ruined cave is then resolved into a semicircular scoop in the cliffs, probably neighboured by another, when projecting arms of chalk are left to be detached by degrees from the mainland, and converted into such striking features as Old Harry here, and the even more striking rocks of the Needles, in the Isle of Wight. To geologists the picturesque features of this range of cliffs are quite lost beside the geological interests they own. On rounding Whitecliff and coming to Ballard Head your true knight of the hammer and amateur of strata has eyes for nothing else but the " fault " in the chalk which, with exciting gestures, he will point out. This " fault " is the handiwork of some terrific cataclysm of nature, by which, in the dim aeons of the past, when things were in a very unsettled condition, this entire part of the coast was shaken up very 64 THE DORSET COAST seriously, and half of it turned up on end. So much can be seen at the " fault," very strikingly marked by a thin band of black flints running perpendicularly from the sea to the crest of the cliff, instead of in a proper and decent manner, horizontally. The " grain " of the chalk, too, varies in like manner, on either side, and is as markedly different as though one took a piece of cloth and folded it over, or placed two pieces of wood beside one another, with the grain running in opposite directions. The traveller coming into the Isle of Purbeck, across Poole Harbour and by Studland, is not obviously and incontestably come to it in its most characteristic aspect until he leaves Studland behind and finds himself on the crest of Ballard Down, midway between that village and Swanage. It is far otherwise when entering this geographical division from Wareham. From that decayed old town that stands between Stour and Piddle, in a thoroughly agricultural environment of purling streams, green meadows and dairy-farms, he crosses directly into that land of stone and little shade which is the true Purbeck. It is no island, really, this " Isle " ; not so much an island even as the Isle of Athelney, which is in the very middle of Somerset, but is actually wholly encircled by streams and marshes. It is not necessary, in order to enter Purbeck, to cross water or bridge, for to the westward it is joined to the rest of the County of Dorset by a very con siderable neck of land where not even a tiny <^S "WHJ^- PARSON S BARN. PARSON'S BARN 67 brook can be found to help out this arbitrary designation. But while we are thus discussing the misnomer, it will be as well to delimit the boundaries of the Isle. It is bounded on the east by the open sea of the English Channel and by Poole Harbour ; on the north by Poole Harbour again and the river Frome, flowing past Ware ham to West Holme, where the little stream of Luckford Lake, flowing from the south, joins it. This forms part of the western boundary, continued by an imaginary line, drawn almost due south and ending at Flowers Barrow, on Worbarrow Bay. The southern boundary of the Isle is, of course, the Channel. Its extreme length from east to west, from Handfast Point to Flowers Barrow, is eleven miles, and from the spit of land near Arne on the north to St. Aldhelm's Head in the south, nine miles. The northern portion is a singular low-lying district of barren but beautiful heaths, whose soil is composed of the stubborn " Bagshot Sands " which form a kind of armoured surface covering the deep and extensive, and incalculably valuable, beds of china clay underlying the southern shores of Poole Harbour and their hinterland. This wealth- giving deposit of china clay, the product of decomposed granite, is considered by geologists to necessarily derive from Devonshire, where, on Dartmoor, the nearest granitic formation is found, and is thought to have been brought thence in solution, and precipitated here at an early period 68 THE DORSET COAST of the earth's existence by some vanished water course, at last grown sluggish and in that con dition depositing its suspended matter. This china clay has for various economic purposes been continuously worked ever since the days of the Roman occupation, and continues to be the source of much prosperity to the shipping industries of Poole and the tile and drainpipe factories that have sprung up in the surrounding districts. CHAPTER IX SWANAGE The entrance to Swanage from the Corfe road, rather than from Studland, is nowadays the most characteristic. These are the days of topsy turvy, of inside-out and upside-down, when fish are sometimes sent down from the London markets to supply the seaside towns ; when proverbial philosophy is out-of-date and coals have been sent to Newcastle ; when butter, milk, cheese, and eggs are better and cheaper in London than on the farm, and it costs more to buy fruit from the orchard than to purchase it of a West End fruiterer. In times so paradoxical as these, when new buildings in such a stony neighbourhood as that of the City of Bath are often built of brick, it is Httle wonder that here, in this equally stony Isle of Purbeck, the newer parts of the town, and the recent settlements along the shore, are constructed of that material, rather than of the native stone, which should be cheaper, and was in fact cheaper until the very mixed blessing of the railway came, and with cheap carriage brought bricks into Swanage. Before that time one might almost 69 70 THE DORSET COAST have brought a brick into the place to show it to the inhabitants as a strange and curious thing from foreign parts ; but nowadays the unwonted portent of a red rash of brick suburbs is observable along the shore to the east and north, where a " Grand " Hotel has sprung up, like Jonah's gourd, amid a number of attendant bungalows. To see Swanage, therefore, in its old-world guise, one must penetrate back from the sea, where all the developments take place, along the High Street that was once so quaint, and is now almost entirely rebuilt and commonplace, to the narrow passage by the "Figurehead" Inn, where the town practically began, and where the " old guard " of Swanage picturesqueness still shows a bold and conservative front. Within recent memory, this was by no means the most picturesque nook of Swanage, but — thanks to " improvements " and demolitions — it is now advanced to that dignity, and long, hopes the sentimental visitor, may it retain the distinction. But still stands the old fish shop near the front, although the once unmistakable mark of Swanage — the trade-mark of Swanage — the " bankers," are gone. The " bankers " were long counters of stone, waggon high, from which carts and trollies were loaded with the serried rows and stacks of Purbeck stone, brought down to the town from the quarries on the hills in the rear, and placed here in readiness for shipment. In the cold moonlight, viewed from the hills, or approached from the sea, all this stone was wont to render SWANAGE 7i the aspect of Swanage very awfully like that of a city of the dead. In these times it is brought down from the quarries and sent off in trucks by rail, and the seashore knows it no longer. At C^MHK?^— OLD SWANAGE: THE "FIGUREHEAD" INN. the same time, the immediate front of the town has become disappointing, and the few remaining old houses that once looked out immediately upon the sea, by the " Ship Inn," are now boxed in by tall blocks of shops and boarding-houses. r- THE DORSET COAST Even the old wooden pier, crazy and picturesque, where the steamers from Bournemouth touched, has given place to a newer, built of iron, and opened in 1897. The steamers call there more than ever, but the quaintness of the place has gone. Swanage in those days was a children's para- Photo by W ' . Pouncy, Dorchtster. THE OLD FISH SHOP. dise, and people who wanted a quiet holiday found it easily enough on the beach between the town and Ballard Head. But that " Grand" hotel is there now, and all manner of satellite villas, and where there are no villas the great touting notice-boards of land to be let on building- lease, or sold outright, according to the immediate needs or the long-armed cupidity of the land owner, affront the blue sea and yellow shores. SWANAGE 73 With all these changes, old Swanage is be coming little else than a tradition. No longer even can the old roofing slabs of stone be often seen. They are noticeable on the roof of the old fish shop, and on that of the old lock-up, but are out of date now that light roofing-tiles and slates permit the building of slighter roofs. To cover the framework of a modern house with THE LOCK-UP. anything so substantial as these local products would mean, most likely, the collapse of the roof-tree. The old lock-up itself is out of date and retired to a position among the building refuse in the yard at the rear of the Town Hall, where it stands as a curiosity, as well it may, for an inscription tells us that it was " Erected for the Prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the Friends of Religion and Good Order," in 1803. How characteristic 10 74 THE DORSET COAST of the " Friends of Religion " of all times, of all creeds, and in all places ! To imprison some one whenever possible, to oppress all not of their particular creed, and to be self-sufficient and the dispensers of stripes and scorpions have ever been the privileges arrogated to themselves by the unco' guid. And this reminds me that Swanage is emi nently a place to be avoided on a Sunday. The Sabbath quiet that was so entirely charming a feature of the place while it remained little more than a village is replaced by an intolerable dullness now that it is a considerable town. Streets of closed shops are inevitable in towns, but they are none the less deadly dull ; and the visitors who would like to be doing something, but have nothing to do, and, for fear of the very strict Sabbatarian feeling of the place, would not dare do it if they had, are reduced to volleys of yawns, and to wishing, like Wellington, hard-pressed at the Sunday Battle of Waterloo — but for another reason than his — that night would come. The lot of the visitor staying in Swanage is thus sufficiently stale and flat on a Sunday, but it by no means compares with the desolation of the touring cyclist who tours by Sunday as well as week-day. The way of the transgressor — for the looks of the smartly dressed church and chapel crowds he meets sufficiently inform him that a transgressor he is — is then hard indeed, and he is not unlikely to go hungry and thirsty, SWANAGE 75 unless he proceeds straightway to an hotel and elects to stay overnight. The Sabbath impressions of Swanage received by the stranger who first makes acquaintance with the town under these circumstances are not favourable, but Monday morning brings a change. The brightness, cheerfulness, and vitality of the air, the whiteness of Whitecliff over at Ballard Head, the grey-green of the turf of the downs, the pale blue and fleecy white of the sky, and the darker blue of the sea dispel the doldrums of yesterday, and Swanage is felt to be a very desirable place indeed. CHAPTER X THE ODDITIES OF SWANAGE The stranger to Swanage might well be excused if he hurriedly came to the conclusion that the town was an appanage of the London building and contracting firm of Mowlem & Burt, for the founders of that business were natives of this place, and have filled it with an astonishing collection of discarded oddments from London, the perquisites that fell to them in the way of their business. It is not so certain that those who delight in quaint, old-world places ought to be grateful to the memory either of Burt or of Mowlem, who are now gathered to their fathers ; for largely to them is due that change from an old-world fishing and quarrying village to a modern sea-side resort, which, to those who knew the place before those changes began to be, have quite succeeded in spoiling it. To those who knew not Swanage in the old days, before the replacing of its quaintly primitive cottages by pretentious modern shops, and before the railway came, to finally modernise it, the town is well enough, and even delightful ; but to those who knew the village as it was, this is a very 76 HIGH STREET AND TOWN HALL, SWANAGE. THE ODDITIES OF SWANAGE 79 different matter, and they feel no gratitude towards the shades of Mowlem & Burt. John Mowlem, the founder of that firm, rose from very humble quarry beginnings, but traced his descent from one Durandus de Moulham, who so far back as the time of William the Conqueror held the manor of Moulham at Godlingstone, between Studland and Swanage. The manorial service by which Durandus held that property was the finding of a carpenter to work about the great tower of Corfe Castle, whenever it required repair and the king put in his claim. In the time of Henry the Fifth, the De Moulhams and their manor parted company, for their direct line or elder branch ended in an heiress, who married one Robert Rempston, and took the property out of the family. In the course of centuries the aristocratic De Moulhams became plain plebeian Mowlems, without a rood of land to justify that territorial " De," which they therefore very properly dropped and discontinued the use of. But time works many practical ironies, and not only brought about the extinction of the Rempstons, but the upheaval again of the Mowlems, in the person of this strenuous con tractor, who, with prosperity and opportunity serving, succeeded in bringing back a portion of the lands his family had lost over four hundred years earlier. He, however, died in 1868, aged 79, childless, and so the Mowlem reappearance was brief. He and his partner, Burt, had a positive 80 THE DORSET COAST mania for erecting monuments in Swanage. Nothing ever happened here, however long ago, but they raised something to put people in mind of it. It is a very long while since Alfred the Great succeeded in defeating the Danes here — over a thousand years, in . fact, for that naval battle, which was fought in Swanage Bay, took place in a.d. 877 — and Swanage had in the mean while existed very comfortably without any memorial of that event, but John Mowlem erected a stone pillar on the beach in 1862, to commemo rate it. It is not a very imposing pillar, and it is quaintly crowned by three cannon-balls, which, in his frugal way, Mowlem chanced upon, lying about somewhere, and found a use for, quite unconscious of the incongruous character of cannon-balls on a monument to a victory fought hundreds of years before gunpowder or ordnance were invented. When there was nothing in Swanage left to decorate in the monumental way, Mowlem was reduced to the expedient of working off his commemorative energy by recognising other than local events. Thus it is that, beside the high road out of the town, on the way to Corfe Castle, the stranger will find a large and not lovely obelisk to the memory of " Albert the Good," by which name the Prince Consort of Queen Victoria is indicated. It was, considering all these things, eminently fitting that when Mowlem himself was taken to his forbears an obelisk of a peculiar massiveness should have been erected over him, HH t<; tnvRj., THE WELLINGTON MEMORIAL, SWANAGE. THE ODDITIES OF SWANAGE 83 No Londoner can feel strange in Swanage, for there are on either hand so many relics of Cockaigne that they render the place quite homely and familiar. If one is old enough to remember Sir Christopher Wren's old decorative stone frontage to Mercers' Hall, Cheapside, re moved in 1882, to be replaced by a newer building, it will be with a warm glow of recognition and reminiscence that the familiar frontage, with its florid garlands and podgy cherubs, is encountered on a stroll down the High Street, doing duty as entrance to the Swanage Town Hall. They, and the well-known bust of the crowned Virgin, the badge of the Worshipful Company of Mercers, over the keystone of the archway, are a good deal cleaner than they were used to be in Cheapside, and the cherubs have been rather ruthlessly scraped ; but the old landmark is easily recognisable, and the clock, bracketed out from an upper storey, is too characteristic of the City of London not to be a spoil snatched from one of the old City churches. Opposite this Town Hall rises the massive and stately Purbeck House, the lordly halls reared by Burt, whose striking, mediaevally- designed tower is surmounted by one of the flying-fish vanes from old Billingsgate Market. But by far the most striking importation from London is the tall Gothic clock-tower — lacking a clock — which has for the last forty years been a prominent object on the seashore in the grounds of " The Grove," at the extreme west end of the town. It was originally built, 84 THE DORSET COAST at the cost of some thousands of pounds, as a memorial to the great Duke of Wellington, and was erected on the pavement to the south side of London Bridge. Its history is thoroughly and singularly in keeping with that of many other monuments to that great commander ; doomed, like the famous Wellington memorial in St. Paul's Cathedral, to be for ever incomplete and con tinually " moved on," to be, like the hideous " Iron Duke " of Hyde Park Corner, the derision of nations, and to be at last banished to the Fox Hills, Aldershot, where it frightens the recruits ; or, finally, subjected, like the equestrian Duke in front of the Royal Exchange in the City of London, to the indignity of being made president over an underground convenience. The Wellington clock tower had not long been in its position at the end of London Bridge before it was felt to be decidedly a hindrance to the thronging traffic of that quarter, and it was removed. No one knew what to do with it, and its stones were given to Mr. Burt, who speedily had them shipped to Swanage, as a present to his friend Mr. Docwra, who then resided at " The Grove." Although its stone pinnacle has of late years come to grief and its tapering proportions are stunted by the substitu tion of a copper capping, it still, with the rough stones, drying fishing-nets, and scattered lobster- pots of the beach, forms a highly picturesque foreground for the artist seeking an effective setting for a characteristic sketch of Swanage. CHAPTER XI TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD One of the great attractions of Swanage is Durlston Head, where the famous Tilly Whim Caves are to be found. There is little or no difficulty in finding the way to this inevitable item of a Swanage holiday, for the route is marked on finger posts, lamp-posts, stone columns, and tablets let into walls to right and left ; but although the way is rendered by those aids to pilgrimage so unmistakable, the steepness of the roads and their glaring stony character under a summer sun make the two-mile journey anything but easy. The curiosities of Durlston Head and the projected suburb of the Durlston Park estate are alike the creation of the amazing Burt, in whose nature eccentricity and business capacity, and the instincts of the pedagogue, the philan thropist and the money-maker seem to have been strangely mixed. So insistent are the directions to his raree-show on the cliffside that curiosity, and perhaps in some degree a kindly desire to please his spirit, now he is gone, sooner or later will take the pilgrim along those stony, steep, and hard-featured roads, to see what is to be seen. 86 THE DORSET COAST John Burt seems to have been very keen on the project of developing Swanage, long before the branch railway from Wareham was opened to it, about 1884, but although Swanage has indeed developed, it has not extended in this direction, and probably never will. These terrible gradients, more than sufficiently trying to the occasional pedestrian, would be absolutely pro hibitive to any likely resident, to whom they would assuredly prove a daily trial. Thus it is that the roads driven in many directions along this plateau and by the cliff-tops are still lonely, and although kerbed and channelled and provided here and there with lamp-posts, have murmuring plantations of pine-woods skirting them, instead of houses, with tufts of hungry grass growing over the macadam that has never known any traffic, nor ever will. Boards prominently displayed at the angles and crossings of these solitudes give their names, but satiric fortune has made them the subjects of ironic laughter. This note of failure and isolation from the world is underscored and italicised, as it were, by the iron lamp-posts and kerb-guards occurring at intervals, seen by the astonished stranger to be the spoils of many a London parish. The astounding Burt, for sake of saving, or with a peculiar idea of decoration, — it cannot be said which — brought these dis carded things from the Westminster yard of his building and contracting firm, and set them up, far from their original home, in this paradise manque of his, Here are iron posts with the name TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 87 and helmeted device of the City of London, others with the name of the St. George's Paving Com missioners still plainly to be read on them, and others yet of St. Anne's Soho, St. Martin's-in-the- Fields, the City of Westminster, and many more parishes and divisions. The toilsome climb by these emptinesses is punctuated at more or less regular intervals by stone seats or benches of generous size — for stone is the one thing there is no need of stinting in stony Purbeck — each one inscribed with some name great in literature or affairs. Thus on your way you may give yourself the satisfaction of sitting on " Milton," " Sir Walter Scott," " Shake speare," and others. Sir Walter, poor fellow ! is a bit decayed by the action of the weather, but Shakespeare is sound enough. " Stowell," " Arthur's Seat," and " Durdle," are other speci mens. At the summit of these (according to the weather) windy or parching eminences is a gigantic seat, bulking so majestically against the skyline that the stranger naturally specu lates curiously as to what it may be styled. " Queen Victoria," one supposes, at the very least of it. But no, it has no name. It com mands a magnificent view over sea and sky, and is fronted by a stone tablet peremptorily bidding the wayfarer "Rest and Admire." You accordingly sit down, for whether you admire or not, and although you instinctively resent being com manded, you must needs rest. Near at hand, on the cliff's edge, stands 88 THE DORSET COAST " Durlston Castle," which is not a castle at all, but a restaurant built in a style remotely resem bling Norman, where the thoughtful Burt has ordained cheap refreshments for the weary whom he has by his alluring tablets and specious sign posts brought to this outlandish place. Beyond and below it is the Mecca of this pilgrimage, the Tilly Whim Caves, the remains of a disused stone quarry in the face of the giant cliffs. A considerable mass of wholly extravagant and entirely unreliable legends has gathered around the name of Tilly Whim. " Tilly Whim," according to Swanage guide-books, which of all books ought to be better informed, "is so called from a person of