A beautiful backward view of the town is obtained on leaving it, over the Town Bridge that spans the sluggish, lily-grown Stour, at the entrance to Lord Portman’s noble park of Bryanstone. Here a dense overarching canopy of trees gives a grateful shade on summer days and frames the distant prospect whence the classic tower of the church grandly rises. The entrance-gates to the domain of Bryanstone are jealously kept locked and guarded, but there be ways of circumventing this churlish exclusiveness and of seeing the astonishingly beautiful scenery of the park, as the present writer has by chance discovered for himself. You, at the cost of some effort in hill-climbing, take the defences in the rear, and entering away back by the farmstead and workshops of the estate, come down by the finest of the scenery to those selfsame locked gates at these outskirts of Blandford, to observe and hear with some secret satisfaction the expressed horror of the lodge-keeper, only too anxious to let you out and be rid of you.
But, for the unenterprising, there is a sufficiently beautiful distant view of the park and of the new mansion from the Town Bridge. A former Lord Portman in 1780 employed James Wyatt to build him a classic mansion which remained until the rule of the present owner of the title, who demolished and replaced it with the fine mansion designed by Norman Shaw, R.A., and built in red brick and Portland stone.
CHAPTER VI
THE OLD COACH-ROAD: BLANDFORD TO DORCHESTER
From this point the old coach-road becomes astonishingly hilly, so that mere words cannot accurately portray it, and recourse must be had to the eloquent armoury of the printer’s case to set it forth in any truly convincing manner. The series of semicircular dumpling hills is not adequately to be shadowed forth by the aid of mere brackets—we must picture them thus:
and, to give some notion of the quality of the surface during the heats of summer, let a glaring white surface five inches deep in dust and powdered flint be imagined, the whole stirred up into a stifling halo of floating particles by the frequent passage of a flock of sheep. Such is the Exeter Road between Blandford and Dorchester in the merry months of summer.
Five miles of this bring us to the village of Winterborne Whitchurch, anciently referred to as “Album Monasterium” or “Blaunch Minster,” situated in the stony bottom where the little stream called the Winterborne does not in summer flow across the road. John Wesley, grandfather of the more famous John, the founder of Methodism, was vicar of this parish in 1658, and on the Restoration was dispossessed, when he took to a life of itinerant preaching amid the hills and dales of Dorsetshire, not altogether dissimilar from that of his celebrated grandson. Here, about 1540, was born George Turberville, the poet. To this succeeds, in less than another three miles, Milborne St. Andrew, on the less dried up Mill Bourne. This, the “Millpond St. Jude’s” alluded to in Far from the Madding Crowd, is a pretty place, of an old-world coaching interest, reflected from its partly thatched “Royal Oak” inn and the post office, once the “White Hart,” with the imposing effigy of a white hart still prominent on its cornice, in company with those of two foxes and a row of miniature cannon. Up along a byroad, past the feathery poplars that lend so feminine an air of beauty to the village, is the church, and then the Manor House Farm, once the residence of the Mansell Pleydells, who since the building of Whatcombe House, near by Winterborne Whitchurch, in 1758, have left this residence to farming. The red-brick pillars of the entrance-gates remain—partly ruined and standing foolishly, without a trace of the old carriage drive that once went between them—on the grass, surmounted still with sculptured displays of military trophies surrounding a cartouche bearing the lichened arms of the Pleydells, including an inescutcheon of pretence showing that before they allied themselves with a Mansell they married money with a Morton. It is a fine house, full of character, with unusually—and somewhat foreign-looking—high-pitched roof. Grand old trees lead up to it, and in the distance one perceives a manorial pigeon-house, against the skyline. The old drive led round to the other side of the mansion, where it is divided from the meadows by a moatlike cut in the Mill Bourne, now, however, richer in mud than in water, and crossed by a brick bridge. We can picture Lady Constantine, the susceptible young and wealthy widow of the defunct Sir Blount, stealing at night over this bridge, to visit Swithin St. Cleeve, stargazing in his lonely tower on the hilltop. In the garden, with its sundial, are pretty old-world box-edged flower-beds and shady arbours. Foundations of many demolished buildings are traceable in the meadows.
