Wessex

Sherborne Abbey Church
By Charles G Harper
London Adam & Charles Black Soho Square W 1911
This is a modest, gossipy and allusive sketch of a delightful part of England, designed rather to arouse the interest and the curiosity of those not already acquainted with what I will call the “Middle West” than to fully satisfy it. If in this connection you choose to regard the author of these pages as a commercial traveller in the interest of Wessex, displaying samples of the picturesque wares the West of England can offer the tourist, it will entirely fit the humour in which they were penned. To aid the medium of words is added a feast of colour in the accompanying selected views, which show the lovely golden russet interior of Sherborne Abbey, the misty rich blue haze of Blackmore Vale, the architectural majesty of Wells, and much else that awaits the traveller in Dorset and Somerset.
C. G. H.
The Wessex of which I shall treat in these gossiping pages is that Wessex of romance and of the great dairy-farms, which has been little touched by the influence of railways. Hampshire and Wiltshire—Winchester and Salisbury—have become too closely in touch with London to stand so fully upon the ancient ways as does Dorset, with the greater part of its north-western neighbour, Somerset. But in these rural territories the countryman still talks the old broad Do’set and Zummerzet speech, in which the letter “o” in every possible circumstance becomes “a,” as you will perceive in that old rhyme beginning:
A harnet zet in a holler tree, A proper spiteful twoad was he. And thus he zung as he did zet, “My sting is as zharp as a bagginet.”
And they think, too, the olden thoughts.
Nothing can give one a greater sense of the difference between the exploited modernized coast-line and the real old Wessex than the journey from up-to-date Bournemouth to Poole, that olden nest of smugglers, and thence across to the untamed heaths and to Wareham. In this way, then, we will begin our exploration of Wessex.