the name of Tilly, who persisted in his whim of working it, in spite of the advice of experienced quarrymen, who warned him of the increasing hardness of the stone." But there was never, so far as records go, any person named Tilly, and the quarry was abandoned about 1814, not on account of any increasing hardness of the stone, but by reason of the then decreasing demand for it. It has been shown in the pages of county historians that Tilly Mead was once the name of a meadow at Swanage, long before ever these Tilly Whim quarries were opened ; but it is hope less to find any record of the meaning of that name, and we are therefore reduced to the sup position that it is a natural provincial corruption of "Tillage Mead." Both the mead and the quarry — which seems to have been first opened TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 89 in April 1805 — were situated on the same manor, and if speculating and surmising be the order of the day we might do worse than guess that the farmer of the meadow about that period took a lease of this promising stone-bed, and turned quarryman ; thus, in the popular mind forming the association of names. The word " whim " is readily explained. It has nothing to do with freaks or whimsies. Swanage folks have forgotten the technical meaning of it, but the word is yet in common use in Cornwall, where the tin and copper miners so style their hauling gear. The " whim " of these cliffside quarries was a crane, which lowered the blocks of stone into barges brought in calm weather against the cliffs. They were then transferred to vessels anchored at a safe distance. The Tilly Whim quarries were thus, from these ready and inexpensive methods of shipment, very remunerative while the demand for stone was maintained. They were first opened, in a highly ingenious manner, from the soil and the soft layer of " dirt- bed," above, on the cliff-top, and then the natu rally terraced and platformed face of the cliffs was reached by the inclined shaft or tunnel by which " the caves " — as the quarries are generally styled — are even yet gained. According to Burt, as guide, philosopher and friend, the genius loci whose admonitory tablets meet the eye in every direction, certain kinds of stone were quarried here in a small way, even before the opening of the beds on a large scale, in 1805. How far it 12 9o THE DORSET COAST was a legitimate business, and in what degree a mere cloak for the much more remunerative occupation of smuggling, none can say, for the smuggler's business was precisely one of those which never by any chance furnished annual reports, or statements of working. But thus says Burt, on the tablet confronting you as you TILLY WHIM CAVES. enter the black and damp tunnel : " These caves were formed centuries ago, by men making sinks and rick-stones (the ' stone staddles ' of farming parlance). Smuggling was also carried on here, and both were discontinued at the end of the French Wars, 1814." The broad stone terraces overlooking the sea, to which this tunnel conducts, have given the TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 91 widest scope to Burt's peculiar idiosyncrasy. It is a striking scene of rocky grandeur, midway between the sea, raging down below against the sheer walls of rock, and the ragged edges above ; and the boldly carved admonition " Look round and read great Nature's open book," is, on the whole, superfluous. The wild Irishman's maxim at Ballyshannon Fair was, " When ye see a head hit it," and the Burt programme would appear to have been, " When a blank space of rocky wall presents itself, carve or paint it with some improving or educational sentiment." Accord ingly, one feels little surprise when, glancing up at the cliffs, a long quotation from Shakespeare appears, in bold lettering. It is the " arranged " and slightly transposed speech of Prospero, in the fourth act of the " Tempest " : — " The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ; And, like the baseless fabric of a vision, Leave not a rack behind." It is generally an idle and unconvincing task to enlarge upon the terrors of so rocky and exposed a coast as this. The reader instinctively dis counts the horrors, and refuses to be impressed. But, without any attempt at word-painting, let the dangers of the Purbeck coast in general, and those of the cliffs at and near Tilly Whim in particular, be seen from the account of the wreck of the Alexandrovna, a fine Scotch-built 92 THE DORSET COAST sailing vessel of 1250 tons burthen, which, sailing from Liverpool, was cast away and in ten minutes reduced to matchwood on these rocks in the fearful storm of April 29th, 1882. Simultaneously, at four o'clock on that tem pestuous afternoon, the coastguard on St. Aid- helm's Head, and two Saturday afternoon holiday- makers at Tilly Whim, observed a large vessel in a disabled condition and apparently deserted, drifting through the heavily laden atmosphere and the raging seas, directly upon the cliffs. At first she seemed likely to strike immediately upon this ledge, but eventually drifted half a mile to the westward, against a wall of cliff. Before the hurrying coastguard, with their life lines and other appliances, could reach the spot, that which had been a fine vessel was already reduced to fragments, even then floating away. So great had been the force with whicli the ill- fated ship was driven against the cliff that a portion of a topmast, shot out of her by the con cussion, was found lying on the turf of the cliff-top. No sign of any crew could be seen, and the identity of the ship was unknown until the next day, when a life-buoy, painted Alexandrovna, was found. This clue disclosed the fact that there had been more than twenty hands aboard, all of whom had perished. Most of their bodies were afterwards found, some terribly mangled by the rocks, and were laid in Swanage church yard. " Protect the wild birds," implore the inscribed TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 95 stones on the way from Tilly Whim to Burt's collection of freaks and object-lessons beneath " Durlston Castle," and let us hope that request is generally observed, and that the gulls and kittiwakes do indeed remain unmolested. Descending the steps from that " castle " restaurant to an artificial platform overlooking the open sea, we find Burt in his most pedagogic and instructive mood. Here are stone tablets inscribed with charts of distances from this point of Durlston to Ushant, Start Point, the Lizard, and many other ancient acquaintances of geo graphy primers ; others detailing what o'clock it is at the present moment all over the world, with information about the solstices, and stone blocks setting forth the points of the compass, and precisely in what direction the various ports on the other side of the Channel are situated. In addition to these is a stone map of the locality, properly contoured with hill and dale and coast, and divided into two-mile rings ; so that, what with one chunk of information and another, the astonished stranger may almost conceive himself to be back at infant school again and studying from the old gamboge-covered Pinnock; that simple mentor of questions and answers of one's lost youth. But we have not yet seen the prime curiosity, the greatest wonder, the finest flower, of Burt's achievement. Not to have seen it argues your exploration incomplete ; and if you must needs answer " No," to the now inevitable Swanage 96 THE DORSET COAST question, " Have you seen the Great Globe ? " why, then, you will earn the mild contempt of the Swanage folk. What the Great Globe is like you shall see from the accompanying picture. It is a model of the earth itself, done in local stone, weighing forty tons, and standing about ten feet high. It is, of course, not a monolith, but built up of some half-dozen slabs, to form a perfect sphere. It is carved in low relief with the seas and con tinents of the world, and embodies a vast amount of class-room information, greatly appreciated, it must be confessed, by the vast numbers of holiday-makers who are attracted by the fame of it. The motto of Burt would certainly appear to have been " Thorough," for, having created the earth, he embarked upon a whole mass of information on the subject of the solar system, duly set forth on stone slabs around the flat space on which the Great Globe stands. Nor even then was his work completed. The little weaknesses of mankind were not hid from him, and the passion of Dick, Tom, and Harry, and of Brown, Jones, and Robinson for inscribing their names upon every prominent object was obviously present in his mind when he set up the globe. He knew perfectly well that, baulked of fame in real life, some Smith or Jones would carve his name prominently over this stony England, America, or Europe represented here, unless measures were taken to prevent it, and so — surely with a touch of sardonic humour — he provided TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 97 two blank stone slabs where all might scribble to their heart's content. " Persons anxious to write their names will please do so on this stone only," runs his admonition, and it is amusing to note how literally it has been obeyed. We may suspect that he wished, not only to protect his globe, but to shame the scribblers out of their scribbling ; but people who do scribble can have no sense of humour, and so it is not altogether surprising to find Burt taken at his word and his slabs so filled that there is no room for more names. On another of his numerous tablets some appreciative member of the Institute of Civil Engineers has set down these sentiments : " Loth should I be with knife to hurt Thy stony work, most noble Burt ; Long may it last, to show to man How much may do the man who can. G. F., M.I.C.E." A little way beyond Tilly Whim, across an intervening glen, is Round Down, whose bald, stark outline ends in Anvil Point, where the new lighthouse stands to warn vessels coming up channel from the dangerous shoals and ledges off Kimmeridge and the forbidding perpendicular walls of rock at this pillared entrance to Swanage Bay. So long ago as 1857, urgent representations had been made to the Board of Trade and to the Trinity House, by which it was shown that this highly dangerous coast was not sufficiently lighted. 13 98 THE DORSET COAST No beacons to warn the hapless mariners existed between the lights of Portland Bill and the light house at the Needles on the westernmost ex tremity of the Isle of Wight, and in consequence many shipmasters, taking a course wide of their proper track, piled their ships up against the inexorable buttresses of the Isle of Purbeck. It was long before these arguments bore fruit, and in the meanwhile other disasters occurred on this portion of the coast, by which the need for another beacon was driven home. At last, however, it was agreed to provide a lighthouse here, where many a stout ship had been battered to pieces between the hammer of the sea and the anvil of this very appropriately named point, and it was at last opened, September 28th, 1881, by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, as President of the Board of Trade. The lighthouse keepers are housed on a lonely spur of rock, not easily accessible, save by the pedestrian, from Tilly Whim. He breasts the rises and stumbles over the rabbit-burrows and mole-heaps on the way, picking his path carefully between the refuse-heaps of exhausted quarries ; perhaps stifled by the still air of a windless summer day, at other times stung by the salt particles of a furious sea-breeze, or met playfully by the August thistledown charging full upon him on the shoulders of a vivifying breath from land ward. Stone is still quarried here, and on the natural shelves and platforms of Dancing Ledge, beyond ; TILLY WHIM AND DURLSTON HEAD 99 but the deserted quarries far outnumber the new. Dancing Ledge itself is a two-mile stretch of cliffs only visible as a whole from this point, or from the vessels that in holiday-time ply between Lulworth, Swanage, and Bournemouth. How it came by that name there are no facts, nor even legends, to tell. Only quarrymen can readily find a way to Dancing Ledge from Anvil Point, and even they in general come to it from the twin villages of Langton or Worth Matravers. Once arrived at it, the way in which " smugglers' caves " are made is easily seen. These so-called haunts and storehouses of smuggling bands were really, in most cases, as we have seen at Tilly Whim, quarries, and nothing else but quarries ; and in a number of workings now in progress in the face of the cliffs of Dancing Ledge, looking down into the sea, very matter-of-fact caverns are being driven which only await disuse and the weathering of a few years to become the romantic scenes of heaven knows what desperate encounters between the old-time protectors and defrauders of the revenue. CHAPTER XII THE QUARRIES OF PURBECK — WRECK OF THE HALSEWELL The best way of reaching St. Aldhelm's Head, one of the most prominent headlands of this coast, is by following the high road out of Swanage to the stony village of Langton Matravers, whose ancient little church has been wantonly demolished, and, with the exception of the tiny tower, rebuilt on a huge scale, so that it looks as though it were suffering severely from elephantiasis of the body. Here, on the elevated plateau of Langton, we are in the midst of a busy scene of quarrying, the district being a huge mass of stone. Numbers of little stone-built sheds, with leaning roofs, and heaps of stone-chippings and rubbish, alternating with yawning pits, dot and seam the level, where little family parties of quarrymen are at work. For we have nothing, here, in the Isle of Purbeck, resembling the quarries in other parts of the country, owned by large firms, employing numbers of men. Here, and at Portland in a less degree, it is an industry of " little men," each man working his own little holding, occasionally employing an assistant or two, yet generally THE QUARRIES OF PURBECK 101 helped by his own family. The local quarrying rights are those of prescription, rights handed down from time immemorial and not lightly to be set aside. The landowner does not take a stated rent, but exacts a royalty on the stone excavated, the amount being calculated and measured, according to the quality of the stone found, by the lineal or by the square foot, or by the ton weight. A quarry once opened by the permission of the landowner is by local custom a perpetual holding, not to be terminated by the landlord, so long as the dues on the stone got out are regularly paid and the quarry itself not abandoned for the space of a year and a day. The quarryman's life is one of severe labour and small gains, as may very readily be suspected from the length of time families of them have been settled here — Phippard, Chinchen, and Bowers being names traditional in the industry, and re presented even nowadays, as they have been for centuries past. They have never made their for tunes by stone-quarrying, but have been glad enough to earn a livelihood at it, and then, old and bent and gnarled by the rheumatism that comes of working in the cold and damp of the pits, to retire to the chimney-corner, while their sons and grandchildren carry on the tradition and the toil. There is nothing on this plateau like the great open quarries of other counties. Here a quarryman begins by digging a shaft, usually an inclined one, and erecting a capstan or windlass 102 THE DORSET COAST for hauling the stone to bank. The capstan is generally worked by a donkey. Then he builds sheds for storing and shaping the stone, which according sometimes to quality and sometimes to circumstances is wrought on the spot into sinks, kerbs, and gateposts, or is purchased in the rough for the builder's use by one or other of the half-dozen or fewer stone " merchants " who carry on operations in Swanage, and buy wholesale for shipping or despatch by rail. The quarrymen have never enjoyed the pos session of much ready money, and their produce is not a very handy article of barter, but in the old days — those " wold times " of which the elders still regretfully speak — they did somehow now and again manage to get a set-off to their grocer's and other tradesmen's bills down at Swanage by supplying sinks, stone tiles, doorsteps, and the like, in part payment of accounts. A quarryman with a long score would probably " allow " that his butcher, grocer, or other creditor could do with a new doorstep, in place of the old one, or " I d'low," he might say, " you'm wanting stone fer that thur new shed o' yourn, and as times be tar'ble bad, I 'lowed you'd tek some o' me and settle that thur bill as your boy has bin axing the missus for." But since Swanage has become modernised, " My stone for your sugar and tea," is become an unheard-of exchange. If we declare that it is the merchants, rather than the hard-working quarrymen, who make the fortunes, or, at the least of it, the comfortable THE QUARRIES OF PURBECK 103 competencies, we do no more than repeat the fact, well known all the world over, that it is the middleman who, buying goods for less than their value and selling them for more, butters his bread on both sides, while (to continue the metaphor) the producer has to make do with a scanty spread of dripping. What then ? 'Twas ever thus, and always will be. You cannot buy your fish of the fisherman, nor your mutton-chop of the grazier ; while, after all, the quarryman, raising stone by the sweat of his brow, is in better stead than the grower of fruit and vegetables, who often makes no profit of his industry, but is sometimes even brought in indebted to his Covent Garden salesman. But the quarrymen, who see the merchants come driving up in their smart traps to select the stone they have hardly won from its native stratum, are none the less bitter because the middle man is an economic factor which cannot be eliminated. " He lives and dresses like a gentleman, and sends his sons to college," is their complaint, with the unspoken, but none the less obvious, reflection, " and we dress in corduroy and fustian, and work hard all day for little more than a bare living." Bare unfertile uplands, rich in nothing but subterranean store of stone, lead to the village of Worth, situated in so undesirably bleak a situation that its original settlement here by the Saxons, who gave it that name, is not readily to be under stood when a much milder and more sheltered 104 THE DORSET COAST position could have been found near at hand, at Winspit or at Seacombe. Plain " Worth " or ' village," (whose original unadorned name suffi ciently indicates the then lonely character of the coast) became Worth " Matravers " in Norman times when the Manor passed to the family of that name, and, as so often the case, the name remains the sole monument of that extinct race. That Worth was once the superior of Swanage seems to be an established fact, for " the chapel of Swanwich " was anciently a chapel-of-ease to the church and rectory of this place. The existing church here is Early Norman, small and rude. There is something in the churchyard of Worth Matravers that upsets opinions generally received, and tends to a general attitude of scepti cism on the subject of recorded incidents. " What," exclaimed Pontius Pilate, " what is truth ? " and Chadband, scarcely a less illustrious and convincing figure, is made to ask the same momentous question, or to vainly seek veracity. The more you travel and the more you read, the more perplexing a thing it becomes to say what is truth, and where it lives ; until at last you halt between a denial or a doubt of any statement, and a feeling that if truth there be, it is only ever true with reservations or limitations ; just as the ground coffee purchased of the grocer is a more or less declared mixture of coffee and chicory, as most butter is secretly blended of margarine, and " York " hams come from America more often than from York. THE QUARRIES OF PURBECK 105 These reflections are called up by an epitaph in this churchyard of Worth Matravers which, against all our cherished opinions, fortified by works of reference sub " Jenner," and by at least one public statue, declares that one Benjamin Jesty was the discover of vaccination : — "Sacred to the Memory of Benjamin Jesty, of Downshay, who departed this life April 16th, 1816, aged 79 years. He was born at Yetminster in this County, and was an upright, honest Man, particu larly noted for having been the first Person (known) that introduced the Cow-Pox by inoculation, and who from his great strength of mind made the experiment from the Cow on his Wife and two Sons in the Year 1774." I think the average person who reads this does so with a very pronounced animus against the memory of Mr. Benjamin Jesty, and goes away less with the opinion that he was a beneficent discoverer than that his " great strength of mind " may be more fitly called domestic tyranny, and that it, whichever it was, was matched by the weakness of mind on the part of those who sub mitted themselves to be so dangerously experi mented upon. A few trees have grown up around the church and cottages of Worth Matravers, to give it a more homelike look, and the sea appears sparkling in a dip of the downs, in a lively manner. The grassy downs giving upon the sea at Worth are elaborately terraced into the likeness of gigantic steps, in a manner that may be matched in many hundreds of different places, where downs 14 io6 THE DORSET COAST exist untouched by the plough, in England and other countries. These curious markings look so startlingly artificial that they have often been seriously accepted as such. Some have con sidered, from their resemblance to raised military earthworks, that there is some occult relation between them and the undoubted hill-camps and fortresses of which they are often near neigh bours, and there are even yet two schools of antiquarian speculation which contend for and against the rival theories that the terraces are the natural weathering of the soil or the relics of a prehistoric system of tillage. " Clearly, when roads were yet unknown, and neighbouring tribes had no relations, except in the way of fighting together and plundering each other's cattle, it was necessary that every tribe should be self-supporting. To import corn from one river valley into another would have been about as difficult then as it would now be to import live-stock from Australia into Central Africa. " So the rude people who once Uved in this part of the country were compelled to cultivate the slopes of the hills, if they did not wish to starve outright. Their communal plots, allotted to par ticular households, were divided into long strips on the hillside, and the object of each family was to keep as large a quantity as possible of the surface soil on its own plot. Left to itself, the soil would never accumulate, for the rain would wash it down from time to time, as it WRECK OF THE HALSEWELL 107 always does on the smooth and rounded shoulders of chalk