Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the country of The Woodlanders, where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels. The long ridge of the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening. To the left hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough efficacy, lose himself. Believe one who has been along the sometimes devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels. There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and a verse alluding to the origin of the name of “Vale of White Hart” given to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—
“When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.
When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.
Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”
The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus darkly reflected. According to his account, corrected in details from other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting. Somewhat later, Sir John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge. The king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer. Another historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states that the whole county was laid under contribution. “Myself,” he says whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.” It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry VII.
The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing to “Giant’s Head,” ascends a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ of The Woodlanders, and the Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire Tannhäuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of her bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for the market.” Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is seen spreading out like an unrolled map.
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. There “in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”
The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” of The Woodlanders. Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription
“LE TEMPS PASSE
L’AMITIE RESTE
1888
IN MEMORIAM H.R.D.”
They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her husband, and the world went on as usual. Only Marty South remembered him and treasured his memory.