“EXTREMELY AMUSING, I DO ASSURE YOU.”
Weymouth is a town of red-bricked respectability, and about fourteen thousand inhabitants. It lives on convicts, Portland stone, and the Channel Islands, and lies upon the curving shores of a beautiful bay. Even as George IV. is the patron king of Brighton, so was his father the respected cause of Weymouth’s prosperity. There is a stumpy statue of him upon the esplanade where Weymouth and Melcombe Regis imperceptibly merge one into the other, and that statue, I take it, is not so much an exemplar of a kingly presence, as a bronze apotheosis of all that was dullest and most obstinate in constitutional monarchy of this century and the last. This is a jubilee memorial, erected in 1809 by the “grateful inhabitants” to George III. It is not a beautiful memorial; it is so unlovely that no photographs of it are on sale at Weymouth, which proves without further ado the poverty of the design. The king looks down the street with a fishy glance, and his gaze to-day rests upon that other jubilee memorial, the Clock-tower, erected in 1887—useful, but scarcely a thing of beauty—a merely meretricious iron and gilt affair, without even the quaint ugliness of the Georgian effigy to recommend it.
Beside these claims to notice, Weymouth has nothing to advance. Its harbour is merely commonplace, and its streets featureless.
We took train to Abbotsbury, and waited a longer time for it to start than it would have taken us to walk the distance. However, we passed the time pleasantly enough, reading the auctioneers’ posters of sales—farm-stock and the like—and consulting our maps. Then we had the advantage of sharing the platform with a gorgeous individual who, like ourselves, awaited the train, but, unlike us, was “got up” immensely, and was evidently incapable of forgetting the fact. He wore an eyeglass, and the most wonderful breeches I have ever beheld.
I don’t mean, by particularising these things, to say that he wore nothing else, but that these articles were the most salient of all his apparel, although, without them, the remainder would have been sufficiently striking. But there! words are not sufficient. I have sketched him for your satisfaction, and for my own eternal delight. The creature smiled at our rough and ready touring fit, and we chuckled at the opportunity of perpetuating him in print: we found one another extremely amusing, I do assure you.
It is a nine-mile journey by rail to Abbotsbury, on a branch line that has its terminus here. The little river Wey lends its name to two of the villages passed, Upwey and Broadwey, but the railway company is superior to derivatives, and spells the latter Broadway on all its time-tables and station furniture.
There were few passengers for Abbotsbury, and none but ourselves were visitors. At our hotel our hearts sank when we saw, framed and glazed, in the passage, a year-old telegram from the Duke of Edinburgh to the proprietor, asking him to get lunch and beds for a party. It was not only the snobbery of it, but the thought that all subsequent visitors would have to pay for that Royal visit (ourselves included) that made us quail. And, true enough, a massive bill awaited our departure the next morning.
XXV.
Abbotsbury is a place of very great interest. It lies within half a mile of the sea, near by the Fleet Water and the Chesil Beach, and was at one time the site (as its name implies) of a very extensive and powerful abbey. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the appropriation of their funds, put an end to this religious house, among others, and very few remains of it are to be seen to-day. The Abbey Farm, a delightful old house, is built of its stones, and portions of the Gatehouse remain, with vestiges of the fish-ponds, here as elsewhere a great feature of the monastic settlement. All else is gone, even the great mansion built by Sir Giles Strangways upon the abbey lands that had been granted to him, and with the stones of its ruinated buildings, has disappeared. But the great tithe-barn of the monks still remains—a building of noble proportions, some 300 feet in length, built with sturdy buttresses and neatly-joined ashlar, with a great porch and a roof held up by massive timbers, every detail fashioned with exquisite taste, and over all a decided ecclesiastical feeling. Few modern churches are built so substantially, and fewer so tastefully, as Abbotsbury tithe-barn. Half of its length is roofless; the moiety of it suffices for the secular farmer who uses it to-day for the same purposes for which it was built many centuries ago: if it was not too large when built, how immense the products of these tithes must have been!