downs. But by gently levelling a little platform and throwing up a slight ridge at its end, the silt is checked in its slow course downhill, and all the detritus brought from the summit by the drainage water is lodged on the platforms. Each year, this process is repeated, until at last large quantities of soil have accumulated, and the hillside is terraced quite as conspicuously as in the more laboriously formed olive-gardens of Italy or Southern France." That is a very excellent example of special pleading, but it will scarcely serve to convince any one that it was ever possible to grow corn in such situations, on the hungry and innutritious chalk soil or stone-brash. If indeed these terraces were artificial — which can neither be proved nor disproved — they certainly can never have served this purpose. The terraced hills of Worth lead through a gorge fashioned by a little stream to the sea-cliffs at Seacombe, where the coastguard path goes along pastures ending suddenly in precipices, and commanding views back to Dancing Ledge and Anvil Point. Many caves and crannies where the sea thunders incessantly are plainly seen from this point ; in particular the dark cavern of Blacker's Hole. It is a tragic coast, for between this and Winspit, a quarter of a mile westward, occurred the dreadful wreck of the Halsewell East Indiaman on January 6th, 1786. The deserted stone-workings in the face of the 108 THE DORSET COAST perpendicular cliff where the ill-fated vessel struck are called from that circumstance the Halsewell Quarry. The Halsewell was bound out of the mouth of the Thames, for Bengal. Soon after she had sailed, the weather grew tempestuous, with a fierce southerly gale, a severe frost, and a heavy fall of snow. Off Dunnose, Isle of Wight, she sprang a leak, and with seven feet of water in her hold, became scarce manageable. With all her masts lost, and water gaining on the pumps, badly worked by a lazy and insubordinate crew, she just succeeded in clearing Durlstone Point, .but with the increasing force of the gale was driven in upon the shore, all efforts to anchor having proved fruitless. At two o'clock in the morning the vessel struck broadside against the cliffs, opposite a cavern ten or twelve yards deep. Captain Pierce, with his two daughters, one on either side, sat in the deck round-house with his chief officers and some of the passengers and crew until daybreak, while others strove in the darkness to climb the cliff they could not see, and were swept away by the tremendous breakers and drowned. Others yet, with varied fate, took refuge in the cave. Shortly before day break on that dreadful scene the Halsewell gave way before the continued fury of the waves, and vanished from the sight of the cowering wretches in that cold and cheerless cavern. " A universal shriek, in which the voice of female distress was lamentably distinguished, announced the dreadful WRECK OF THE HALSEWELL 109 catastrophe. In a few moments all was hushed, except the roaring of the winds and the dashing of the waves ; the wreck was buried in the deep, and not an atom of it was ever afterwards seen." One hundred and sixty-eight persons were drowned in this disaster, and eighty-two saved, chiefly by the exertions of the quarrymen, aroused by the quarter-master of the ship, who had scaled the cliff and found the village of Worth. A rope was let down from the cliff-top into the cavern and the half-frozen survivors hauled up by it into safety. An entry in the parish register may yet be seen, telling how the East India Company rewarded the villagers with a present of a hundred guineas. CHAPTER XIII ST. ALDHELM'S HEAD— CHAPMAN' S POOL— ENCOMBE From here it is about a mile's length, by coast guard path, up the gradual ascent to St. Aldhelm's Head, the noblest feature of the Dorset coast. Other cliffs rise higher than this towering mass, four hundred and fifty feet above the sea, but they are rarely " staged " so magnificently, and often do not look their height, while this assumes every inch, and more. Its bold perpendicular outline, scarped and channelled by thousands of years of storm and shine, is carved by all the agencies of Nature into the likeness of some stupendous castle that might have been imagined by Grimm or Hans Andersen, and pictured by Dore, so little does it look like anything in natural scenery. Its geological features are curious, ranging from the Portland limestone of those gigantic bastions, to the Portland sand of the natural glacis on which they appear to rest, and the underlying and invisible Kimmeridge clay. This glacis in its turn rests upon a wild and tangled undercliff, where paths cunningly lead the wayfarer on to morasses formed by the springs oozing from the face of the cliff, to rents ST. ALDHELM'S HEAD. ST. ALDHELM'S HEAD 113 and fissures caused by landslips, or to fragments of rock as big as houses, that have come down at different times from that towered steep. Away to the westward are the gigantic cliffs of Swyre Head. At the summit of this promontory dedicated to St. Aldhelm — sometimes mistakenly confused with St. Alban — stands the foursquare and rugged ST. ALDHELM S CHAPEL. little Norman chapel that bears his name. How it and the great headland became associated with Aldhelm, first Bishop of Sherborne, who died in a.d. 709, is not known, but the chapel seems to have been a chantry in which a priest was stationed to pray for the safety of passing mariners. As a practical and physical aid to those spiritual attentions the priest every night exhibited a beacon light which served to warn sailormen off this terrible coast. The substantial circular stone 15 114 THE DORSET COAST to be noticed on the apex of the chapel roof is original, and is supposed to have been the base on which that beacon or firepot stood. The cross now surmounting it is a modern addition. An ancient legend accounting for the existence of the chapel is not without pathos. It seems that in the early part of the twelfth century a bride and bridegroom sailing from the village of Worth Matravers were drowned within a few hundred yards from this spot, while the bride's father stood watching, unable to render any assistance. To their memory, and for the purpose of practical charity already mentioned, the building was erected, about 1140. The priest who served the altar held the rank of a Royal Chaplain. The chantry was for many years desecrated, being used latterly as a storehouse and stable, but was restored in 1873 by the Earl of Eldon. The door is open daily, under the care of the coastguard, whose plain whitewashed barracks are only a few yards away. The interior is very dark, only one little window-slit on the east side giving a ray of light. The vaulted roof is supported by a sturdy central pillar and by pilasters projecting from each of the four walls. A path over the short grass of the cliff-top leads around the wind-swept headland, down to a little bottom, thence up again to Emmit Hill, and down once more to the deep and romantic sheltered inlet of Chapman's, or Shipman's, Pool, where the sea comes lazily lapping upon the beach, Photo by W. Pouncy, Dorchestet. CHAPMAN'S POOL. CHAPMAN'S POOL 117 and softly moves the boats at anchor, as though there were never such things as storms or currents, or fierce tides such as that of St. Aldhelm's Race out yonder, which makes the neighbourhood of this shore terrible to sailors. The only sign of life at Chapman's Pool is the coastguard station, where you may learn the impossibility of finding a way round by the cliffs of Kimmeridge Ledges, to Kimmeridge Bay ; or if you elect to try for yourself may come independently to the same conclusion. The cliff scenery here is a repetition of that beneath St. Aldhelm's Head, with wilder paths that, impeded by springs, stones, brambles, and land slides, become presently quite impracticable. The cliffs overlooking this wilderness are known as Hounstout. Just here, among smaller particles shed from those beetling walls of rock, is a huge fragment — if that may be called a fragment which probably weighs twenty tons — completely blocking the path. The coastguard know it as " Reynolds's Escape," it having fallen just as a comrade of theirs of that name was passing, narrowly missing him. The incident so shook his nerves that he sent in his resignation, rather than continue to parade the path of duty that was also the path of danger. The cliff-ledges at this point are matched by a long reef running parallel with the shore", dreaded from ancient times by mariners. These hidden rocks, while they brought disaster to many, were a source, year in and year out, of considerable 118 THE DORSET COAST revenue to the Abbot of Cerne, whose manors here marched with the shore, and on whom, by several successive charters, were conferred the rights of " wreck of the sea." This was a privilege not lightly parted with, and ancient deeds leasing land from the Abbot are found to make special exception of this source of wealth, reserving all such chances of rocks, shoals, winds, and currents to my lord Abbot. Records exist of a wreck happening here at a period before the king had conferred his royal privilege in wrecks upon the Abbey of Cerne. It happened in the reign of Edward the Third, when the Welfare, of Dartmouth, making for the Port of London, was driven out of her course and smashed on these cruel rocks. Her cargo was exceptionally valuable, including thirty-two pieces of cloth-of-gold, two pieces of baudekin de say, and miscellaneous goods, in all valued at £2,000. The simple peasantry of Dorset appear, according to the subsequent trial held at Sherborne, to have been wreckers who halted little short of murdering any unfortunate sailors who chanced to be cast away upon their inhospitable littoral, for although the crew of the very unprophetically named Welfare came ashore alive, with the captain, they laid hands on everything that came to land, and made off with it ; and when Robert Kurlls, the owner, tried to prevent them, they not only insulted, but nearly killed him. But it was not merely the peasantry who distinguished themselves so greatly by stealing Mr. Kurlls' s cargo. Living ENCOMBE 119 close at hand, they were, of course, first on the scene, but when the neighbouring gentry and my lord Abbot of Cerne heard of it, they were on the spot with the wings of the wind, and not only gleaned what was left, but relieved the peasants of their ill-gotten hauls. A wide inland detour is necessary from Chap man's Pool, up the ravine called Hell Bottom, to the pretty village of Kingston, which stands at the entrance to the beautiful domain of Encombe, seat of the Earl of El don. Encombe is one of the most secluded and deepest combes, or valleys, to be found on this or any other coast. It resembles one of those romantic hollows called " punchbowls," but has the added advantage of being densely wooded with undergrowth and forest trees. At the foot of a long and winding, cliff-bordered descent which goes three parts the circuit of the combe, is the mansion of Encombe itself, which would be considered, in any situation, plain to ugliness, but in a position so beautiful as this is little less than an outrage. That, of course, is the business of no one but the Earl of Eldon himself, who, to be sure, is at considerable trouble to keep his ugly house private, and to prevent anyone having access to the lonely little beach of Freshwater, on to which this remote dell of Encombe opens, like a set scene in romantic drama. Passing near the house, and by the lake formed by damming a little stream, one comes by the crumbly, shaly cliff to a little beach, where a boat and a private 120 THE DORSET COAST bathing-machine are alone visible, and where the streamlet which gives the place the name of Freshwater tumbles to the se,a. Better views than those to be obtained by following the coastguard path from this point to Kimmeridge Bay are found by retracing one's steps up the cup-shaped sides of Encombe to Kingston. This is not an easy route, for the cherished object of landowner and farmers alike seems to be that of discouraging strangers in these parts, even to placing obstacles in their way. From Kingston you " folly the telegraph-posties," as a rustic instructs ; but this is not so easy a matter as at the first blush it would appear to be, for instead of the " posties " following a clearly defined track all the way, they presently, leaving the road— or rather, the road itself coming to an end — bring the explorer out upon field- paths crossed by gates, and thence to wide fields of wheat and barley, whose hedgerows you skirt without knowing whither you are bound, for those " posties " sometimes go across the middle of the fields, where, in fear of the farmers, you cannot follow them. To the pedestrian this is perhaps no great matter — he must emerge some where eventually, even if he be reduced to bursting through a hedge ; but the cyclist's case is rather more difficult, for it is not the most pleasant of experiences to wheel a cycle along the uneven plough-baulks on the skirts of a barley field. But if you are committed to it, you must needs ENCOMBE 121 solace your soul with the reflection that it is all in the day's work — or pleasure — and when the last field is passed and a smooth green ride along the cliff-top appears, why then you have your reward, for the going for awhile is grand, the cliff's edge is walled in so that you cannot fall over, and the panoramic views are magnificent. Here the Isle of Portland first comes in sight, tethered to the mainland by the long, low, almost invisible fine of the Chesil Beach ; and in between that distant landmark and the spot where you stand, delighted at the scene, is a semicircular sweep of coast, indented and jagged with every kind of bay, cove, and cliff. Halting awhile, to take in the beauty of the scene, it is found that this standpoint, although very high, is after all not precisely a cliff, but the edge of an ancient landslide which has gone down so gradually and smoothly that it descends with scarce a ripple on the surface of the grassy fields to the sea, and forms a kind of sheltered and fertile under world, protected from the rigours of these windy uplands. To the eastward is the bold hill of Swyre Head, which disputes with Golden Cap, near Lyme Regis, the honour of being the crowning height of this coast. In " follying the posties " we have passed along at the back of it. Ahead, westwards is the inlet of Kimmeridge Bay, the cliff on its eastward side crowned with a tall classic belvedere of romantic look, while immediately below, sheltered by its embowering 16 122 THE DORSET COAST woods, and nestling in the fertile meadows stretch ing at the foot of the cliffs, is the old Manor House of Smedmore. From this view-point, looking backwards over it, the grand outline of the Isle of Purbeck is passed in review ; serried ranks of cliffs and headlands, bays and coves, notched and crannied, until they fade away in the haze of refraction. CHAPTER XIV SMEDMORE — JOHN CLAVEL, HIGHWAYMAN The beauty of Smedmore Manor House lies less in itself than in its situation, for it is but a plain building of some two hundred years ago, when it was the seat of Sir William Clavel, descendant of an old family whom Hutchins, the county historian, traces back to Walter de Clavile, of William the Conqueror's days. The family be came extinct in 1774, when George Clavel died, childless. In the meanwhile, however, it had produced one famous, or at least notorious, figure ; that of John Clavel, or Clavell, as he spells the name, in his " Recantation of an ill-led Life." John Clavel was, in fact, that black sheep of the flock to be found in every family, if you go far enough back, and search with sufficient diligence. He was a highwayman, who, to take him at his own valuation, had been, before he was plucked as a brand from the burning, as rollicking a young rantipole and as filibustering a blade as might well be met, even in those times, when such were by no means rare. But sinners saved often enhance the glory of their sanctified con dition by the artistic licence of painting their "3 124 THE DORSET COAST former careers very black indeed ; and we may shrewdly suspect the same of this precious sprig of a county family. He seems at the beginning of the reign of Charles the First to have taken to highway robbery on Gad's Hill, near Rochester, where many a much more illustrious figure than he looted the lieges before his time and after; but he was a poor hand at it, and was soon laid by the heels, tried, and condemned to death. SMEDMORE. Family influence appears to have been at work, for he was respited by the King, and he never suffered the capital sentence. In his " lonely, sad, and unfrequented " prison cell in the King's Bench he wrote, in October 1627, the curious '¦' Recantation " printed the following year, and now one of the minor curiosities of literature ; but whether the appeal he makes therein to be set free " for the service of his country," had an immediate effect, we do not know. He appears to have been at hberty in 1634, when the third SMEDMORE 125 edition of his canting " Recantation " appeared. Opinions concerning him at that time have the look of being pretty equally divided, for we are told that " people did not know which to admire most ; his former ill ways, or his now most singular reformation." What eventually became of him, or when he died, are equally unknown, but this much is certain : that his uncle Sir William Clavel, of Smedmore, himself without children, devised the estates to a distant relative, especially to shut out his highwayman nephew, who was the son of his next brother John, from the succession. Those who read the egregious " Recantation " will feel a certain satisfaction at this stroke, for it proclaims itself in every page the whining, canting, snivelling production of a mean lick spittle, who had little or none of the spirit of the traditional highwayman about him. He styles it "A difcouerie of the High- way Law. With Vehement diffuafions to all (in that kind) Offen ders. As alfo Many cautelous Admonitions and full Inftructions, how to know, fhun, and appre hend a Theefe. Moft Neceffarie for all honeft Trauellers to per'ufe, obferue and Practife. " Written by John Clauell, Gent. " Ego non, fum ego —Quantum mutatus ab illo ? " Approued by the King's moft Excellent Maieftie, and publifhed by his expreffe Com- maund." 126 THE DORSET COAST The thing is written in verse, prefaced by rhymed appeals dedicated to an amazing number of personages : to " the King's moft excellent Maieftie " ; to " Her Never to be equall'd Maiftie, the Queene of Great Brittaine,j&c." ; to " the no leffe ennobled by Vertue, then Honourable by their Titles, and Dignities, the Ducheffes, Mar- chioneffes, Counteffes, with the reft of the moft worthy and noble Ladies of the Court of that great Queene of Mercie, her Maieftie of Great Brittaine " ; then to the Privy Council and Council of War, and to " all his Honourable and never to bee enough thanked Friends at the Court." Continuing, he inscribes himself with ingenious variations. To the Judges of the King's Bench he is " their diftreffed prifoner " ; to the Justices of the Peace " a diftreffed prifoner " ; to the " right Worfhipful, his euer dear and well-approued good Uncle, Sir William Clavell, Knight Banneret, his right sorrowful nephew " ; to all " the graue and learned serjeants and Counfellors at Law, theirs in all due obferuance," and finally to the Reader his " well wither." Then follow the heads of his discourse, divided into — " Acknowledgement and Confession. " Absolute Defiance of those that follow my late course of life, living upon the spoile. " The highway law. " How soon they spend what unlawfully they get. " Instruction for the honest traveller : What SMEDMORE 127 he is to take heed unto, before he take his journey. " How to carry himself in his inn. "The danger of travelling on the Sabbath Day. " How as he rides he shall know a thief from an honest man. " An instance how dangerous it is to grow familiar with any stranger upon the way. "When to ride. " Where to ride. " How to ride. " What is to be done if he is beset. " If by chance he be surprised, how to behave himself. " Being robbed, how to follow, which way to set forth the Hue and Cry, how to coast, and where to find the thieves," &c, &c. A great deal of this must have seemed to con temporary travellers altogether beside the mark, and as superfluous as the proverbial " teaching your grandmother to suck eggs." But here is a taste of his quality, when, after these extra vagantly long preliminaries, he does at last begin : — "... Though I oft have seen Gad's Hill and those Red tops of mountains, where good people lose Their ill-kept purses, I did never climb Parnassus Hill, or could adventure time To tread the Muse's Mazes, or their floor, Because I knew that they are lightly poor, And Shooter's Hill was fitter far for me, When pass'd releases for my own poverty." 