The Hardy Country: Literary landmarks of the Wessex Novels

by Charles G. Harper

The great barn of Far from the Madding Crowd, scene of the sheep-shearing, is really a description of the monastic barn of Abbotsbury, which, as in the story, resembles a church with transepts. “It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity. . . . The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed chestnut roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals was far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our modern churches. Along each side wall was a range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions the precise requirements, both of beauty and ventilation. One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied.”

Out of Abbotsbury, and down amid the waters of the West Fleet, is the famous Swannery, where, amid reedy lakes and marshes, some thousands of swans have from ancient times had a home. Once belonging to the Church, in the persons of the old abbots of the Benedictine abbey of Abbotsbury, the swans are now the property of the Earl of Ilchester, descendant of the “First Countess of Wessex,” Betty Dornell, whose romance is set forth in A Group of Noble Dames. Though long passed from the hands of any religious establishment, the ownership of the swans still points with the trifling alteration in the position of an apostrophe, to the fact that “the earth is the Lords’ and the fulness thereof.”

Eight miles of cliff-top roads, with magnificent views to the left over sea and coast, and other views equally magnificent inland, to the right, lead in staggering drops and rises past Swyre and Puncknowle down to Burton Bradstock, and thence to the “unheard-of harbour” of West Bay.

West Bay, and Bridport town itself, are scenes in Fellow Townsmen, where they are called “Port Bredy,” from the little river, the Brit or Bredy, which here flows into the sea. West Bay is one of the oddest places on an odd and original coast. A mile and a half away from Bridport town, which is content to hide, sheltering away from the sea-breezes, it has always been about to become great, either as a commercial harbour or a seaside resort, or both, but has ended in not achieving greatness of any kind. No one who enjoys the sight of a quiet and picturesque place will sorrow at that.

Picturesque it is in a wholly accidental and unstudied way. It owns a little harbour, with quays and an inn or two, and shipping that, daring greatly, has to be warped in between the narrow timbered pier-heads, where a furious sea is for ever banging in from the unsheltered bay; and away at one side it is shut in from the outside coast by some saucy-looking cliffs of golden yellow sandstone, whose odd effect is due to their being the remaining part of a symmetrically rounded down. The seaward part has been shorn off, with the odd result that the rest looks like the quarter of some gigantic Dutch cheese of pantomime. It is an eloquent, stimulating, not unpleasing loneliness that characterises the shore of West Bay. A few old thatched houses, halting midway between an inland and a coastwise picturesqueness, and so only succeeding in being broken-heartedly nondescript, start out of wastes of tiny shingle, and are backed at a discreet distance by a long row of modern houses, whose architect is so often on their account professionally spoken of as a genius, that it becomes a duty to state, however convenient to the residents in them their plan may be, that their appearance in the view is the one pictorial drawback to West Bay.

The microscopic shingle—for shingle it is—of West Bay has for centuries been the enemy of the place and has practically strangled it. There are heaped up wastes of it everywhere, and every visitor involuntarily carries some of it away, as a sample, about his person, in his shoes or his hair, or in his pockets. The more of it removed in this, or indeed in any other manner, the better pleased will West Bay be, for it comes, unasked, into the houses; you have it for breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper, as an unsolicited garnish to the viands, and when at last you seek repose between the sheets, there it is again. These wastes are part of that natural phenomenon of the Dorset coast, the Chesil Beach, which runs eighteen miles from this point along the perfectly unbroken shores of the Bay to Chesilton and Portland. The “Chesil” is just the “Pebble” beach: that old word for pebbles being found elsewhere in Dorsetshire, and at Chislehurst, among other places. A pecularity of it is that by insensible degrees it grows coarser as it proceeds in a south-easterly direction, ending as very large pebbles at Portland. The fishermen of this lonely coast, landing on dark nights, with nothing else to guide them as to their whereabouts, can always readily settle the point by handling this shingle, and by use can tell within a mile of the particular spot.

The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old one. In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament empowering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and flourishing state whence it had declined. The preamble stated that by reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants had been swept away and the haven choked. But although the Legislature had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate whence the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged. Mr. Hardy in Fellow Townsmen thus describes West Bay: “A gap appeared in the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade. Between these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior valley, being a mere layer of blown sand. But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed. There were but few houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief features of the settlement.”

The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the corporate town of Bridport, which, after long remaining, as far as the casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of neighbouring residents who, residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.