At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock, to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t know where ’tis.”
But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.
From just before Minterne Magna there is a left-hand turning which affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and going exposedly over the haggard downs. The two routes are locally known as the overhill and the underhill roads. The first-named is now little travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of the past. This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense story of The Three Strangers. On that route you see better than anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where “the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.” It is, by the same token, of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken by the most robust.
By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent. Presently, therefore, one reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” of Tess and other stories, situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture. From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside. There the fine tower of the church stands out against the sage-green coloration of the hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley, presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one of those respects by a closer acquaintance. For Cerne is a place very hardly treated by heartless circumstance.
Many centuries ago, in A.D. 987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint, Edmund the King and Martyr. It does not appear what became of the hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed might imagine. The hermit probably received due compensation for disturbance and went off somewhere else. However that may be, the abbey grew and flourished. Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he had been brought to see the error of his ways and that plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong. And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff” as the librettist of The Golden Legend makes the devil say of it.
In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from Weymouth, where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of the hills. It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII. The abbey disestablished, the town of course also suffered. How greatly we do not know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly stop at home.
And at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in general, but not to Cerne. It is still, to-day, remote from railways and is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which, when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then, in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and staggering buffet. Cerne is dead. There is (assuming for the moment positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the respect due to the departed. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and if there were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered. But there are no such things for utterance. It has all the romance of the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in it. It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse; earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face. Soulless Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse! Ah! my dear lady, your contempt is misplaced. I love these things better than you imagine, but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more. The abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its streets. A noble, highly decorated tower is that belonging to it, one of the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles, whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests. Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to passing admiration. It will be observed that there are shops—or things in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year. They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their shopkeeping. The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.