128 THE DORSET COAST Here is how he warns the traveller come to his inn : — " Oft in your clothier's and your grazier's inn, You shall have chamberlains that there have been Plac'd purposely by thieves, or else consenting By their large bribes, and by their often tempting, That mark your purses drawn, and give a guess What's there, within a little, more or less. Then will they grip your cloak-bags, feel their weight : There's likewise in mine host sometimes deceit : If it be left in charge with him all night, Unto his roaring guests he gives a light, Who spend full thrice as much in wine and beer As you in those and all your other cheer." So much for the guest, and now a few words of advice from this expert to the landlord : — " I think it fitting now for me to show Unto the innkeeper, how that he shall know Such guests from other men. Mine host, take heed, To wink at suchlike faults were fault indeed. Respect, then, rather honesty than gain, Know well your servants whom you entertain. Try them, that you may trust, their help in this Subtle discovery most needful is. Your ostler must observe, and he shall see About their horses they will curious be. They must be strangely drest, as strangely fed, With mashes, provender, and Christians' bread. If this be wondered at, they cannot hold : Their goodly qualities they must unfold : Crying, ' they do deserve it,' and that they By their good service will their cost repay With overplus, or some words more or less, By which relation he may shrewdly guess," SMEDMORE 129 John Clavel, it will thus be seen, wholly and treacherously gave the game away, and though we have neither part nor lot with highwaymen, he does not secure our sympathy. J7 CHAPTER XV KIMMERIDGE — WORBARROW — ARISHMILL GAP He is an expert cyclist who shall descend from this hill-top grass-ride into Kimmeridge without a dismount, and he will have little opportunity of looking at the fine inland scenery of that backbone of the Isle of Purbeck, Purbeck Hill, as he descends across the ridged sheep-downs, where the flocks seem to look at his exploits with astonishment. At the foot of these downs, and at the head of the Vale of Kimmeridge, stands the tiny village of that name, to which is, or was, absurdly prefixed the epithet of " Great." A sense of the humorous incongruity of the thing has of late years led to this prefix being discontinued. The road leads directly to the little church, overshadowed by trees and neighboured by a fine old seventeenth century farmhouse, and then comes to a full stop in the farmyard. The only other road is that which leads at a right angle, down to Kimmeridge Bay, a mile distant ; and even that, after proceeding for less than a quarter of a mile and passing the twenty-odd rustic cottages which — without a village inn — form the 130 KIMMERIDGE 131 sum-total of the place, dwindles to a rough footpath. Kimmeridge Bay is a small shallow semi circular inlet fringed with cliffs of dark crumbling shale, from fifteen to twenty feet in height, its narrow beach littered and dirty with the small flaky pieces of this curious coal-like substance, and the sullen waters heaving in lazy, oily ripples, greatly discoloured by it. A cottage or two close at hand, and a coastguard station across the fields, alone disturb the solitude, which is intensified by a rusty line of rails, a few upturned rotting waggons, and a decaying wooden pier, showing that this was once a scene of industry, long ago gone to ruin. Kimmeridge, in fact, has been the scene of various commercial enterprises, away back to the period of the Roman occupation of Britain, when a substance resembling jet found here appears to have given employment to a thriving settlement of jet- turners, who manufactured all kinds of ornaments and trinkets for feminine wear, on the lathe. Before this fact was ascer tained by antiquaries the large deposits of per forated discs of shale continually found here, and called by the country folk " Kimmeridge coal-money," were very mysterious in their origin ; but they are now seen to be refuse pieces of this ancient turnery. The so-called " clay " formation which geolo gists find exhibited here most prominently, and to which they have therefore given this local 132 THE DORSET COAST name, extends with intervals from St. Aldhelm's Head to Portland, where it underlies the famous stone-beds of that isle, and thence forms the bed of the sea extending westward through West Bay, and reappearing in the cliffs of Holworth, Wyke Regis, and Charmouth. It is "clay" only in the specialised geological sense, and not as under- KIMMERIDGE BAY. stood in the popular mind, being a decomposed substance which may be popularly described as something between coal and slate with a liberal admixture of grease, known commercially as shale. It was long quarried in the cliffs off Smed- more, for fuel, for manuring land, and for the distillation of naphtha, and under the local name of " Kimmeridge coal " was often used in the KIMMERIDGE 133 neighbourhood for firing, despite the offensive smell it emits in burning. The first attempted use of Kimmeridge Bay as a port appears to have been the effort made by Sir William Clavel to export alum, in the middle of the seventeenth century. He had been a good servant of Queen Elizabeth with the army in Ireland, and had been knighted for his services there. Retiring to his ancestral seat, he em barked in commerical enterprises disastrous to himself, and, losing £20,000 in them, died, a soured and impoverished man. He had built a stone pier half-way across the bay, to protect the ships engaged in the trade, but the trade itself languished, and the last traces of his pier were battered out of existence by a great storm, in 1745. A French company in later times endeavoured to exploit the shale deposits, and shipped a great quantity to Paris, for making gas, and for the extraction of grease and lamp-oil ; but although the gas seems to have been sufficiently good, the grease sufficiently greasy, and the lighting qualities of the oil beyond question, the terrible smell was equally undeniable, and the French, exclaiming Mon Dieu, quel horreur ! abandoned the enter prise to an English concern, which in turn quickly ceased operations. Hence the tumbledown pier, the rusted rails, and the abandoned trucks that form such melan choly features of the bay, dominated by the bold eastern bluff of Hen Cliff, crowned by its picturesque belvedere tower and pavilion. 134 THE DORSET COAST But now to get out of Kimmeridge again. Steps must be retraced to the church, and thence a not very easily discernible path be found through the farmyard, and up an incredibly steep down. This is where the cyclist finds he has brought his cycle out for a walk — and wishes he hadn't. Is there no end to the ascent, he wonders, and how much longer is the steepness of the path going to increase ? In the end he is reduced to pushing that bicycle along the merest ribbon of sheep-track on the knife-edge of the tremendously lofty downs of Broad Bench, which slope sharply on the left seawards, and on the right to sombre inland valleys ; and to lifting it over the stone walls with which the farmers jealously enclose these worthless upland deserts. It is a back- aching and an arm-aching job, particularly when the path (so to dignify it) is so steep that the front part of the machine is at an angle of forty- five degrees above the hinder part. This is the time when even those least appreciative of scenery sit down to admire the view, long and often, and certainly that view is of the grandest. Kim meridge Bay, which has just been left, appears down there in the semblance of a little pool, and farmsteads, fields, flocks, and woodlands are all parcelled out as they would be seen by the direct downward glance from the car of a balloon. There are two miles of this pilgrimage up in the clouds above the world, with the weird scenery of the western coast full in view ; Gad Cliff prominent, head and shoulders taller than WORBARROW 135 its fellows, rising to five hundred feet, and with an overhanging crest that looks to be every moment in danger of falling. A scrambling descent from these high places to the low levels near Tyneham leads to a pleasant little road descending a gorge which presently ends in the little neck of land connecting Wor- barrow Tout — or Worbarrow Knob, as it is some times named — with the horn of land forming the ¦#/f o WAKEHAM, AND THE GATES OF PENNSYLVANIA CASTLE. CHURCH HOPE COVE 235 skip the rocks with the agility and surefootedness of goats. Amidst all this tumbled wreckage there is a grassy platform of undercliff, a green oasis amid the white and grey looking out upon the blue water of the Channel and the series of white cliffs away to St. Aldhelm's Head, between which and this point runs the dangerous current known to THE HOME OF " AVICE,'' IN THE " PURSUIT OF THE WELL-BELOVED." and dreaded by mariners as the Race. The white foam of the disturbed waters is distinctly seen from this point, with ships made by distance to appear as though sailing close by it. Pennsylvania Castle is a castle only in name, being only a castellated residence built for John Penn, the Governor of Portland in 1800, and named by him after his celebrated grandfather, the founder 236 THE DORSET COAST of Pennsylvania. Here he planted the only trees that redeem the Isle from the old and well-merited reproach of being treeless, and his sycamores and other trees now form a very respectable piece of woodland. Beneath the towers and hill-top woodlands of Pennsylvania Castle, in midst of a scene of pic- THE COAST OF PORTLAND. turesque desolation caused by the sliding down of the cliffs upon the butter-slide of the underlying Kimmeridge clay, stand the ruins of Portland Church, whose presence here gives the allusive name to Church Hope Cove. The landslide seems to have happened towards the close of the seven teenth century, and since then there has been no attempt to repair the injury. The building then CHURCH HOPE COVE 237 destroyed was dedicated to St. Andrew, in 1475, and had the unusual feature of a detached tower. An earlier church had been burnt by the French or others in 1328. Among the few memorials that have escaped the destruction that befell the church and churchyard and the subsequent ravages of the weather is the curious epitaph on Abel Flew, October 25th, 1676. He appears to have been one of the workers in the old traditional trade of Portland Isle : — " In life I wroath in stone ; Now life is gone, I know I shal be raised By a stone and B Shuch a stone as giveth Living Breath and Saveth The Righteous from the Second death." There is some fine confused reading in this that leads the reader to re-read it, in the hope of under standing what it means, when it becomes more perplexing than ever : the one certainty about it being that Abel Flew had a very high opinion of himself, or those who wrote the epitaph of him. The coast-line on to Portland Bill passes by Southwell landslip to Southwell, one of the many abject little places that go to make up the Isle's population of eleven thousand. Here is the little church, dedicated to St. Andrew, in succession to the ruined church of the same name at Church Hope, built and opened in 1879, in memory of those who perished in the Avalanche disaster of 238 THE DORSET COAST 1872. It is a sad and tearful spot. Under the west window is the long list of the drowned. The subject of the stained glass is an illustration of the text : "He rose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still ; and there was a great calm." The features of the coast around are Freshwater THE RACE. Bay and Cave's, or Keeve's, Hole. Cave's Hole is a remarkable place, and a startling, for it is nothing less than a yawning chasm (chasms, by an un avoidable convention, always yawn, like a drowsy congregation under a prosy preacher), which opens in the path, and discloses to the now somewhat alarmed stranger on the cliff route something of which he has not until now been aware : that the HP -¦ PENNSYLVANIA CASTLE AND THE RUINS OF PORTLAND CHURCH. PORTLAND BILL 241 cliffs at this point are pretty generally undermined by the sea into a series of caves that may at any time open after this manner. The sea is visible down below, darkly washing and splashing about, and in rough weather may be heard bellowing and thundering in it, as though Neptune had stabled some of his sea-monsters down there. The place is big enough to accommodate a small ship, as was proved, in involuntary fashion, when a vessel of about fifty tons was washed in, about 1740. Those who are amateurs of thrilful things may readily enough indulge their humour, and gain an experience, by exploring the interior of Cave's Hole by boat from the lower lighthouse, in suffi ciently calm weather. Portland Bill, or Beale, is not so rugged as Church Hope, and the cliffs nowhere rise little more than thirty feet above the sea, generally descending to its level by easy ledges called by the Portlanders " weirs." The quarries, too, that are in working, give the spot a commercial, rather than a romantic, air. Indeed, if you figure to yourself the wave-washed, stone-strewn site of a number of recently demolished buildings — the whole with a background of bare fields — you have a picture of Portland Bill. In midst of scenery so little inspiring are placed the two lighthouses — upper and lower — which were rebuilt in 1869. Four miles offshore from the Bill are those shambles that slaughtered many a good ship in times before the lightship was stationed there. " Shambles " is an appropriate and dramatic name 3i 242 THE DORSET COAST for shoals that have proved so fatal, but the older name seems to have been the " Shingles." There it was that the ill-fated East Indiaman, Earl of Abergavenny , struck, in March 1805, with the loss of three hundred persons. Fishermen long continued to declare that the ribs of the vessel could be distinguished down in the water, and still speak of the spot as " the Abbey." Amid the cranes and quarry-rubbish, and the stone ledges that are for all the world like portions of paved streets, stands the Pulpit Rock, a pillar rising from the sea, and connected with the shore only by a huge flat mass of rock that has been tilted against it. Away from the unrelieved glare of the quarries, round by Mutton Cove and Black Nore, the barren scenery that is so stark in the mass has beauties of its own in detail, for in the crannies where the rocks have not been disturbed grow innumerable wild flowers, among them the lovely pheasant's eye, sea-pink, and sea-lavender. This western side of Portland to which we have now come has little else than quarries new and quarries old, quarries working and others deserted, to show. From some of these near Chesil came the stone that was used in the building of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and thus first introduced this product of Portland to London. Hence, too, came some of the stone for the re building of St. Paul's Cathedral ; but those beds have long been deserted. By way of their solitudes we complete the circuit of the Isle. CHAPTER XXIII ABBOTSBURY Those for whom the long pebble ridge from Portland to Abbotsbury has no attractions must needs — as the cyclist must, in any case — return to Wyke, and thence make by inland roads past West Chickerell and Langton Herring, both fisher villages, although the waters of the Fleet and the intervening fields and beach place them a mile and a quarter inland. Not a sight of the sea is to be obtained from Chickerell street, but its neighbourhood might readily be deduced from the very maritime neighbouring inn signs of the " Three Mariners," and the " Lugger," whose name spells romance of the old Surrey melodrama sort, in which the exultant speech of the villain, " Once aboard the lugger, the gyurl is mine ! " never failed to bring down the execrations, and sometimes the half-bricks, of the gallery. The traveller is advised of his approach to Abbotsbury by the appearance ahead of him of the chapel-crowned isolated hill of St. Catherine, with Linton Hill and the great shoulders of Black- down further inland, on the right. The village of Abbotsbury is at the terminus of a short line of 243 244 THE DORSET COAST railway from Weymouth, and is probably as large as it is possible for a village to grow before it is more justly to be styled a small town. It consists chiefly of one exceedingly long street of stone houses, most of them of the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries, some tiled, others thatched, many built of stone plundered from that great Abbey which has thus almost utterly disappeared in being made the quarry whence this village was largely built. As the stranger proceeds along this street he notices carved heads and other architec tural fragments that must needs have come from the Abbey, built into the walls. The sign of the " Ilchester Arms " indicates that the owner of the property here is the Earl of Ilchester, in whose family it has been ever since the abbey and the abbey lands were granted to Sir Giles Strang- ways, in the time of Henry the Eighth. It is past the parish church, on the way down to the famous Swannery and the sea, that the traces of the Abbey are to be found, principally consisting of an arch once forming part of the great gateway, and a farmhouse, oddly preserving fragments of a Gothic age embedded amid much of the less distinguished later centuries. Beyond this and two or three quaint cottages is the great Gothic tithe-barn, itself seeming to the approaching stranger like some venerable ecclesi astical building. This is the sum-total of the remains of that famous Benedictine Abbey, considered to have been founded in the reign of Canute, about 1026, by one Ore and his wife ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL, ABBOTSBURY. ABBOTSBURY 247 Thola, who were of the Royal household. Fan tastic legends, however, which we may credit or not according to our individual credulity or scep ticism, tell us that this was the much more ancient foundation of a certain Bertulfus, whose pious works here were consecrated personally by no less a personage than St. Peter. History tells us very little of this ancient monastic house of Abbotsbury. It seems to have been an exceedingly snug retreat from the outer world of contentions and discontents, and even the ways of the abbots with their neighbours, which in many cases afford stirring reading, are not recorded. The hatred between the monks and the townspeople, and the hard knocks given and returned, of which we often read, had no place here, for the excellent reason that Abbotsbury village was then small, and inhabited solely by an agricultural and fisher class, wholly dependent upon the Abbey. And so the monks continued to live their recluse life, to tend their Swannery, and to till their lands, throughout the centuries, with little to disturb their calm. They built a beacon chapel on the summit of the great terraced hill that over looks the sea in this ill-omened bay, and night . by night Brother Benedict, Brother Hyperion, or others of their community served the warning light there on the tower. Their existing chapel of St. Catherine is probably a successor of an earlier building, for it is of Perpendicular date, and seems to have succeeded a smaller structure, 248 THE DORSET COAST perhaps resembling the Norman beacon chapel of St. Aldhelm, on St. Aldhelm's Head. And then, not perhaps wholly without warning, this order of things came to an end. The quiet life was a thing of the past, the beacon up there on the hill-top was extinguished for ever, and the abbatial lands and buildings, meres and swans, were given to Sir Giles Strangways, to have and to hold. Sir Giles and his successors wrought so hardly with the Abbey that, as we see, there are scarce sufficient traces to tell where it stood. What their energy was not sufficient to destroy seems to have been wrecked about a hundred years later when Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper was progressing through the county on behalf of the Parliament, laying his heavy hand upon many a Royalist garrison, and destroying any possible stronghold of the King on these coasts. At the close of September, 1644, he came to the Abbey House at Abbotsbury, garrisoned, together with the church, by Colonel Strangways, and after severe fighting took both and burned the house down. In October he thus reported to the Parlia mentary Committee for Dorsetshire : — " Honourable, ' Yesterday we advanced with your brigade to Abbotsbury, as a place of greate concerne, and which by the whole council of war was held feasible. We came thither just at night, and sent them a summons by a trumpeter, to which they returned a slighting answer and ABBOTSBURY 249 hung out their bloody flag. Immediately we drew out a party of musketeers, with which Major Bainton in person stormed the church, into which they had put thirteen men, be cause it flanked the house. This, after a hot bickering, we carried, and took all the men prisoners. After this we sent them a second summons, under our hands, that they might have fair quarter if they would accept it, otherwise they must expect none, if they forced us to a storm ! But they were so gallant that they would admit of no treaty, so that we prepared ourselves for to force it, and so fell on. The business was extreme hot for above six hours. We were forced to burn down the outgate to the Court before we could get to the house, and then our men rushed through the fire and got into the hall porch, where with furze faggots they set fire to it, and plied the windows soe hard with small shot that the enemy durst not appear in the low rooms. In the meantime one of our guns played on the other side of the house, and the gunners, with fire-balls and granadoes and with scaling-ladders, endeavoured to fire the second storey, but that not taking effect, our soldiers were forced to wrench open the windows with iron bars, and, pouring in faggots of fuze fired, set the whole house in a flaming fire, so that it was not possible to be quenched, and then they cried for quarter, but we having lost divers men before it, and 32 250 THE DORSET COAST considering how many garrisons of the same nature we were to deal with, I gave command there should be none given, but they should be kept into the house ; but Colonel and Major Sidenham, riding to the other side of the house, gave them quarter, upon which our men fell into the house to plunder, and could not be by any of their commanders drawn out, though they were told the enemy's magazine was near the fire, and if they stayed would prove their ruin, which accordingly fell out, for the powder, taking fire, blew up all that were in the house." The house was burnt down to the ground, and the Strangways family — the Fox-Strangways of the present time, Earls of Ilchester — had no house by the seashore until the first Earl built the so- styled Abbotsbury Castle, away under the hills to the west of the village, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Signs of the " hot bickering " are still visible in the church, in the bullet-holes scattered over that Jacobean pulpit which was a new feature of the church furniture at the time when this affray took place. It is a steep climb to where the chapel of St. Catherine crowns the ringed hill, and many are those who, " fat and scant of breath," are content to view it from below, in general effect, rather than make the almost hands-and-knees progress necessary to come to where it looks upon a wide ABBOTSBURY 251 panorama of sea-beach, sea, and the salty Fleet on the one side, and down into the valley and on to the village chimney-pots on the other. It is a small chapel, only forty-five feet in length, and fifteen feet in breadth, but built with a massiveness and a cunningly jointed masonry calculated to withstand the fiercest storms that ever blew. To make assurance doubly sure, the architect who designed it has almost wholly obscured the natural outline of his walls with sturdy buttresses, which descend from roof to earth in stages of such in creasing bulk and projection that the spaces be tween them are quite cavernous. In addition, the walls themselves have a four-foot thickness of solid masonry, and the roof is equally solid vault ing. It is, therefore, no wonder that the chapel, beyond its lichened surface, shows little sign of age. It used to be a custom " on a certain day of the year," as we are told — St. Catherine's Day, without doubt — for the girls of the village below to enter the chapel, and, kneeling on the stone floor, to offer up the supplication, " A husband, St. Catherine." Not content, however, with this simple demand, they must needs have spouses in whom all the best qualities were centred, and thus were wont to add — " A handsome one, St. Catherine, A rich one, St. Catherine, A nice one, St. Catherine, But one of some sort, if you please, And soon, St. Catherine." 