The scene of Two on a Tower is a selection from various places. “The tower,” Mr. Hardy writes to me, “had two or three originals—Horton, Charborough, etc.” Those other places are duly described in these pages, but the “etc.” covers the curious brick obelisk built on the summit of the earthwork-encircled hill near by this old manor-house of Milborne St. Andrew, and called Weatherbury Castle. Standing on this “fir-shrouded hilltop,” one may see, for many miles around, summer conflagrations among the furze on Bere Heath, the tall tower in Charborough Park, which, much more than this obelisk, resembles Swithin’s observatory, and, near at hand, below, this old manor-house, the “Welland House” of the story. From this eyrie, too, you perceive the old Exeter Road swooping whitely downhill, and hear the hum of threshing-machines, coming up, like the drowsy buzz of insects, from the vale.
It is not difficult to detect sarcasm in the description of this hill. It “was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman camp—if it were not (as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of Witanagemote—with remains of an outer and an inner vallum, a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy ascent.”
Not so easy, really—indeed, demanding a rather strenuous climb. And when you are on the crest of that ancient glacis (impregnable it might well have been when men fought hand to hand) it is with some difficulty you penetrate the dense woodland growing within this ceinture. Little can in these times be seen of the obelisk from without: only from one particular view-point can you observe its ultimate inches and the metal ball that caps it, rising mysteriously from amid the topmost branches of the fir-trees. Its situation is exactly described in the story: “The gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable. The sob of the environing trees” (how like, by the way, to that passage in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s Ruddigore, “the sob of the breeze is heard in the trees”) “was here expressively manifest, and, moved by the light breeze, their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums, while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally clicked in catching each other. Below the level of their summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation. Pads of moss grew in the joints of the stonework, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning, but curious and suggestive.”
Regaining the high road and passing uphill by where the Dewlish toll-gate once stood, and by an up-and-down course infinitely varied as to gradient, we come at length down to the valley of the Piddle, and to Piddletown, the “Weatherbury” of Far from the Madding Crowd, where Gabriel Oak, come down in the world by the agency of Fate and his foolish young sheep-dog, took service with his distractingly elusive dear, Bathsheba Everdene, the lady-farmer. Weatherbury, as Mr. Hardy regretfully tells us, is not the Weatherbury he once knew. It has indeed been very largely rebuilt, and the rather stern and prim limestone cottages that stand prominently in one of its several streets do not altogether prepossess one in favour of this village that is not quite a townlet and yet may quite possibly resent the more rustic definition. The “several” streets are, after all, rather roads, with rows of houses and cottages less integrally than incidentally there, and the several are perhaps reducible to a term less connotive of number; but they run in unexpected directions and uncovenanted angles, and so make an imposing show, comparable with the effect produced by six supers who, by judicious stage-management in passing and repassing, can be made to represent an army. But the Piddle, running sparkling and clear through Piddletown, redeems the conjoined effect of those streets and gives the place a final and definitive cachet of rurality, by no means belied by the very large, though very rustic, church—happily still unrestored, and, with its tall pews and fine Jacobean carved oak choir-gallery, a perfect picture of an ancient Wessex place of worship. Hardean village choirs and Gabriel Oak’s bass voice take, if it be possible, an even greater air of actuality to the pilgrim who enters here.
The interest of Piddletown church is added to by the fine and curious bowl font, diapered in an unusual pattern, and by the tombs of the Martins of Athelhampton, who lie mediævally recumbent in effigy in their own chapel, quite unconcerned, although scored over with the initials of the undistinguished, and although their old manor-house of Athelhampton, near by, on the road to Bere Regis, has since the time they became extinct passed through several alien hands. Poor old fellows! Their somewhat threatening motto, under their old monkey crest, of “He who looks at Martin’s ape Martin’s ape shall look at him!” has lost any point it ever had.
