AMESBURY
Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs. It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’ ‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836, through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly chronicled in the papers of the period.
Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this description was correct, the matter dropped.
XXX
And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages.
No one, despite the affected archaisms and the
STONEHENGE