252 THE DORSET COAST Was ever a well-disposed saint so badgered ! But let us hope those requests were generally granted. The late Mr. Beresford Hope, who ac companied an Archaeological Society's excursion to this spot, humorously suggested that all the gentlemen and married ladies present should retire and afford the young ladies an opportunity of invoking St. Catherine, but whether or not the girls took advantage of his thoughtfulness is not recorded. St. Catherine is no longer invoked, for the maids of Abbotsbury, realising that heaven — and St. Catherine — helps those who help themselves, in matrimonial as in other affairs of life, go forth and seek husbands in London, instead of blushing, like the hedge-row flowers, unnoticed in their native home. But the most famous feature of Abbotsbury is the Swannery, which is gained by passing the church, the celebrated tithe-barn of the abbots — itself church-like — and the old mill-house. Beyond this a field-gate leads across rough meadows toward the Fleet, where a door in an enclosing wall opens on certain (occasionally changed) days of the week to this wonderful haunt of swans and innumerable wild-fowl. It is rarely, however, that a shilling to a keeper who is magically near at hand on the other side of the door will not render all days alike. Abbotsbury Swannery is the largest in England, and is so chiefly by reason of the exceptionally favourable conditions prevailing here, superior ABBOTSBURY 253 even to those on the Norfolk Broads, where the climate is much more severe than along this sheltered sunny chain of narrow lakes and reedy pools, under the lee of the Chesil Beach. Here a pole bears witness, in an eloquent in scription, to the terrible storm of November 23rd, 1824, when the sea broke over the Chesil Beach, washing great portions of it away, and submerging the low-lying part of the Swannery under twenty- two feet eight inches of flood water. Within this many-acred enclosure of marshes, lakelets, rushes, and dense undergrowth of alder- bushes, is the nesting-place of a " game " of some thirteen hundred swans. Just as one speaks of a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, a drove of pigs, a school of porpoises, or a covey of partridges, so does one — or should one — speak of a " game " of swans. There are swans everywhere — swans walk ing about on dry land, swans swimming, swans flapping along the water as they rise against the wind, swans sitting on their nests, and groups of young cygnets being piloted about by their parents. In springtime — the months of April and May — the Swannery is most interesting, for then the building of the nests, the hatching of the eggs, and the rearing of the young are all in progress. The nests are built of stubble brought into the Swannery in cartloads and left in heaps for the birds to take. They plentifully stud the shallows, generally rising above a depth of six inches of water, quite exposed to even the most casual glance, and often rising to a height of three feet. 254 THE DORSET COAST The hatching out of the clutch of from five to eight eggs a nest will contain is a lengthy six weeks' business. During this period the male bird is busily put to it, foraging for food, in company with very many others of his species, and at this time their tempers are not of the best. They are quarrelsome among each other, and suspicious and threatening to all but their keepers. To strangers they have a great objection, and they have been known to attack children. It is not generally known that the swan, like a goose or a turkey, is a bird for the table, and although swans figure as items in many elaborate mediaeval feasts, they are by most people looked upon in that connection as one of the peculiarly nasty dishes in which our ancestors delighted. It is, therefore, very much of a shock to find that this most graceful of birds, whose charms have been sung by so many poets, is, even nowadays, occa sionally fattened for the table, just as the unpoetic goose is prepared over against Michaelmas, or the choleric turkey induced to eat more than is good for him, in view of the coming Yuletide feast. It is true you would ask your poulterer in vain for a swan, for swans are not known to the public in any other than their purely ornamental character ; but they figure occasionally on aristocratic tables, and are said to taste something like goose or hare. Cygnets are fattened on the best maize and barley. A fat cygnet will weigh perhaps sixteen pounds, and be worth two guineas ; a fact which goes a very long way towards explaining why ABBOTSBURY 255 swans are not competitors with geese and turkeys in the markets. An ancient rhyming recipe for cooking swans runs : — " To a gravy of beef, good and strong, I opine You'll be right if you add half a pint of port wine ; Pour this through the swan — yes, quite through the belly, Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly. " N.B. — The swan must not be skinned." Generally speaking, however, the swan at table is very much more of a curiosity than an accepted delicacy, and a swannery is a merely ornamental and unprofitable feature of an estate. Yet, despite this fact, swans are cherished as a property, and the cygnets at Abbotsbury, as elsewhere, are carefully marked, so that they are afterwards easily to be identified. But not swans alone inhabit the Abbotsbury Swannery. It is the home in winter of myriads of wild ducks, widgeon, woodcock, moorhen, teal, and coot. It is precisely at this period that it is difficult for a visitor to obtain access to this place, for the wild fowl, although so amazingly numerous, are extremely shy and easily frightened away. Decoy-pipes are provided for the capture of these myriad visitors from more rigorous climes, who come here for comparative warmth and are inveigled into the decoys, slain, and sent up to Leadenhall Market. " In vain is the net set in the sight of any bird," says the famous old Biblical saw, and so the wildfowler has recourse to his decoy, which is a long tunnel of wicker-work 256 THE DORSET COAST extending into one of these lagoons ; its wide mouth, from seven to nine feet high, out in the open water, its gradually tapering shoreward end decreasing to two feet. The net is placed inside, in such a manner that it can be drawn taut by the keeper, crouched in hiding ashore, behind his screen of wattles and rushes. The only remaining problem is that of inducing the highly suspicious wild- fowl to enter the mouth of this wicker pipe. To this end the wildfowler cunningly acts the familiar part of a Government which keeps secret- service agents and spies in its pay, ready to make common cause with secret societies, and then to betray them. He tames a select few wild ducks, by a long course of feeding them, to come to his call, and, hiding behind his screen and throwing a handful of hemp-seed into the water, whistles up his feathered accomplices, who swim at once, without hesitation, into the decoy-pipe. These are the " decoy-ducks," whose Judas-like treachery has become proverbial. The unsus pecting strangers follow and swim right up the pipe, while the " informers," quite conscious of the part they play, swim unostentatiously out again. Meanwhile the doomed innocents have become alarmed at the sound of a human being, and perhaps realising that they have been be trayed, endeavour to escape : but too late ! The net is drawn and their necks are presently wrung. Another great feature of Abbotsbury is that sheltered nook in a fold of the hills at the western end of the village, where the famous sub-tropical ABBOTSBURY 257 gardens of Abbotsbury Castle are situated. Here the aloe, euphorbia, pampas-grass, and many varieties of strange plants grow and flourish in their " lew " situation ; with a little stream flow ing in and out, and still fishponds : all very like the accompaniments^of a Japanese garden. 33 CHAPTER XXIV SWYRE — BURTON BRADSTOCK The choice now presents itself of reaching Burton Bradstock by the seashore, or by the high moor land road to which one has to climb by the heart breaking half-mile ascent of Abbotsbury Hill. The shore road is along the Chesil Beach, here grown more firm, and overgrown in patches with grass. It leads by white-walled coastguard stations, the hamlets of East, West, and Middle Bexington and the site of Swyre White House- built on the beach in the long ago by an Earl of Bedford for fisherfolk, and as a shelter for cast aways — to within little more than a mile from Burton Bradstock, where it turns inland. The moorland road has the advantages of being rideable to the cyclist, and of overlooking from its great height a vast panoramic stretch of coast-line, bounded on the east by the Isle of Portland, and on the west melting vaguely beyond the heights near Lyme Regis into the uncertain distance of Beer, in Devonshire. Once arrived at the tremendous pull up to the crest of Abbots bury Hill, the unenclosed road through the wild moorland, where the rabbits skip and scurry in 258 SWYRE 259 millions, goes undulating grandly away, and the sole obstacles to long gorgeous stretches of free wheeling are the occasional gates that span the road. The last of these, at the foot of the ex tremely steep and sharply curving descent into the tiny village of Swyre, is nothing short of criminal and murderous, and the notice-board in advance of it is itself scarce noticeable in the clump of bushes above the wayside. Many an one has dashed violently unawares into this closed gate, and been severely injured. The object of the gates is, of course, to keep the variously owned flocks of sheep that graze here apart from one another. Swyre is a remote and tiny place of a church, one inn, and half-a-dozen cottages. The men inhabitants are fishermen by night, and dreamers by day, sitting and gazing vacantly upon the vacant sea all day long, with perhaps rare intervals of planting or digging potatoes in their gardens, or with much deliberation caulking their boats. The women meanwhile are industriously occupied in making nets, as may be seen through the open cottage doors by the passing stranger. Swyre stands high above the sea, but ensconced snugly under the yet higher point of Puncknowle Knob, rising so bold and black behind it, crowned with a ruined building that serves as a landmark to sailors going up and down channel. " Punnol " the natives style it and the village of Puncknowle, scarce more than a quarter of a mile away. In 26o THE DORSET COAST the little church of Swyre may yet be seen a few plain slips of monumental brasses to the memory of the Russell family, who resided here and at Kingston Russell, four miles inland, many cen turies before, and some little while after, their romantic rise to fame and fortune in 1502, through the courtly bearing of the then obscure young country squire, John Russell, who was kinsman to Sir Thomas Trenchard, of Wolveton, near Dorchester. The landing in that year of the Archduke of Austria, " Philip the Handsome," with his wife, at Weymouth, into whose bay their ships had been driven by stress of weather, has already been mentioned in these pages. Those distinguished visitors could speak Spanish, but not English, and Sir Thomas Trenchard, the nearest great man to Weymouth, who received them, had no Spanish ; and so the party at Wolve ton seemed like to become an absurd piece of pantomime, when old Sir Thomas bethought him of his relative, John Russell, who had travelled in Spain and had acquired the language. John Russell therefore repaired to Wolveton, and made himself not only an efficient interpreter, but so agreeable and courtly a gentleman, that when those distinguished foreigners left, to pay their respects in London to Henry the Seventh, he accompanied them, and was received at court as a " right goodlei gentleman, of greate parts, one fit to stand before princes, and not before meaner men." John Russell had such a " way with him " SWYRE 261 that he rose to high offices of State, was the negotiator of treaties and royal marriages, and under Henry the Eighth became one of the most fortunate among the grantees of church lands. Elevated to the peerage by successive steps, he was at last created Earl of Bedford, and thus, as the founder of his family, he died in 1545, the progenitor of the present Dukes of Bedford, SWYRE, AND PUNCKNOWLE KNOB. who inherit their vast wealth in landed property directly from him. The land here and in Kingston Russell, whence his race sprang, is still in the possession of the family, as may be seen from the ducally coroneted " B " prominent on the cottages and farmsteads. Swyre, too, we should by no means forget, was the incumbency of Hutchins, author of the monumental " History of Dorsetshire." In another two miles and a half of ups and 262 THE DORSET COAST downs the road bends to the right, round a sharp elbow of down, and descends rapidly to a consider able village seen nestling below, in a green and sheltered valley. It is the village of Burton Brad stock. To the north of it rise the yellow-green heights, clothed with short grass, characteristic of chalky downs ; north-easterly are the hills of Hammerdon and Shipton Beacon, whose striking summit, remarkably like a gigantic boat turned keel uppermost, claims instant attention, and is not easily forgotten. Up there, on the landward side of it, goes the old coach-road to Exeter, in one of the bleakest and windiest situations that in winter ever froze the marrow of unhappy travellers. Burton Bradstock owes the first part of its double-barrelled name to the river Bride, Brit or Bredy, which, flowing out of a lake in the grounds of Bridehead House, up in those heights, not only gives a name to that estate, but acts as sponsor to other places in the course of its short journey of eight miles from source to sea. Little Bredy and Long Bredy are its godchildren, and, last of all, Burton Bradstock itself : the " Bride Town of the Broad Stockade " of prehistoric times, as one school of antiquaries will have it. The village they considered to have been at a remote period a post on the river-bank, fortified against some enemy of whom we know absolutely nothing, by the earliest form of defence — a fence or stockade of timber. There are certainly two indications, and these two significant, of bygone BURTON BRADSTOCK 263 racial wars, in the names of immediately surround ing places. The little village of Walditch, inland, between this and Bridport town, shares this distinction with the hamlet of Walton, near Allington. While Walton indicates a Welsh town ship — the name of Walditch means Wales, or Welsh, Dyke, and seems to point to a time when Saxons and Welsh faced one another behind their primitive entrenchments and fortified camps, in the long-drawn wars of conquest and extermination that gradually swept the British — the Wealhas, or Strangers, as the Saxons impudently styled them : hence the name of Welsh for the people who do not style themselves Welshmen, but Cymru — into that corner of England we now know as Wales. But although those philological traces of ancient strife would appear at first sight to fully bear out the origin claimed for the title of Burton " Brad stock," such theories are quite upset by the fact that the manor once belonged to Bradenstoke Priory, in Wiltshire : an ownership that conferred the second half of the name. The clock in the tower of Burton Bradstock Church is not remarkable in appearance, but its history is rather curious, for it is that of Christ's Hospital — Bluecoat School — brought down from London on the demolition of those buildings, and re-erected here in memory of Queen Victoria. The river Bredy at Burton Bradstock is a very tame and ineffectual watercourse, flowing slug gishly in several diverging channels half choked 264 THE DORSET COAST with rushes, and lazily uniting again. But if it is so slow and divided a stream, it does at least, in these vagaries, demand very considerable lengths of bridge and causeway, which seem to the visitor in the dry months of haymaking and harvest more than a thought too substantial for necessity. But 'tis another tale in winter, and the Bredy is in more ways than one a peculiar stream. Its sluggishness is largely caused by the impediments of uplands and earthy cliffs which deny it a free outflow to the sea, and have caused the village to be placed nearly a mile in shore. The river has, in fact, no visible outflow, but sinks into the earth and percolates through it again, not on the muddy beach at Burton Cliff, but into the sea at a considerable distance from the shore, rising through the salt water in the form of cold freshwater springs, to the great dis comfort and even danger of bathers unacquainted with this local peculiarity. Autumn and winter, with their excess of rains, greatly raise the level of this imprisoned stream, and thus necessitate the strength and length of the heavy works that bridge it and conduct the traveller into the village. Burton Cliff, a mass of impure fuller's earth, was lonely until quite recently, but two red-brick villas, as red as geraniums, now look down from the bluff upon the sea and the mud which the Bredy, sometimes bursting through, brings down to the shore and has not sufficient strength to scour away. The Dorset coast has found much appreciation BURTON BRADSTOCK 265 in these latter years, so that the holiday-maker, flitting irresponsibly and light-heartedly day by day from one place to another, is no longer so sure as once he might reasonably have been of finding accommodation by day or a lodging for the night, even in the most out-of-the-way hamlets, far from railways and remote from the track of the ordinary tourist. Every cottager is familiar with applica tions for rooms and is as well versed in visitors' requirements as the professional letters of lodgings in the towns. Burton Bradstock was, within the recollection of the present writer, a place but dimly known, if at all, to the holiday-maker, but to-day a complete change has come over its August spirit. Not only the inn that styles itself " hotel " is full, but every cottage as well ; and it is only out of her native kindness of heart, I verily believe, that the good woman who keeps the general shop finds me and mine a cup of tea, lest we faint by the wayside into Bridport, for she has a houseful of visitors and — O ye rusticities ! — is preparing late dinner for them. I remember well that walk into Bridport after that cup of tea. It was after sunset, along the darkening roads, the scenery changing from green to grey-green, and then to a velvety blackness of roads and fields and rounded hills, until at last, in a notch of the cliffs, cleft as though by an axe, the full-orbed moon smote through like molten silver, across the sea, sending a path of light, diversified by a myriad ripples, across the channel. It was a magnificent moment. There rose the 34 266 THE DORSET COAST cliffs, intensified by that glorious radiance to a supreme blackness that no palette could success fully imitate ; while a little way to the right the single red eye of a railway signal rose out of the obscurity behind the cliffs of West Bay, like a tragic touch out of the vague night of early history. Bridport town, with its gas-lamps, more than a mile ahead, could not help, after such magnificence of mise en scene, but be an anti climax. CHAPTER XXV BRIDPORT TOWN It must not be thought that this mention of the lighted gas-lamps of Bridport town in any way indicates an illumination. There is that same essential difference between the lights of Bridport and the lights o' London as you will notice between sunshine and the glimmering points of light in the starry firmament ; the Bridport lamps are specks of brightness disclosing the darkness of the streets, rather than illuminating agents. There is, Heaven only knows, little enough truly ancient in the way of stick or stone in Bridport town ; but, for all that, it is a town sufficiently lovable. I suppose there must be poor as well as rich and moderately well-to-do folks in Bridport, but their poverty has no obtru sive edge, their wealth is not so blatant, and their well-to-doness is not so smug as elsewhere, and does not insist upon your admiration. It is a clean, neat, sweet-smelling town, where I should not be surprised to learn that all the Christian virtues abide, and where, certainly, the inhabitants one and all have the whimsical air of mildly interested spectators in the drama of life, in which 267 268 THE DORSET COAST they have no parts, but look on approvingly, or critically it may sometimes be, from their several seats. There is, I can scarce help fancying it, an unmistakable air of benevolence even in the tradesmen, who absurdly seem to keep their shops open from altruistic principles, for the convenience of purchasers, rather than from any base designs of making profit. The town owes its modern aspect to the various rebuildings under the provisions of the Act of Parliament of 1784, for taking down the old market-house and re-building it as a market-house below and a Sessions, or Court House above, "in a more convenient situation" than it had occupied before. The same Act made provisions for " the better lighting and cleansing and watching the said borough, and for removing and preventing nuisances and annoy ances, and prohibiting the covering of any new houses or buildings with thatch." That last provision owed its inclusion to the most terrible of the many fires that had destroyed Blandford, fifty-three years earlier, and to the continually recurring outbreaks that had laid low many a thatched village in the neighbourhood. The market-house then rebuilt, and removed from the centre of the road to the side of it, is the one we see to-day, a plain and heavy building of red brick and Portland stone, its clock turret, with the cupola above it, the one feature of the long vista of the broad East and West streets. It bears on its front a representation of the BRIDPORT TOWN 269 Bridport coat-of-arms : a castle standing on the waves, with three objects, at a distance slightly resembling Prince of Wales's feathers, erect in the gateway. These, however, are really intended for three spinning cogs, or hooks, and have a place on Bridport's shield in allusion to the very ancient trade of the town which so early as the times of Henry the Second and King John, supplied the British navy with sails and cordage manufactured here. A long obsolete Act of Parliament even ordained that " ropes for the Navie of England " should be " twisted and made noe where else." This time-honoured trade consisted of " sains and nets of all sorts, lines, twines, and small cordage, and sail-cloth." Great quantities were exported during the eighteenth century, its period of greatest prosperity, to America and the West Indies, but its largest customers were at that time those engaged in the home and Newfound land fisheries. One thousand five hundred tons of hemp and flax were then worked up annually, giving employment to nearly ten thousand hands of both sexes, in the town and the neighbouring villages. Nowadays the number of rope-walks and of those engaged in net-making is much smaller. It is the old tale of trade, with the introduction of machinery, gravitating to