WEYMOUTH TO BRIDPORT AND BEAMINSTER
To leave Weymouth by this route is to obtain some initial impressions of a very striking character: impressions, not slight or fleeting, of hilliness and of Weymouth’s modern growth. A specious and illusory flat quayside stretch of road, by the well-known swan-haunted Backwater, ends all too soon, and the road goes at a grievous inclination up through what was once the village, now the suburb, and a very packed and populous suburb, too, of East Chickerell. To this succeeds the Chickerell of the West; and so, in and out and round about, and up and down—but chiefly up—at last to Portisham, the first place of any Hardyean interest.
Portisham, under the bold hills that rise to the commanding height of Blackdown—locally “Black’on,” just as the name of the village is shortened to “Po’sham”—rising eight hundred and seventeen feet above the sea, is notable to us both from fiction and in facts. It appears in The Trumpet Major as the village to which Bob Loveday comes to seek service under Admiral Hardy, and although the brave but sentimentally flighty Bob be a character of fiction, the admiral is that very real historical personage, Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, Nelson’s friend and comrade-in-arms, who was born here, in the house still pointed out, in 1769, and to whose memory the conspicuous monument on Blackdown is erected. The house is the first on the left, at the cross-roads as you make for the village. In the garden belonging to it, on the opposite side of the road may still be seen a sundial, bearing the inscription:
Joseph Hardy, Esq.,
Kingston Russell. Lat. 50° 45′
1767
Fugio fuge.
It is a lovely perspective along the road approaching Portisham, disclosing a long avenue of poplars and ashes, with the village church and some scattered farmsteads in the vale, and the tremendous sides of the rolling down, covered in patches with furze, filling in the background. The beautiful old church has, happily, been left very much to itself, with the lichen-stains of age and other marks of time not yet scraped off. A strange epitaph in the churchyard provokes curiosity:
“William Weare lies here in dust,
As thou and I and all men must.
Once plundered by Sabean force,
Some cald it war but others worse.
With confidence he pleads his cavse,
And Kings to be above those laws.
September’s eygth day died hee
When neare the date of 63
Anno domini 1670.”
Those Sabines appear from the internal evidence of the epitaph to have been the Roundhead party, and “rebellion,” or perhaps “robbery,” to have been the worse thing than war some called it. The allusion is probably to some raid in which cows and sheep were carried off by the Puritans and were grudged them by the loyal Weare, who seems, in the passage where he claims “Kings to be above those laws,” to have cheerfully borne some other foray on the Royalists’ behalf.
Two miles from Portisham is the large village of Abbotsbury, not itself the scene of any of the Wessex romances, but intrinsically a very interesting place, remarkable for a hilltop chapel of St. Catherine anciently serving as a seamark, and for the remains of the Abbey; few, and chiefly worked into farmsteads and cottages, but including a great stone barn of the fifteenth century, as long as a cathedral, and very cathedral-like in its plan.