On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of £200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair. No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures, objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary fragment.
There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is still to be seen. Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered found this the only way out of his trouble.
When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was tied.
XXXVI
Returning to the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep hill leads up to the wild downs again, with a corresponding descent in three miles into the village of Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same manner, along a byeway at a right angle to the coachroad. There is a battered cross on an open space near the church, and the church itself has been severely restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne, and it requires no great stretch of imagination to conjure up a vision of him pacing the road to Eastbury, and composing laudatory verses on Dodington and his ‘flowing wit’; rendered, perhaps, the more eloquent by anticipations of the flow of Burgundy already quoted. He died in 1748, fourteen long years, alas! before the wine had ceased to flow at that Pierian spot.
BLANDFORD
From this haunt of the Muses it is two miles to the town of Blandford Forum, whose name it is sad to be obliged to record is nowadays shamefully docked to ‘Blandford,’ although the market, whence the distinctive appellation of ‘Forum’ derived, is still in existence.
One comes downhill into Blandford, all the way from Pimperne, and it remains a standing wonder how the old coachmen managed to drive their top-heavy conveyances through the steep and narrow streets by which the town is entered from London, without upsetting and throwing the ‘outsides’ through the first-floor windows.
If the outskirts of Blandford town are of so mediæval a straitness, the chief streets of it are spacious indeed and lined with houses of a classic breadth and dignity, as classicism was understood in the days of George the Second, when the greater part of the town was burnt down and rebuilt. One needs not to be in love with classic, or debased classic, architecture to love Blandford. The town is stately, and with a thoroughly urban air, although its streets are so quiet, clean, and well-ordered. Civilisation without its usual accompaniments of rush and crowded pavements would seem to be the rule of Blandford. You can actually stand in the street and admire the architectural details of its houses without being run over or hustled off the pavement. In short, Blandford can be seen, and not, like crowded towns, glimpsed with intermittent and alternate glances at the place and at the traffic, for fear of jostling or being jostled.
Who, for instance, really sees London. You can stand in Hyde Park and see that, or in St. Paul’s and observe all the details of it; but does anyone ever really see Cheapside, Fleet Street, or the Strand, when walking? The only way to make acquaintance with these thoroughfares is to ride on the outside of an omnibus, where it is possible to give an undivided attention to anything else than the crowds that throng the pavements.