the already great manufacturing centres. But fishing-nets, twines and lines are still the staple of the place, and Bridport prays that lawn-tennis may never go 270 THE DORSET COAST out of fashion, for it is the chief seat of the production of hand-made tennis nets. Bridport ropes, in the old days of plentiful hangings, hoisted many a sinner into eternity, and the local cultiva tion of hemp had then, to some minds, rather a sinister look. It is told of a stranger travelling down the road that, seeing a farmer, as he sup posed, sowing corn, he looked over the hedge, and with an affected town manner said, in a patronising way, " Ah ! old fellow, you sow and we reap the fruits of your industry." " Very like," rejoined the rustic, dryly, " I be a-zowing hemp." They do not sow hemp nowadays at, or any where near, Bridport, but import it chiefly from Riga, in Russia. A romantic incident in the history of Bridport is formed by the wanderings of Charles the Second after the battle of Worcester, when he, as a hunted refugee with a price on his head, was seeking to gain one of the ports, to escape across channel to the coast of France. He had been recognised, and forced to hurry away, at Charmouth, and came with his companions into Bridport. Here they are said to have called at the " George," on whose site there stands to-day, opposite the market-house, a picturesque old chemist's shop, itself established so long since as 1788, and bearing an inscription recording the traditionary event. The fugitives then made off, up along the road to Dorchester, turning, a mile out of Bridport, to the left hand, down a narrow thoroughfare leading BRIDPORT TOWN 271 to Bradpole, known as Lee Lane, at whose junc tion with the highway, under an old storm-bent THE MONUMENT, LEE LANE. hedgerow oak, the following inscription has been placed on a monument set up in 1901 : — KING CHARLES II escaped capture through this lane Sep' xxiii, mdcli When in the midst of fiercest foes on every side For your escape God did a lane provide. (Thomas Fuller's Worthies) Erected Sepr xxiii, mdcccci. A. M.B. The King's wanderings took him on to Broad- windsor and Salisbury, and eventually to Bright- helmstone, whence he took boat and safely escaped to Fecamp, on the French coast, near Dieppe. Another chapter in the tragedy of the Stuarts interrupted for a little while the calm current of 272 THE DORSET COAST Bridport's existence. This was the landing at Lyme Regis of the unfortunate Duke of Mon mouth, in rebellion against James the Second, in 1685. There was a skirmish at Bridport, and in it, or in some more personal attack, fell a Dorsetshire gentleman, one Edward Coker. A little mural monument to him is to be seen in Bridport parish church, presided over by a grotesque weeping cherub. The epitaph runs : — " In Memory of Edward Coker Gent., Second Son of Capt. Robert Coker of Mapowder Slayne at the Bull Inn in Bridpur1 Ivne the 14th An. Do. 1685 by one Venner who was a Officer vnder the late Dvke of Mvnmvt' in that Rebellion." After the church, which has been highly renovated and over-restored, the oldest and " arnshuntest " thing (as a Dorsetshire rustic might say), is the old " Castle " inn, long since retired from that business, and now a Conservative Working Men's Club. Beside the church, it is probably the only Gothic building in the town. But that is by no means its only interest, for it figures in the stirring annals of the highwaymen as the hostelry at whose door, by the treachery of the landlord, the varied career of Thomas Boulter wras at last brought to an end, in 1778. Mr. Thomas Boulter was one of the most pro minent highwaymen of his age. He was a native BRIDPORT TOWN 273 of Poulshot, near Devizes and on the verge of Salisbury Plain, on whose long wastes he first learned the dangerous art of highway robbery. Sometimes he worked by himself, at others in company with other road agents, and several times succeeded in making a wide circuit around his native heath too hot to hold him. At such times he would go touring on business in the Midlands, and carry on operations there until the local hue and cry raised in his native county of Wiltshire had sufficiently quieted down. At York, in 1777, he came very near ending on the gallows, but escaped that inevitable fate for awhile by accepting the alternative offered him, and criminals in general, of enlisting in the Army ; which shows us, if we did not already know it, that the Army at that time was not a school of manners or of morals. But a military life was little to Boulter's liking, and after three days of it he deserted. He then did a very rash thing indeed : proceeded, that is to say, at once to his native Poulshot and began again in Wiltshire the old game of highway robbery. In alliance with one Caldwell, a fellow spirit, he continued with varying success, here and in the Midlands again, until he and his partner were arrested and thrown into prison at Birming ham for trying to sell stolen jewellery. Transferred thence to Clerkenwell, for trial, Boulter once more broke loose and made his way to the West, with the idea of escaping oversea until the hot chase that was now raised at his heels had again died 35 274 THE DORSET COAST down. Unfortunately for him, we were then at war with France, and a strict surveillance was kept over all vessels. He could not obtain even a small boat, either at Portsmouth or at Bristol, and then doubled back with a hope of being able to put off from the lone Isle of Portland. He reached as cv^ THE OLD ''CASTLE INN. far as Bridport in safety, and was beginning to see a happy issue of his adventures in sight when he halted at the " Castle " inn for dinner. His horse was stabled, and he entered and sat down at the family ordinary, just ready. Beside the landlord and himself there were three gentlemen at table, BRIDPORT TOWN 275 one of whom regarded Boulter with interest and such suspicious looks that, had he dared, he would have risen and left forthwith. Presently the suspicious guest himself rose, and, beckoning the landlord out of the room, told him of his belief that the horseman was none other than Boulter, the escaped prisoner, for whose apprehension heavy rewards were being offered. It was the landlord's duty and interest alike, he said, to see that he was arrested. The innkeeper, after a while, returning to the dining-room, bade Boulter accompany him into a parlour, where he told him of the guest's suspicions and added, " As you have never done me any injury, I wish you no harm ; so just be pleased to pay your reckoning and make off as soon as you can." Boulter protested that he was no highwayman, but " a London rider " ; which, in the language of that period, meant what we should call " a com mercial traveller." " But," said he, " I have no wish to cause a disturbance in your house, and so I will go." His horse was brought round and he had just leapt into the saddle, when out rushed the false landlord and his guests, and seized him. They handed him over to the proper authorities, and before night he was lodged in Dorchester Gaol. Brought to trial at Winchester and found guilty, he was hanged, in company with Caldwell, August 19th, 1778. CHAPTER XXVI WEST BAY Bridport derives its name from the little river Brit, which trickles slowly down a wide and exceedingly fertile valley between the town and the sea, close upon a mile and a half away, and eventually finds an outlet, through sluices and lock-gates, into Bridport Harbour, more generally known as West Bay. It is a pleasant suburban road that leads from the town to this harbour and little holiday resort. The little single-track branch of the Great Western Railway, which branches off languidly at Maiden Newton and comes down to Bridport by way of Toller and Poorstock, continues to the harbour and presently obscurely expires, as it were, amid sheds and outhouses. But to the good burgesses of Bridport and their kin, wishful of a breath of sea-air, it is nothing but an easy walk and an easier bicycle ride from their pavements to the beach. It is true that on the way they pass the Bridport Gas Company's works, where the Company gives all and sundry a liberal taste of its quality, but that is an interlude which possibly makes the sea air more justly appreciated. If, however, gas 276 WEST BAY 277 should be accounted good in proportion to the strength of its scent, the Bridport Gas Company's product should be of the very best illuminating power. Close by is the " Fives Court " inn, whose sign draws attention to what probably very few would ever notice, the old fives court wall which, dated 1847, and surmounted by two decorative urns, forms the north wall of the inn. By daylight West Bay is not that place of ineffable tender romance or tragic interest that, by the witching light of the moon, it seems to be. No place ever keeps in daytime the dramatic intensity acquired under the moonbeams, and one, being an amateur of first impressions, should have the mingled courage and wisdom of renunciation, and refuse under any other circumstances to know a place first beheld under such conditions. The place may be very well ; may even be surpassing lovely, but the shame less penetrating sunshine leaves not a scrap of mystery anywhere, and imagination is atro phied : the poetic dream is dispelled and its place taken by the actualities of the guide-book. The little harbour of West Bay is the smallest of harbours, and the most difficult for ships to enter. Its name creates a mind's picture of some sheltered natural basin, tucked in snugly from the rages of the open sea behind sheltering head lands and promontories ; but it is not in the least like that. The " West Bay " to which allu sion is made in that place-name is no mere little 278 THE DORSET COAST quiet pool where " the stately ships come home, to their haven under the hill," but is that immense arc of a circle, some thirty-six or forty miles across, which stretches westward from Portland Bill to Devonshire, and is known to chartographers as Lyme Bay : or to sailors more melodramatically as Deadman's Bay. It is naturally exposed to all the fierce surges from the West and has no sheltering features of inlets or subsidiary headlands to help any vessel in distress ; but, as the map eloquently shows, presents a singularly monoton ous edge for over twenty miles, without a single cranny wherein to take refuge ; and for the rest the merest rudimentary and practically useless headlands, or river mouths. West Bay or Brid port Harbour is situated midway of this arc, and is just a narrow gullet only with constant care and at great expense kept open for the passage of ships through a cleft in the Chesil Beach. Says an old chronicler, " What time Bridport began to be an Harbour of anie note surelie I could never have any notice." Early, therefore, striving and hopeful people endeavoured to convert the in significant mouth of the feeble little river Brit to some practical use for sailormen. " In some sort," continues our ancient author, " it requireth Art and Man's help to accomplish the same." Not a doubt of it, and so much art and labour it has ever been, not by any means to enlarge it, but to keep it in being at all, that its story is a long record of appeals for help to repair the damage wrought by storms and to remove the choking accumula- WEST BAY 279 tions of gravel, washing irresistibly along out of the West towards Portland, and flinging up un wanted deposits on the way. There were many ways open in the Middle Ages of compounding for sins. You might gain absolution for a great deal by giving to the Church, whose mouth was as capacious as that of a hippopotamus, and as incapable of being filled ; or might win indulgences by contributing, under the patronage of religion, to such greatly needed works of practical piety as roads, cause ways, bridges, and harbours. Thus we find a record surviving of an indulgence granted in 1444 by the Bishop of Salisbury for "gifts to wards the building and reparation of Brydeport Haven," and forty days' peccadilloes were blotted out by the same hands in 1446, for similar bene factions. In that same year the Bishop of Bath and Wells granted several indulgences for those who would help this " great work of piety and service pleasing to God." These gifts were supple mentary to already existing dues, for, about 1380, we learn that, in consideration of his keeping the harbour in repair, a certain John Huddersfield was granted a halfpenny on every horseload of goods exported or imported here. In more material days, when the old spiritual concessions were out of date and no longer possible to be the subject of belief, the money necessary was occasionally raised by briefs, when free-will offerings were made for this and other purposes on behalf of Bridport and other places by the congre- 280 THE DORSET COAST gations of churches throughout the country. The way in which distant towns and villages in this manner contributed towards alleviating the mis fortunes of other places is very striking : the more so because those offerings were made from sheer kindliness, and not from hope of securing the doubtful spiritual benefits once purchased in this fashion. In later times the even more matter-of-fact agency of Acts of Parliament and harbour dues was employed to maintain the harbour as a going concern. That it remains in existence at all may well be a matter of surprise to those who walk its wooden piers in summer time, and of sheer astonishment in winter, for here the sea is never still. Figure to yourself two sturdy timber arms, packed inside with heavy stones, projecting at right angles from an open, unsheltered shingle beach, on which a heavy surf is continually break ing from the open channel ; and between them a deep water passage wide enough for only one vessel at a time to be carefully warped through, into the still little basin beyond. That is the entrance to the haven of West Bay ; and if captain or pilot in heavy weather fouls those pierheads, which require such nice handling to enter, his ship is almost certainly lost. A truck and crane in stalled here as a permanent feature on the stone- flagged quay are evidence sufficient that repairs are always in progress. It is not often that a large vessel enters, but when it does, the entry is a sight by no means to 36 WEST BAY 283 be missed. With the heavy swell that always sets in here, it is a matter of considerable judgment and finesse that neither ship nor the timber sides of the piers receives a hurt, and the hurrying with fenders, both aboard ship and on the piers, to receive and lighten the shock if she should yaw to one side or the other, and the shouting from ship to shore and back again are sufficient to bring the whole population of West Bay (which to be sure is not a very large one) on the spot. The captain or mate is to the fore, shouting, " Here, you there, reeve a hawser round that there bollard," or, " Another fender on her stabbud bow," and many another technical command that no mere landsman can comprehend ; and it is, in one way and another, a time of breathless excite ment until the harbour basin is won. But the visitor will lie a-basking in the sun many days on the piers, and yet, unless exception ally lucky, he will not witness such a scene, for Bridport's goings to sea and comings back are more of the yachting and boating kind, and those lighter pleasure-craft do not afford the excitement and bustle that always attend the entrance of the barques, brigantines and schooners of commerce. It is to be observed that of late a something in the likeness of an esplanade, with shelters and a bandstand, has been erected on the west side of the beach : attempts are being made to bring West Bay into line with the average holiday resort. I wish those who placed them there no particular ill, but could witness their being swept 284 THE DORSET COAST away by a storm without any severe pangs. Those to whom the sweet simplicity and retirement of West Bay are precisely its charms can do very well, and would do very gladly, without such varieties and " amusements," and those who really like such things will seek them in larger places, where they are, and must needs be, better done. Bating those unwelcome additions, and the great ugly block of buildings, really lodging-houses, but looking like a converted workhouse, factory, or model dwelling that has lost its way out of the East End of London and come here by mistake, West Bay is delightful. You can fry yourself all day in the sun on the beach or on the more airy pier-heads, and have it very much to yourself. With an interesting book — which must by no means be so exciting or so dull (for they can reach both extremes) as a novel, but ought to be a volume of mildly interesting biography or re miniscence — you can, with the golden-hued cliffs and the dark blue seas for sole company, be very happy. But save me frorn a wild nor'-easter at West Bay, where the unrestrained wind is severe enough to cut your liver into collops. CHAPTER XXVII WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH Instead of returning to Bridport, the pedestrian, who has not perforce to consider the surfaces and gradients that are marked considerations with the cyclist, may make his way across the golf links to Eype, two miles distant. Eype is a very primitive village off the beaten track, and as pretty as primitive, with many thatched cottages of rough stone walling, generally perched high above a hollow road and entered up long flights of stone stairs. From this point a lane leads steeply down to the quiet and secluded gully known as Eype's Mouth, where the sea splashes in upon a lonely beach commanding fine views of the near headland of Thorncombe Beacon, five hundred and nine feet high, and its more distant and loftier neighbour, Golden Cap, the highest cliff beacon of the south coast, rising to a grand peak six hundred and fifteen feet above sea level. There is good fishing for prawns in the pools among the Hope Rocks at the foot of Thorncombe Beacon at low tide. The next break in the cliffs is a mile onward, at Seatown, generally reached by the old Exeter road from Bridport town, through Chideock. 285 286 THE DORSET COAST Those who go this way, which is the only practic able cycling route, may see if they will, by turning off to the left at the Allington suburb of Bridport, the farmhouse of Vearse, (or Vere's Wootton as it was originally named), where lived at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion that likable young squire, Christopher Battiscombe, who was brought to trial at Dorchester and executed at Lyme Regis for taking part in that ill-fated rising, " for Faith and Freedom." The girls of the neighbourhood, who loved the debonair young Christopher well, interceded for him with the sanguinary Judge Jeffreys, but he repulsed them with coarse humour, and the young man went to his fate, pitied by all. But he kept a brave heart, poor soul, as they brought him for the last time down the well-worn old highway from Dorchester to Lyme, and when he caught, in passing, a glimpse of his fair home, he waved a farewell with a cheerfulness and com posure that made those who saw him weep ; he felt convinced, he said, that he was on the way to a fairer one. At the charming rustic village of Chideock (whose name is pronounced " Chiddick "), the way down to Seatown is on the left hand. Town it is not, nor even village : only a little coastguard station, half-a-dozen cottages, and the " Anchor " inn, standing grouped together where a little stream loses itself in the shingle, at a gap in the cliffs. Here Golden Cap shows prominently, re markable, beside its height, for its peculiar shape, which resembles a volcano with the peak shorn EYPE'S MOUTH, AND GOLDEN CAP. WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH 289 off, leaving a flat or table-top. It is, I suppose, what the scientific would love to style, in their jargon, a " truncated cone." The varied colour of this cliff is another striking feature, the grey- white of its base of inferior oolite surmounted by the blue-blackness of the blue lias stratum, and this finally crowned by the yellow sandy marl which under certain conditions of sunlight glows so guinea-gold that from it has arisen the name of Golden Cap. Lanes of an extroardinary narrowness, and a steepness of ascent and descent which, together with sharp curves, make the cyclist's way hazard ous, lead to the coombe in which the few farms that form the parish of Stanton St. Gabriel lie hid until you pass almost under their windows. The lanes are, indeed, worn so rutted and deep below the surface of the soil, and the hedges are so tall and untrimmed, that the surrounding country is rarely to be seen, save at the breaks in the hedges where field gates open. The church of Stanton St. Gabriel has long been a ruin, and has given place to the chapel-of- ease built " oop yarn " — which means " up yon der " — at Moreeomblake, the once mere hamlet of this parish, which lines the old coach-road to Exeter, and, so situated, not wholly away from the world, grew and flourished with the prosperity of coaching days, while the original village down below, near the sea, decayed. Legends that may be true or may not, but probably are not, account for the lonely, retired situation of Stanton St. 37 290 THE DORSET COAST Gabriel church, by declaring that it was first built from the offerings of sailors washed safely ashore when they had thought to have perished. The direct way westward, along the coast to wards Charmouth, is barred by the precipitous green sides of Stonebarrow Hill, and the lanes all trend inland, towards Moreeomblake, referred to by the poet Gay, in his "Journey to Exeter" on horseback in 1715 : — "Through Bridport's stony lanes our way we take, And the proud steep descend to Morcomb's lake." Moreeomblake, situated under the great hills called by the unlovely name of " Gollops," and between Hardown and Chardown, resembles a little settlement in the mountains. The old Exeter Road, leaving this village for Charmouth, went winding up the flanks of Stonebarrow Hill, and so continued until about 1820, when the present fine straight route down hill was cut. The old horsemen and that early coach, the " Exeter Fly," all went painfully over the hill, through the rugged lanes, and here still stands the old house that was once an inn, where that " Fly " coach slept and where the judges, progressing horseback, on assize, lodged. We are now come to the brink of the hills looking down upon the Vale of Marshwood, through which flows, or crawls, the little river Char, to its feeble outlet amid the pebbles of Charmouth beach. The capital of this vale of stodgy clay is Whitechurch Canonicorum, one WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH 291 mile down below Moreeomblake. This White church — the " Whitechurch What ? " of those astonished acquaintances to whom you mention its imposing name — is, of course, when stripped of its Latinity, merely " Canons' Whitechurch," and obtained its distinguishing appellation among the many other Whitchurches from its being the especial preserve of the Canons of Wells and of Salisbury ; but in " Domesday " it is p merely " Witcerce." Wh i t ec h urch Canonicorum has no relation to the coast, but I cannot resist the magnetic attrac tion of that gorgeous name, with a rich ness and bouquet like that of the fine fruity old port so rarely found nowadays, and the reverberating sound of an anthem or a prayer chanted in some cathedral choir. It beckons from afar. Oh, that one could reside at Whitechurch Canonicorum and be able daily to address one's correspondence from it, to the astonishment of the recipients ! It is a large parish, and a large, scattered, pleasantly rural village ; but its chief attraction is the magnificent cruciform church of Holy Cross, of great size, great antiquity and great beauty ; largely of the transitional period between Norman DEVICE ON THE TOWER, WHITECHURCH CANONICORUM. 