The High Street of Poole, a mile long, is busy enough to quite dispel any idea that Poole is not prospering; but, on the other hand, the many puzzling narrow streets that lead out of it are so rich in what have been noble residences, that they tell in unmistakable tones of a greater period than this of to-day.
These byways lead at last past the church of St. Paul, the fellow to St. James’s, with its dolphin vane, to Poole Quay, where the most prominent feature is an ancient Gothic building, looking very like some desecrated place of worship, or a monastic tithe-barn. It is, as a matter of fact, neither, but the “Town Cellar,” a relic of a past age when Poole was part of the manor of Canford. The lords of Canford, away back to that ubiquitous John o’ Gaunt, “time-honoured Lancaster,” who seems to have owned quite half of the most desirable properties in the England of his time, took toll in money, when they could, and in kind when silver marks and golden angels were scarce; and in the “Town Cellar” were stored those bales of wool, those spices from Ind, and those miscellaneous goods, which were made in this manner to render unto the Cæsars of Canford, in times when such things were. It is a picturesque old building, its walls oddly composed of flint intermingled with large squared pieces of stone that, by the look of them, would seem to have been plundered from some older structure.
Opposite stands the Harbour Office, not altogether unpicturesquely provided with a loggia supported by columns, and still retaining the sundial erected when clocks were scarce. The Mayor of Poole, who in 1727 presided over the fortunes of the port, is handed down to posterity by the quaint tablet let into the gable wall, showing us the quarter-length relief portrait of a stout personage in voluminous wig and mayoral chain and robes, lackadaisically glancing skyward, as though longing to be gone to those ethereal regions where double chins and “too, too solid flesh” are not.
Poole Quay—its old buildings, waterside picturesqueness, and the shipping lying off the walls—is an interesting place for the artist, who has it very much to himself; for the holiday-maker does not often discover it. But waterside characters are not lacking: sailors, who have got berths and are only waiting for the tide to serve; other sailors, who are in want of berths; town boys, who would dearly like to go to sea; and nondescript characters, who would not take a job if offered to them, and want nothing but a quayside bollard to sit upon, sunshine, a pipe of tobacco, and the price of half a pint: these form the natural history of Poole Quay, which though it may have been—and was—one of the gateways into the great outer world, in the brave old days of Arripay and his merry men, is now something of a straitened gate, and Poole itself for the land voyager very much in the nature of one of those stop-blocks at the end of a railway siding: what a railway man would call a “dead end.”
For Poole is not a main road to anywhere, and when you have turned down into it, on those three and a half miles from Bournemouth, you are either compelled to return the way you came, or else cross a creek by the toll-bridge to Hamworthy, where there is nothing but a church built in 1826—and precisely of the nature one might expect from that date—and, a little way onward, a lonely railway junction in midst of sandy heaths and whispering pines, which, even at night, “tell the tale of their species,” as phrenologists say, “without help from outline or colour,” in “those melancholy moans and sobs which give to their sound a solemn sadness surpassing even that of the sea.” It is the district of The Hand of Ethelberta, and if we pursue it, we shall, as Sol says, in that novel, “come to no place for two or three miles, and then only to Flychett,” which, in everyday life, is Lytchett Minster, a place which, despite that grand name, can show nothing in the nature of a cathedral, and is, as Sol said, “a trumpery small bit of a village,” where possibly that wheelwright mentioned in the story still “keeps a beer-house and owns two horses.” That house is the inn oddly named the “Peter’s Finger,” with a picture-sign standing on a post by the wayside, and showing St. Peter holding up a hand with two extended fingers in benedictory fashion, as though blessing the wayfarer. The origin of this sign is said to be the custom, once usual in Roman Catholic times, of holding manorial courts on Lammas Day, the 1st of August, the day of St. Peter ad Vincula—that St. Peter-in-the-Fetters to whom the church on Tower Green, in the Tower of London, is so appropriately dedicated. On that day suit and service had to be performed by tenants for their lands, which thus obtained, in course of time, the corrupted title of “Peter’s Finger” property.
Around the village so slightingly characterised in The Hand of Ethelberta there is little save “the everlasting heath,” mentioned in that story, “the black hills bulging against the sky, the barrows upon their round summits like warts on a swarthy skin.” It is true the road leads at last to Bere Regis, but it has little individuality and no further Hardyesque significance, and so may be disregarded in these pages.
CHAPTER XXV
WIMBORNE MINSTER
Wimborne Minster or “Warborne” in Two on a Tower—is, or was, for the Romans and their works are altogether vanished from the town, the Vindogladia of the Antonine Itinerary. If you speak of it in the curt irreverent way of railways and their time-tables, or in the equally curt, but only familiar, manner of its inhabitants, it is merely “Wimborne.” In their mouths, elision of the “Minster” merely connotes affection and use, as one drops the titles or the “Mister” of a friend, in speaking of him; but in the case of railway usage it is the offensive familiarity of the ill-bred, or, at the least, a derogatory saving of space and type.