A great deal might be said of the Convict Prison and its quarries. It is another “sermon in stones,” quite as effective as the sermons preached by those other stones referred to in the lines
. . . books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything,
and the text, I take it, is the amended and horribly sophisticated one: “Thou shalt not steal—or, if you must, do it outside the cognisance of the criminal laws!”
But this only in passing. Literary landmarks have fortunately, no points of contact with burglars, fraudulent trustees, and swindling promoters of companies. We will make for Pennsylvania Castle, very slightly disguised in The Well Beloved as “Sylvania Castle,” the residence of Jocelyn Pierston in that story. Coming to it, past the cottage of Avice, down that street innocent of vegetation, the thickets of trees surrounding the Castle (which is not a castle, but only a castellated mansion built in 1800 by Wyatt, in true Wyattesque fashion, for the then Governor of the Isle) are seen, closing in the view. A tree is something more than a tree on stony, wind-swept Portland. Any tree here is a landmark, and a grove of trees a feature; and thus, in the thickets and cliffside undergrowths of “Sylvania Castle,” that justify the name and give the lie to any who may in more than general terms declare Portland to be treeless, the boskage is therefore more than usually gracious.
Many incidents in the elfish career of Pierston are made to happen here. The first Avice was courted by him in the churchyard down below, where a landslip has swept away the little church that gave to Church Hope Cove its name, and Avice the third eloped with another—that Another who with that capital A lurks between the pages of every novel, and behind the scenes in most plays—down the steep lane that runs beneath the archways of “Rufus’,” or Bow and Arrow, Castle on to the rocks beside the raging sea.
By lengthy cliff-top ways we leave this spot and make for Portland Bill, whence Anne Garland tearfully watched the topsails and then the topgallants, and at last the admiral’s flag of the Victory drop down towards, and into, the watery distance. Offshore is the Shambles lightship that gave a refuge to the fleeing Avice and Leverre.
This “wild, herbless, weatherworn promontory,” called Portland Bill, with its two lighthouses looking down upon shoals and rapid currents of extraordinary danger to mariners, obtains its name from the beak-like end of the Isle which “stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel.” Other, and more fanciful and wonder-loving accounts would have us believe that it derives from this being the site of propitiatory Baal fires in far-off pagan times; and, if we like to carry on the fancy, we may draw comparisons between the fires of the shivering superstitious terrors of those old heathens, and the beneficent warning gleams maintained here in modern times by the Trinity House, for the benefit of “they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters.”
Completing the circuit of Portland, the return to Fortune’s Well and Chesilton is made chiefly along high ground disclosing a comprehensive and beautiful view of the whole westward sweep of the Dorset coast, where the many miles of the Chesil Beach at last lose themselves in hazy distance, and the heights of Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, between Bridport and Lyme Regis, pierce the skies.