292 THE DORSET COAST and Early English architecture, and additionally remarkable for still containing the shrine of St. Candida, or St. Wita, about whose identity or whose actual existence at any time, there are many disputes, never likely to be settled. It is even uncertain whether this was originally the " white church," or " Wife's church." The beautiful Norman chancel and nave, dating from about 1170, the south doorway of the same period, the Early English transepts, of about 1200, are all exquisite. The great tower is of the Perpendicular period, about 1420, and is remarkable for a sculptured device, high up on its south wall, representing a ship of that period, between a knife and an axe ; giving rise to the local legend that the tower was built from the combined benefactions of a shipmaster and a butcher. A similar device is carved on the fireplace of a farm in the village, and another curious carving, resembling a two-handled flagon, is to be seen on the exterior wall of the south aisle. In the chancel is the finely sculptured altar- tomb of Sir John Jeffery of Catherston, who died in 161 1, near the monument of John Wadham of Catherston, sometime Captain of Sandsfoot Castle and Recorder of Lyme Regis, who died in 1584. The shrine of St. Wita is under the north window of the north transept. The curious stone structure, with the three vesica-shaped openings in it, had always by immemorial tradition been regarded as the shrine of that saint, or of St. Can dida, but it was not until recent years that this WHITECHURCH CANONICORUM. WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH 295 legend was resolved into certainty. A serious subsidence, consequent upon the gradual draining of the Vale and the shrinkage of the soil, had occurred in this transept, by which the stones of the shrine had been cracked, and an old fracture in the lid of the stone coffin within reopened. The necessity for repairs gave an opportunity for in specting the contents of the coffin, when a leaden casket, eight inches square, was discovered, bearing the inscription, in twelfth-century raised lettering, * f>i@ . i^eges©© . Reixige . s@e . raise This was found to be, as the inscription indi cates, the reliquary in which the relics of St. Wita had been placed. An inspection of the coffin and the torn and greatly injured reliquary itself, proved that the shrine had been violated centuries ago. Authorities pronounced the teeth, the thigh-bones and fragments of bone found to be those of a small woman, about forty years of age. They were reverently placed in a metal box, and again sealed up. At the foot of the great hill from Moreeomblake and Whitechurch, the Char is crossed, at the entrance to Charmouth. It is pleasant to pass through the field gate here by the mill, and to scramble down to the grassy side of the Char, and to pass under the single arch of the stone bridge that carries the Exeter Road over the water. An inscription reads, "J. & W. Short, Builders, 1824." The clear-running water, the plashing of the mill-wheel, and the sounds of 296 THE DORSET COAST occasional traffic overhead, on the Exeter Road, are soothing and restful on a summer's day. Charmouth's one long hillside street begins here. It is a wide, empty street, climbing out of the valley to the hill towards Lyme Regis — the hill Hutchins styles " the Plinlimmon of Dorset." The general aspect of Charmouth is something THE SHRINE OF ST. WITA. that of the period beween the Regency and the opening of the Victorian era, when there was a small overflow from the then abounding prosperity of Lyme, and when it seemed almost as though Charmouth, although half a mile from the sea, might some day blossom into a seaside resort. It has not done so, nor ever will, because the little valley that runs down to the sea beach is so marshy with the baulked attempts of the WEST BAY TO CHARMOUTH 297 River Char to find its way out, as a river should, that there are few building sites available in a good position, and the cost of making a proper outfall for the Char would be prohibitive, in view of any possible value of the land for building in this remote spot. Meanwhile, the stream ignobly sneaks out to sea between the pebbles, and but two or three small, new, and ugly houses have arisen to give countenance to the land- agent's notice boards, offering to the green hills and the empty blue offing plots for sale or on building-lease. Looking up street from the " George " inn, Charmouth is not unpicturesque, and the church in the middle distance, with its gilded fish vane, looks a great deal better than it does close at hand ; when it is seen to be built in the Carpenter Gothic style of 1836. The private house (now the manse of an adjoining independent chapel), nearly opposite the " George," was once an inn, and in 165 1 bore a part in history, as a tablet placed on its frontage in 1902, informs the way farer. It was on September 22nd, that Charles the Second, a fugitive from Worcester Fight, arrived with his faithful friends, Lord Wilmot and Colonel Wyndham, at Charmouth. The king went under the name of William Jackson. Colonel Ellesdon, who had guided the party to Charmouth, hastened over to Lyme Regis, and there entered into negotiations with one Stephen Limbry, the master of a small vessel, to put in at 38 298 THE DORSET COAST Charmouth beach as soon after midnight as the tide served, there to take aboard three or four gentlemen, and land them in France. For this service he was to be paid £60 on his returning with a certificate from his passengers of their safe arrival. All was arranged, but both sides acted without reckoning with Limbry's wife and two daughters, who had been that day to Lyme Fair and heard the proclamation made, offering a reward of £1,000 for the capture of Charles Stuart, and ending with threats of what would be done to those harbouring or in any way assisting him and his. On their return they instantly suspected the identities of these gentlemen, so anxious to set out for France at such an untimeous hour, and they very effectively hindered Limbry from performing his part of the contract, by locking him up in his bedroom, and threatening, if he made any attempt to get out, to inform the Roundhead governor of Lyme, Captain Macey. The king and his companions were therefore obliged to sleep the night here in Charmouth, and seek as best they could to get across country to Bridport in the morning. In the morning another awkward incident occurred. The king's horse dropped a shoe, and had to be taken to the smith's, to have it re-sst. The ostler, Henry Hall, who had been a Republican soldier, was gossipping with Hammet, the_smith, while he was about his work, when the smith asked him whence these gentlemen who CHARMOUTH. WEST BAY AND CHARMOUTH 301 stayed the night at the inn had come. " From Exeter," said the ostler. " But," returned the smith, " these three remaining shoes were made in the north, and have been set in three different counties ; one of them in Worcestershire." This fact, and the additional one that the horses of the party had not been unsaddled all night, could point to only one conclusion. The party were fugitives from the Battle of Worcester, " and even the king might be among them." ' The ostler," says Colonel Ellesdon, " communi cated this hint and comment to the Puritan minister, Wesley. The preacher made all speed to the inn, preparing in his mind the most successful mode of entrapping the hostess into a confession. ' Why, how now, Margaret," quoth he, " you are a Maid of Honour." " What mean you by that, Mr. Parson ? " rejoined Margaret, tartly. " Why, Charles Stuart lay last night at your house, and kissed you at his departure ; so that you cannot but be a Maid of Honour." The woman then began to be very angry, and told him he was a scurvy-conditioned man to go about to bring her and her house into trouble. " But," said she, " if I thought it was the king, as you say it was, I should think the better of my lips all the days of my life ; so, Mr. Parson, get you out of my house, or I'll get those shall kick you out." The minister took the ostler before a magistrate, who disregarded the matter, and by the time that 302 THE DORSET COAST Captain Macey of Lyme Regis — who took the information more seriously — had been apprised, it was midday, and the fugitives were gone. The clergyman figuring in this story was none other than the Reverend Bartholomew W esley, or " Westiey " as he signed his name. He came of a good old county family long settled at Westleigh, in the north of Devonshire, near Barnstaple, who were not only landowners there, but dignified land owners too, enjoying the state of knighthood. He " flourished," as the phrase goes, from the close of the sixteenth century to well on into the second half of the seventeenth, having been born about 1595, and died in 1679. His greatest title to fame is the altogether extrinsic one that he was the great grandfather of the famous John, the Methodist. He held the living of Charmouth from 1640, and, being a man of Roundhead sympathies, kept his place and was given that of Catherston in 1650. In 1662, when with the Restoration so many men of his principles felt the hand of the restored monarchy hard upon them, he was ejected, and thenceforward is said to have practised as a doctor and to have died obscurely in 1679. CHAPTER XXVIII LYME REGIS — EARLY HISTORY — THE MONMOUTH REBELLION The hills between Charmouth and Lyme Regis go steeply up and down, and were even more precipitous in the days before the dawn of the nineteenth century. They are breakneck roads now, but they then went, little more than bridle paths, unnecessarily over the extreme crests of the hills, and in the result, carriages were so great a curiosity at Lyme that the Lyme folks long used, by way of recreation and amusement, to walk the one mile and a half up from their town to the top of Charmouth street, to see those wonderful things, the coaches, pass along the Exeter Road. In the same way, until the short branch of light railway was opened from Ax minster to Lyme Regis in 1904, railway locomotives and trains were curiosities, greatly marvelled at by many old folks who occasionally went by road to Axminster, the nearest market town. Those deserted tracks upon Rhodehorn are still visible in places, to those who climb and seek them, above the present road, the so-called " New Cut," generally known, from the furious 303 304 THE DORSET COAST blasts that in winter sweep through the funnel-like cutting, as the " Devil's Bellows." From here the road goes on the very edge of the crumbling cliffs, which have gradually fallen away until here and there the margin of the road itself is encroached upon, and presently begins to plunge down, down, and down again, with a miniature Lyme visible below, in the LYME REGIS. distance, disclosed as it might be to the eye of a bird looking sheer down from the sky. The cyclist fleets down, with an aching wrist upon his front brake, and a foot carefully actuating that on his hind wheel ; past danger-boards, round corners, and by an old toll-house ; and, as he descends, the eternal sea rises up before him like a great blue wall, into whose vastness he seems like to dash. It is a great, solemn emptiness, that blue . EARLY HISTORY 305 expanse, for Lyme Bay is out of the track of vessels passing up and down channel, and thus the little town, seen in far perspective below, seems awfully like a poor shivering soul, trembling on the brink of Eternity. It is therefore not until this Dantesque vastness sinks out of sight in descending, that Lyme loses this uncomfortable touch with the infinities and takes on the less rarefied and more homely and comfortable air of a town in the workaday world. The descent continues to the very last, and brings the astonished stranger, in an appalling gradient, to the Town Hall, on the very verge of the gun cliff. Here, in this entrance, if any where, Jane Austen's description of " the principal streets almost hurrying into the water," is fully justified. Lyme is still that " praty market town " mentioned by Leland as " set in the rootes of an high rokky hille down to the hard shore," and even yet there " cummith a shalow broke from the hilles about a three miles by north, and cummith fleting on great stones through a stone bridge in the botom." This is the little river Lym, or Buddie, as it is sometimes called, which thus comes out of the hills and flows into the sea by the Town Hall, under Buddie Bridge. It is this tiny stream which in a bygone strength carved out the nook in the hills that forms the site of the town, and it was the stream that in the long ago stood sponsor to the town itself, which in the beginning was no more than a row of houses, or huts, built on either 39 306 THE DORSET COAST bank. But although those beginnings were small, they are very remote, for there was a Lyme even so far back as a.d. 774, when Kynewulf, king of the West Saxons, gave a part of the manor to the Abbey of Sherborne. It was then styled Lym, Estlym, or " Netherlym-supra-mare," in contra distinction from Uplyme, the inland village on the hill-top, just within the Devon border. Few towns can have had so many variants of name as Lyme. The part once belonging to Sherborne Abbey was long distinguished from that pertaining to the King's manor, and was known as Lyme Abbots. It was in the time of Edward the First that the town became a borough and the " Regis " was first applied. Lyme has, for so small a town, made a great deal of history of the warlike sort, and has in its day been one of the naval bulwarks of the nation. It sent four ships and sixty-two men to aid Edward the Third in his siege of Calais, and although in the meanwhile having suffered greatly by inroads of the sea and from repeated attacks of the French, was still able to contribute two ships for the attack upon the Spanish Armada, as it sailed up the Channel in 1588. But the chief incidents in its story were yet to come, and it was not until the wars and rebellions of the seventeenth century that Lyme took — or was made by circumstances to unwillingly take — a prominent part in English history. Fighting of a scattered kind took place in the neighbourhood in 1643, between the Royalist EARLY HISTORY 309 forces under Prince Maurice and the townsfolk, bitterly Puritan in sentiment ; but the Prince, when Lyme refused to surrender, merely made off to Exeter, and did not reappear until the following spring. Then, with a more adequate force, he began the siege of Lyme, which began on April 20th and continued until June 15th. He brought some four thousand men to the attack, and Lyme is said to have had only five hundred defenders, which is almost certainly an under-estimate, by at least half. Five hundred men could not have possibly sufficed to defend the walls and forts which, in anticipation, had been built in a half circle, from the church cliffs, round by Pound Street and the Axminster Road. The Cobb itself was incapable of being defended, and the besiegers, long vainly attempting to take the town, entered the harbour on May 22nd, and burnt all the merchant shipping lying there. The siege of Lyme was a hopeless affair on the part of the Royalists, for the Navy was in favour of the Parliament, and its ships kept the town fully provisioned and its garrison supplied with all necessary warlike stores. The siege had lasted eight weeks, when the approach of an overwhelming force of thirteen thousand men under the Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller made it seem imprudent, even to the reckless Prince Maurice, for the investing force to remain. They accordingly went off, to try their luck elsewhere ; leaving perhaps a thousand of their number dead, outside the defences of 310 THE DORSET COAST Lyme, whose brave townsmen, however, com puted the enemy's slain at twice that number. Forty-one years later occurred that event which, more than any other, has made Lyme Regis famous. On June nth, 1685, the Duke of Mon mouth, the darling of the West, the Protestant champion, landed on the Cobb, in defence of Faith and Freedom, and then and there began the romantic, but short-lived and ill-fated rebellion, closed after barely four weeks of irresolute skirmishing and marching and counter-marching, by the Battle of Sedgemoor, on the fatal 6th of July. There surely was never so handsome or so courtly a rebel as this well-favoured son of Charles the Second and Lucy Walters, and the sour bigot at Whitehall trembled on his throne when he heard that Monmouth, so well fitted in his person and his manners to advocate a Cause, had landed with an armed expedition at Lyme, to dethrone him and to upset his Romanising policy. Lyme in general was surprised and alarmed at the appearance in the bay of the frigate and three tenders carrying the " Protestant Duke " and his friends and warlike equipments, for only a select few in the town were in the secret of his intended descent from the Hague, and it looked as though an enemy was come to invade these shores. The Duke came ashore in a boat and landed at the Cobb, where a Lieutenant Bagster, of the Navy, seeing that he could not step ashore without THE MONMOUTH REBELLION 311 becoming wetted, sprang to his aid and, offering a knee, enabled him to alight dryshod. Mon mouth then invited this polite person to join him, but received his first rebuff in the unexpected reply, " No, sir ; I have sworn to be true to my King." The duke then, according to the testimony of a contemporary, " called for silence, and then desired we would join with him in returning God thanks for that wonderful preservation we had met with at sea, and accordingly fell on his knees on the sand, and was the mouth of us all in a short ejaculation, and then immediately, well armed, as many as we were, entered the town." Monmouth's blue flag was then unfurled in the street, and the violent proclamation read which, asserting the Duke's legitimacy, went on to declare the " Duke of York " — as Monmouth styled James the Second — to have been the author of the Great Fire of London, the secret instigator of the Papist Plot, and the poisoner of the late king. It further declared the Duke of Monmouth to have landed in defence of the liberties and the Protestant religion of England. Gregory Alford, Mayor of Lyme, was playing bowls with a number of townsmen when Mon mouth's ships came into the bay on June nth. The game of bowls, if you come to consider it, plays a not inconsiderable part in history, for it will be remembered that Sir Francis Drake was engaged in such a game with his captains, on the Hoe at Plymouth, when the Armada hove 312 THE DORSET COAST in sight ; and the Mayor of York was similarly occupied on that memorable evening in the summer of 1676, when Nicks, the highwayman, who really performed the ride to York, wrongly ascribed to Dick Turpin, appeared. Alford, a Papist and a sympathiser with the reactionary policy of James the Second, imme diately took horse and rode off to Exeter with the news, whence it was dispatched to London, arriving there, with great celerity for those times, on the 13th. The duke was received with the wildest enthusiasm, and the poor little force of some one hundred and sixty followers who had landed with him to upset a throne and gain a crown, was speedily recruited from the townsfolk and the whole countryside. For Monmouth was no stranger in the West. Some years earlier, in the lifetime of Charles the Second, he had made an almost royal progress through these Western shires, and was even regarded as the king's successor, as he was undoubtedly well known to be his son. A descent of five hundred of these recruits upon Bridport was unsuccessful, and they came flying back to Lyme in wild disorder, according to one who had the advantage of observing them, who narrates that they " never stopt till they were safe in Lyme again." Four days later, Monmouth's forces had grown so numerous that he was able to march out from Lyme with three thousand horse and two thousand THE MONMOUTH REBELLION 313 foot, and to present so bold a front at Axminster, that the Duke of Albemarle, commanding the king's forces, was obliged to retreat. And so Monmouth marches out of Lyme, with his blue banner, his plumed hat and gallant bearing amid his untrained rustics, in the hopeless enterprise of giving battle to an army of trained troops. Himself a soldier of proved capacity, he soon perceived, when he could not win the sympathetic but cautious gentry to his aid, that his revolt must fail ; and on Sedgemoor, confronted by the very regiments himself had captained, he gloomily exclaimed, " I know those men : they will fight. If I had but them, all would go well." Against such foes his countrymen, largely armed with pikes, bill-hooks, and scythes lashed to poles, had no chance. Defeated there, he ended on Tower Hill, and his fellow rebels were hanged in hundreds in the West. Lyme, in the old folk-rhyme, was to have benefited greatly had Monmouth succeeded, for the Duke is made to say, on landing : — "Lyme, though but a little town, I think it wondrous pretty ; And if I come to wear the crown, I'll make of it a city." But, as we have seen, the duke had never the opportunity of proving his bona fides, and Lyme is not yet a city. 40 CHAPTER XXIX REVIVAL OF LYME— THE COBB — THE FISHERMEN The long-continued commercial prosperity of Lyme, depending largely upon trade with France, was almost destroyed in the lengthened wars under William the Third and Queen Anne, and the town seemed almost doomed to extinction when, about 1770, that discovery of the sea as a possible bathing-place, which sent hosts of fashion ables to many derelict towns and humble fisher villages along the south coast, from Kent to Devon, put new life into Lyme, as at the same time it revivified Brighthelmstone and Weymouth. Lyme Regis suddenly became a seaside rival to the inland waters of Bath. It is amusing to picture the horror the first visitors to Lyme experienced when, sent to the sea by the advice of the doctors, they came upon the half-ruined town and its uncouth fisher inhabitants. The fashionables stared at the natives, and