Between this and Dorchester, past that end of Piddletown called ‘Troy Town,’ is Yellowham—one had almost written ‘Yalbury’—Hill, crowned with the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under the name of ‘Yalbury Woods’ in that story, and drawn again in the opening scene of Far from the Madding Crowd, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his leafy eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba’s feminine vanities with the looking-glass.
Descending the western side of the hill and passing the broad park-lands of Kingston, we enter the town of Dorchester along the straight and level road running through the water-meadows of the river Frome. Until a few years ago this approach was shaded and rendered beautiful by an avenue of stately old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town as in a frame; but they were cut down by the Duchy of Cornwall officials, in whose hands much of the surrounding property is placed, and only the pitiful stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground, remain to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached the road is seen in the distance becoming a street, and going, as straight as ever, and with a continuous rise,
‘CASTERBRIDGE’
through the town, with the square tower of St. Peter’s and the spiky clock-tower of the Town Hall cresting the view in High West Street, and in High East Street the modern Early English spire of All Saints nearer at hand. The particular one among the many bridges and culverts that carry the rivulets under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in his Mayor of Casterbridge as the spot where Henchard, the ruined mayor, lounged in his aimless idleness, amid the wastrels and ne’er-do-weels of Casterbridge, is the bridge that finally brings the road into the town, by the old ‘White Hart Inn.’ It is the inevitable lounging-stock for Dorchester’s failures, who mostly live near by at Fordington, the east end of the town, where the ‘Mixen Lane’ of the story, ‘the mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant’ was situated.
It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by the novelist in that story; or, perhaps more exactly, the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ‘It is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden-ground by a box-edging,’ is the not very apt comparison with the tall chestnuts and sycamores of the surviving avenues. ‘It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.’
This peculiarity of Dorchester, a four-square clearly-defined appliqué of town upon a pastoral country, has been gradually disappearing during many years past, owing to an increase of population that has burst the ancient bounds imposed by the town being almost completely surrounded by the Duchy of Cornwall lands. This property, known by the name of Fordington Field (and not the existence at any time of a ford on the Frome), gives the eastern end of Dorchester its title. The land, let by the Duchy in olden times, in quarters or ‘fourthings’ of a carucate, gave the original name of ‘Fourthington.’ A great deal of this property has now been sold or leased for building purposes, and so the avenues that once clearly defined with their ramparts of greenery the bounds of Dorchester are now of a more urban character.
THE BLOODY ASSIZE