In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in the town itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling, had their like nowhere else. Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dine à la carte or table-d’hôte at the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great cities. All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks) when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.
Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the surging mass of modern brick and stone. One of them is the ancient church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta Petherwin, in The Hand of Ethelberta, marries Lord Mountclere. Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up. No dread Bastille this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight, and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its nail-studded door. It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the Friends of Religion and Good Order.” The inference to be drawn from the small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and Vice” of Swanage were on a very insignificant scale. Although Swanage has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station, it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.
Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the Grove.” But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.
The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge, but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point. Once removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it, and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem, the contractor. They thought he had been saddled with a “white elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man. He considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.” This poor old monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.
CHAPTER X
SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE
That pilgrim who, whether on foot or by cycle, shall elect to trace these landmarks, will find the road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton Matravers and Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose blinding glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the scenery of Ireland. Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of Swanage, is not encouraging. But the world—it is a truism—is made up of all sorts, and here, as elsewhere, rewards come after trials.
Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might suppose from the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone houses, and very grim and unornamental ones too. Nine hundred souls live here, and so long as the “Langton freestone” won from its quarries is in good demand, are happy enough, although subject to every extremity of weather. The “Matravers” in the place-name derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers family, who dropped the “l” out of their name some time after one of their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of Edward II., proved himself a very “bad Travers” indeed, and so made his name peculiarly descriptive.
Passing Gallows Gore Cottages—what a melodramatic address to own!—we come to Kingston village, along just such a road, with just such a view as that described in The Hand of Ethelberta, although, to be sure, she went, on that donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route, through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down. Ordinary folk would have gone by the ordinary road; but then, you see, Ethelberta was a poetess, and “unconventionality—almost eccentricity—was de rigueur” for such an one. Hence also that unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey’s back.