the natives were unfeignedly as tonished at their unaccustomed visitors. Either class was hard put to it to account for the others. There was scarce a house in the place fit for an exquisite to inhabit, and indeed, the Lyme of 314 REVIVAL OF LYME 315 to-day takes its dominant note from the buildings which at that time began to rise, in obedience to its discovery as a health resort. A fashionable community was established here, with the Assembly Rooms inevitable at that time ; and where mere " inns " had been from time imme morial, " hotels " began to rise. Already, when Jane Austen visited the town, in 1804, it had assumed that air of permanent prosperity which survives into the twentieth century in conjunction with the stucco of the eighteenth, and the bay- windows of the Regency. For bay-windows play the same prominent part in Lyme allotted to them at Kemp Town, and when the time shall come that rebuilding will abolish the bay windows and the white-faced houses of Lyme, why then, one of the especial endearing charms of the town will have gone. The Assembly Rooms building still remains by the Cobb, but public dances are no longer a feature of the visiting season, and although the ball-room where Jane Austen danced may yet be seen, it is part of a club. A little house with a verandah on the sea-front, as you enter the narrow old-fashioned walk which leads presently to the Cobb, is pointed out as the home of Jane Austen during her stay here. It looks directly across the way, to the projecting quay, where the foursquare " Bay Cottage " stands, white-faced, with windows of the uncompromising regularity of a well-ordered doll's house. It is the home of the Harvilles, in her novel 3i6 THE DORSET COAST " Persuasion," and from its windows the startled Harvilles observed Louisa Musgrove's fall from the steps of the Cobb. But the reader has not yet been introduced to this supreme feature of Lyme ; as supreme in Lyme as the Capitol was in Rome, the old THE QUAY, LYME REGIS. Chain Pier in Brighton, or the dome of St. Paul's in the City of London ; nay, even more supreme, for had there never been a Cobb, there would, almost certainly, never have been a Lyme. There is not, nor was there ever, a natural harbour at Lyme, whose shore lies open to the seas and winds ; and it is therefore a matter for surprise that it should have ever been selected THE COBB 317 as the site of a seaport, or that, the port being established here, it should have survived its natural disabilities. The harbour has been con structed in a most unpromising situation, on an exposed foreshore where there could never have been more than an insignificant ridge of rocks to form the foundations of that pre-eminent feature of Lyme, " the Cobb." The Cobb, without which the port must long since have decayed, and the town with it, is the roughly semi-circular stone pier built originally in the time of Edward the First, when Lyme was made a borough. Since then it has been destroyed and rebuilt, damaged and repaired, times un countable, and no longer bears much resemblance to the original Cobb, which was formed of parallel piles of tree-trunks driven into the bed of the sea and packed with enormous round stones once plentifully found in the neighbouring cliffs and called " cowstones." The suggestion may be made that they were also the " cobbles " whence the unique name of the Cobb derived. A pier built of such materials in such a manner would not seem to have any lasting elements, yet the Cobb of those times owed its very strength to these uncemented stones dropped in between the wooden piles, for it gave protection to vessels lying in the lee of it, while the interstices between the stones allowed for the play of the surges through the wall, which thus had not to resist the battering force of the waves directed against a smooth wall of masonry. Although that older 318 THE DORSET COAST form of Cobb was destroyed many times, that destruction was due only to exceptional storms, which would probably have as greatly damaged a building of the present type. There remains nothing of that Cobb which Monmouth knew, for the present aspect of the pier dates from 1825, when the almost entire reconstruction of it was rendered necessary by the great damage wrought by the storm of November, 1824. A brass plate into an alcove on the lee side details the facts of the rebuilding ' by order of the Master General and Board of Ordnance," and adds the length of masonry, with the estimates and the actual cost, down to the trivial particularity of an odd farthing, as thus : — " Length of pier rebuilt : 232 ft. „ „ parapet rebuilt : 447 ft. Amount of estimate : ^19,193 19 10 „ expenditure : £17,337 o g\ Commenced April 19, 1825. Finished November 18, 1826." It is at the steps by this inscription that the locally famous whispering gallery is formed by the smooth curve of the masonry wall. A small portion of the inner face of the Cobb remains as it was in Jane Austen's day, and the great stone steps, projecting like giant fangs from the face of the wall, are still pointed out by a few interested people as the scene of the accident in Jane Austen's " Persuasion," but it may be A HEAVY SEA AT LYME REGIS. THE COBB 321 supposed that this literary association is quite overlooked by nine-tenths of the visitors to Lyme ; for Jane Austen, like many another " classic," is unfortunately a great deal more talked about and written about than read, and modern illustrated editions of her novels have been issued rather as picture-books, as vehicles for illustrating the costumes and the manners of her time, than in any expectation of her tales winning again to the enjoyment of a vogue. In any case, it is difficult to believe the story told of Tennyson visiting Lyme, and on his being shown the landing-place of Monmouth, exclaiming, " Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell ! " Why should Louisa Musgrove's fall on the Cobb be supposed to create such vivid interest ? It had no tragic consequences, for Louisa, very unromantically, recovered, and Jane Austen herself did not expend a very great deal of sentiment upon the incident. There are, it is true, characters in fiction more real than many historical personages, but it will scarcely be allowed that Louisa Musgrove is of that vivid company ; while the handsome, ill- fated Monmouth is one of the most romantic figures in history, who does but gain an increasing interest as the years roll on. He fell, beyond recovery ; there is no surviving the stroke of the headsman's axe. The Town Hall, standing in all the florid, 41 322 THE DORSET COAST studied picturesqueness of a reconstruction com pleted in 1888, stands on the site of the old Guild hall, or Town Hall, and embodies portions of the old building. It is in that banded red-brick and Portland stone, mixed Elizabethan and Jacobean style, with a strong smack of Netherlandish architecture, called absurdly enough, for lack of a better name, " Victorian Renaissance " ; but, if we do not inquire too closely into the cheap details of the work, and pay no attention to the cramped and awkward rooms and staircases to be found inside, in which convenience has been sacrificed for the sake of presenting a quaint elevation, it is, for those who have not constantly to use it, a very delightful building. An arcaded open space on a level with the street beneath it remains as it has always been, the Butchers' Market. Looking one way into the street, and the other way out upon the open sea, it is probably the most curious and airiest butchers' market in existence. Another survival incorporated in the new buildings is the iron-studded doorway of the old lock-up, with the stocks still preserved inside ; and the curious who climb to the court-room will find there the staves tipped with a white glove, with which the beadle from time immemorial proclaimed Lyme Fairs, on February 13th and October 2nd. The summary jurisdiction court of Piepowder was held on those occasions, and the usual magistrates' sittings were suspended for the time, which was also a close time for debtors, who might appear in the town without fear of arrest, THE COBB 323 The fairs are now the merest shadows of their former selves, but a staff with a white glove is still displayed from a window of the Town Hall, to signify that old-time enfranchisement. The " Fossil Shop," well known for many years to every visitor to Lyme, is another of the town's survivals, and reminds us that the cliffs and landslips of the neighbourhood have for nearly a century been a happy hunting-ground for geo logists in search of fossils. It was in 1811, when but ten years of age, that Mary Anning, the daughter of an old curiosity-shop keeper, dis covered the remains of those distinguished saurians of the primal ooze, Lchthyosaurus Platydon, and the Plesiosaurus, and earned for herself a species of immortality, emphasised by the stained-glass window erected to her memory in Lyme church by the Geological Society, after her death in 1840. The twenty-five feet length of Lchthyosaurus him self is now in the Natural History Museum, at South Kensington, and we cannot do better, when feeling hipped and dissatisfied with things as they are, than to make a little journey to that museum and have a look at him, when we shall come away feeling thankful that we live in times when Lchthyosaurus and his playfellows no longer inhabit the earth. Meanwhile, the old Fossil Shop ekes out a trade by vending ammonites of incredible age from one counter, and fresh fish from another : fossils from the blue lias and mackerel from the deep blue sea ; and carries out the old fossil idea very fully by still 324 THE DORSET COAST exhibiting the notice : " Patronised by Prince Alfred." Not everyone in this latter generation can at once confess to a knowledge of " Prince Alfred," but that notice refers to the Duke of Edinburgh, who went by that name before he was created duke, " ever so long ago," and died, years since. From the fossils, let us into the fresh air and sunshine of the tiny " Parade" of Lyme, where queer little cottages look out upon the sea and the ridge of Lucy's Ledge. From here, if it be a fine day, you may see the gulls, astonishingly tame and confiding, cruising about all day, off Buddie Bridge, like some miniature naval flotilla. They sit high out of the water, or skim lightly over it, screaming and quarrelling for the offal thrown out of the windows, and are the most efficient scav engers of the place. Here, sunning themselves, perhaps a little awkwardly, among the visitors, one may generally happen upon two or three blue-jerseyed fishermen with grizzled beards and the freckles and tan of long years of seafaring. " Ah ! " says one, talking of Lyme as it was, as it is, and as it may become, now that it is accessible by railway, " if it had only come when I wer' a young man, it'd a' done me good. 'Tes a good thing, I zay, that the railway have come to Lyme : 'twill bring more people, make more business, and give a poor man a chance to earn a living. Some people would Hke to have the place all to theirselves. There was . He said, ' if the railway do come, THE FISHERMEN 325 I shall leave.' He's gone now ; he had to leave." ' Where did he go ? " you ask, innocently, and the fisherman, who had spoken quite without any idea of mystification, replies, " Ah ! I can't tell 'ee. He's dead." A simple piety, or superstition, if you like, is the note of these men. " Ther' hav'n't bin no herr'n' in Lyme this twenty yur," says one. " Sprats and herr'n' ! why, they used to come in such milhons that I've seed a time when ye c'd have taken a boat and dipped in y'r hands and pulled out handsful. I've a-sold herr'n' so high as a shillun a dozen, and so low as a penny a dozen, an' tons and tons at tuppence a bushel for manure, and at other times for seven-and-sixpence a bushel. An' sence they was sold for manure ther've bin no more herr'n in Lyme : no, not for twenty y'r. They've passed down Channel, and the Sidmouth and Exmouth men have got 'em ; but never any more herr'n' in Lyme sence we sold 'em for manure. 'Twas a wicked thing. Yes, my belief is the Lord didden send fish for such a purpose as that, and that 'tes a judgment." My old friend with these moral sentiments was a reformed character. He had been something of a drinking man in his youth, and, going home after one of his bouts, had fallen over a cliff. As he lay at home, slowly recovering, he took the Pledge, which he has loyally kept, ever since, against some odds ; for the unregenerate are, in their own wicked and perverse way, as keen to 326 THE DORSET COAST seduce the teetotaller from the paths of virtue as the missionary to obtain converts. " 'Twas always," says he, " when I come ashore, ' Come and have a drink, my friend.' ' No, thankye, my friend,' says I. ' Ef ye doan't come and have a drink,' says they, 'I'll throw et auver ye, then.' ' So do, my son,' says I, ' an' I'll lay ye out, as stiff as a gurnet.' " And I have no doubt he would have done it, too. CHAPTER XXX LYME SMUGGLERS — BUDDLE BRIDGE — THE DEVON BORDER It is in due accord with the eternal verities, the essential inwardness of things, that the most characteristic corner of Lyme should be alongside the river Lym, or Buddie, as we have seen it to be variously named. The Lym is not one of the great waterways of the world, for you can walk across the very mouth of it, on the beach, without seriously wetting your shoes, but it is the cause and origin of Lyme town, and has made the place picturesque. No other seaside town in these isles has quite so romantic a corner as this, where the little river comes trickling among the boulders and the pebbles to meet the sea, out of the black-browed archway of Buddie Bridge ; and the Gun Cliff, and other neighbouring cliffs, long since faced with masonry, serve as the sturdy supports of a toy-like Town Hall, whose pinnacles and turrets spire into the sky, more like an architectural dream than a reality. Grim, mal-avised old houses, their walls hung with slates, to keep out the damp, are built over and beside Buddie Bridge, just as in old prints 327 328 THE DORSET COAST the houses that once lined London Bridge are seen to overhang the Thames. Everything in this queer corner is old-fashioned and quaint, BUDDLE BRIDGE. even to that custom of flinging the slops out of the window, without an admonitory " gardy-loo," which often comes near to effectively quenching the stranger's desire for further exploratory ad ventures, BUDDLE BRIDGE 329 Those hard-featured, secretive-looking houses did indeed hold many secrets in the days — or, to speak by the clock, the nights — when smuggling was a flourishing industry ; and the situation and the houses seem as though specially provided for the convenience of those free importers of cognac, hoUands, tea, silks and laces, who without a qualm of conscience cheated King George's re venue for a livelihood. Many a boat has been silently rowed ashore with muffled oars on dark some nights, at the full of the tide, within the archway of Buddie Bridge, and many consign ments of goods have been hoisted up through those windows ; and, in times when those im mediate houses were suspect, the smugglers in their great sea-boots splashed, with the tubs of spirits on their shoulders, up the rock-strewn bed of the stream. There, at one or other of the many old houses, removed at a judicious interval from the suspected area, a window would open to the hoot of an owl, and " the stuff " be dehvered, to be stored in some secret cellar until convenient to distribute it to customers inland. By Monmouth Street, Mill Lane, and Lynch the course of the stream may be traced, gradually ascending into the open country of the valley beyond Lyme, and emerging by degrees from that half underground condition to which it is degraded in the town by those overhanging houses. In Mill Lane there is, of course, the mill, standing there as it has stood for many centuries. It is placed at the junction of Mill Lane and 42 330 THE DORSET COAST Lynch, where the Lym runs in two streams ; the one its stony, natural bed, the other the mill-leat ; the original course, deep below the other, containing a feeble trickle, irresolutely finding an outlet in between the blockading boulders ; the mill-leat deep and brimming. The back windows of the mill look down there on to the green, slimy, fern-grown walls, and through the ancient misty glass, dusty with flour, the miller, cogitating over his ledgers, is seen, like a bear in his pit, or a prisoner immured in a Bastille. There he tots up his accounts, to the tune of drip, drip, trickle, swish, and drop, played in a soothing anthem of Profit and Loss, by his enriching waters. Steeply shelving back-gardens of old houses descend to the river at Lynch, and overhang it. They are bolstered up by sturdy retaining-walls, which, now and again, after bulging awhile ominously, fall into the stream, depositing potato patches, cabbages and flower beds in it ; only to be recovered with much labour. It is a picturesque stream and delightful, and would be more delightful still, and additionally picturesque, if it were not made a common receptacle for old boots, tins and broken crockery, and if the inhabitants could be induced to refrain from throwing their other domestic refuse into it. Some day, now that the railway has come, the old conditions will be altered. The cabbage stalks and the ancient umbrellas will be fished out, the old buildings will give place to new, OLD HOUSES ON THE BUDDLE, RESORTS OF OLD-TIME SMUGGLERS. THE DEVON BORDER 333 the stumbly paths made straight, and grass lawns and flower beds will make the Lym smart. It will be all very nice and tidy, but it will not be the old-time river ; and the unregenerate will then unavailingly regret the vanished uncon- ventionality, and even, perhaps, the potsherds and the cabbage stalks of yore. It does not take long to come into the fields and meadows, from Lyme town. Following the stream, the Middle Mill fields and the open country are at once entered. Here the old mill, with its disused water-wheel slowly rotting away, still remains. It was from close by, from Colway and Hay farms, that Prince Maurice directed his ineffectual siege of Lyme. Here, too, Dorsetshire ends, for in this valley runs the Devonshire border, and the little village of Uplyme, whose cottages are wholly in Devon shire, is visible from this point. The scenery, too, is already Devonian in character ; and indeed Lyme Regis itself is less like a Dorsetshire than a Devonshire town. Indeed, it is not so long since an agitation in favour of transference to Devon was largely supported in the town, but the change now seems unlikely. So here, or, even more fittingly, on the cliffs' edge beyond the Cobb, at Devonshire Point, whence Devonshire Hedge runs across the fields, we end this long pilgrimage of the Dorset Coast. THE END INDEX Abbotsbury', 202, 243-57 Agglestone, The, 55-7 Anvil Point, 97, 99, 107 Arishmill Gap, 140 Arne, 38 Ballard Down, 47, 64 Head, 59, 63, 72, 75 Bindon Hill, 147 Blacker's Hole, 107 Boundary Chine, 7 Bow-and- Arrow Castle, 232 Brands B.iy, 42 Branksea Isle, 40-2, 57 Branksome Chine, 6-8 Bredy, River, 262-4 Bridport, 265-76 Harbour, 276-84 Broadwey, 188 " Burning Cliff," The, 157-61 Burt, Tohn, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89-91 Burton Bradstock, 202, 258, 262-5 Canford Cliffs, 6 Heath, 7, 32 Manor of, 7 Cave's Hole, 238 Chapman's Pool, 114-7, 119 Char, River, 295, 297 Charmouth, 164, 270, 295-302 Chesil Beach, 121, 197, 199, 200-3, 2°7> 208-12, 223-7, 253, 258, 278 Chesil village, 223-7 Chesilton, 201, 214 Chideock, 285 China clay, 67 Church Hope Cove, 232, 236 Clavel, John, 123-9 Point, 40 Clavinium, 166, 169 Corfe Castle, 36, 40 Culver Cliff, 139 Dancing Ledge, 98, 107 Deadman's Bay, 197-202, 13 " Devil's Bellows," 304 Dungy Head, 153 Durdle Door, 153, 154 Durlston Head, 85-99 Easton, 223, 231 Encombe, 119, 120 Eype, 285 Eype's Mouth, 285 Fitzworth Point, 39 Fleet, 197 The, 200, 202, 243 Flowers Barrow, 67, 139 Fortune's Well, 218-23 Freshwater Bay, 238 Frome, River, 36, 67 Gad Cliff, 134 Giggers Isle, 37 Goathorn, 40 205- 334 INDEX 335 Godlingstone, 79 Golden Cap, 121, 285-9 " Great Globe," The, 93-6 Green Isle, 40 Greenland Quay, 40 Handfast Point, 67 Hawcombe Bottom, 139 Hell Bottom, 119 Holes Bay, 40 Holton Mere, 36 Holworth Cliff, 157-61 Horsefall Bay, 153 Cliffs, 153 Hounstout, 117 Hyde Quay, 37 Jordan Hill, 165, 169 Kimmeridge, 97, 130-4 Bay, 117, 120, 121, 130-4 Ledges, 117 Kingston, 119, 120 Kinson, 32-4 Langton Herring, 197, 243 Matravers, 99, 100 Lee Lane, 271 Lilliput, 40 Hill, 28 Littlesea, 57 Lodmoor Marsh, 166-70 Long Isle, 39 Luckford Lake, 67 Lulworth Castle, 140-6 Cove, 146-50 East, 142, 146 West, 141, 146, 147, 149 Lym, or Buddie River, 305, 327-33 Lyme Regis, 272, 286, 292, 297, 303-33 Lytchett Bay, 36 Man-o'-War Bay, 150-3 Marm Tout, 153 Melcombe Regis, 165, 172, 176, J8g Middlebere Passage, 39 Moreeomblake, 289-91 Moulham, 79 Mowlem, John, j6, 79, 80 Mupes Rocks, 140 Newton Bay, 40 North Haven, 9, 11, 12,40, 41, 43 Nothe Point, 174, 192, 199 " Old Harry " Rocks, 45, 59, 63 Osmington, 163 Mills, 161, 162 Ower, 39, 40 " Parson's Barn," 60 Patchins Point, 37 Pennsylvania Castle, 232-6 Piracy, 15, 28 Poole, 13-35, 174 Harbour, 7-9, 11, 35-42, 67 Head, 6, 8 Portland Bill, 201, 208, 237,241 Castle, 214-6 Convict Prison, 228-30 Isle of, 121, 162, 165, 174, 200-42 Quarries, 227, 229, 232, 237. 241, 242 Roads, 161 Preston, 164-6 Puckstone, The, 57 Pulpit Rock, 242 Puncknowle, 154, 259 Knob, 154, 198, 259 Purbeck, Isle of, 40, 64, 67, 87 98, 122, 130 Quarries, 100-3 Redhorn, 40 Reforne, 230 Reynolds' Escape, 117 Rhodehorn, 303 Ringstead Bay, 154, 163 Rodwell, 194 336 INDEX Round Isle, 39 Russel Quay, 17 St. Aldhelm's Head, 67, 92, 100, 1 10-4 St. Catherine's Chapel, 113, 243, 245-8, 251 Salterns, 40 Sandbanks, 9-1 1, 29 Sandsfoot Castle, 199, 292 Seacombe, 104, 107 Seatown, 285 Shambles, The, 202, 241 Shipstal, 37, 38 Simpson's Folly, 8 Smallmouth Sands, 200 Smedmore, 122-9 Smuggling, 14, 28, 30-4, 90, 99, 198, 329 South Haven, 40, 41, 43 Southwell, 237 Stair Hole, 150 Stanton St. Gabriel, 289 Stone Isle, 40 Stone Quarries, Portland, 227, 229, 232, 237, 241, 242 Purbeck, 100-3 Stonebarrow Hill, 290 Studland, 41-54 Heath, 55 Swanage, 46, 69-86 Swannery, The, Abbotsbury, 252-6 Swyre, 154, 258-61 Head, Encombe, 121 Swyre Head, near Weymouth, 153 Thorncombe Beacon, 285 Tilly Whim Caves, 85, 88-91 Tongue Bench, 153 Tyneham, 135 Wakeham, 231-3 Wareham, 35, 36, 39, 64, 67 West Bay, or Bridport Har bour, 201, 276-84 Chickerell, 197, 243 Holme, 67 West, or Deadman's, Bay, 197- 202, 205-13 Weston, 222 Wey, River, 166 Weymouth, 162, 165, 172-93, 197, 207, 260 Bay, 161, 165, 170 Whitechurch Canonicorum, 290-5 Whitecliff, 63, 75 Whitenose, 154 Winspit, 104, 107 Worbarrow Bay, 135, 139 Tout, 135, 139 Worth Matravers, 99, 103-7, 109, 114 Wrecks, 92, 107-9, Il8» l97> 205-13, 237, 242 Wych Channel, 37 Lake, 39 Wyke Regis, 194-7, 243 Printed and bound by Hasell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.