The pilgrim of the Hardy country, come to Wimborne—I should have said “Warborne”—to see that Grammar School where, to quote Haymoss Fry, “they draw up young gam’sters’ brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way,” is like to be disappointed, for the place where “they hit so much larning into en that ’a could talk like the day of Pentecost” is no longer an ancient building. ’Tis true, the foundation is what the country folk might call an “old arnshunt” thing enough, being the work indeed of that very great founder of schools and colleges, the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, mother of Henry VII. It was refounded by Queen Elizabeth, who stripped all the credit of this good deed in a naughty world from the memory of the pious countess, and willed that it should be styled “The Grammar School of the Foundation of Queen Elizabeth in Wimborne Minster in the County of Dorset.” That was pretty bad, but worse came with the whirling years. James I., like the shabby fellow he was, raised a question respecting the validity of its charter, and was only bought off with £600; and Charles I., unlike the noble, magnanimous sovereign he is commonly thought to be, bled the institution to the tune of another £1,000, by a similar dodge. The wonder is that it has survived at all, and not only survived, but flourished and was able, so long ago as 1851, to build itself that new and substantial home which is so scholastically useful, but at the same time disappointing to the literary pilgrim who, at the place where Swithin St. Cleeve was educated, hoped to find a picturesque building of mediæval age.
CHAPTER XXVI
WIMBORNE MINSTER TO SHAFTESBURY
Wimborne shall here be the starting-point of a twenty-eight miles route, that in its south-easterly to north-westerly direction, is as easy as the one north to south of the road between Sherborne and Weymouth. It follows the valley of the Stour the whole way, and only at its conclusion brings up butt against the hill on which Shaftesbury is built.
There is at the outset from Wimborne a choice between the easeful and the toilsome. You may elect to go directly up-along, to the height frowned down upon by the greater height of Badbury Rings, or may go more circuitously but by more level ways, through Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. On the first route, beautifully overhung by elms, lies Kingston Lacy, the old seat of the Bankes family, rebuilt by Sir Ralph Bankes in 1663, and now a very treasure-house of art and historic relics. Here one may, greatly favoured, see and touch those keys of Corfe Castle, held so stoutly by the valorous Lady Bankes in the two sieges she withstood.
A younger avenue of beeches lines the exposed road across the shoulders of what has been identified as Mons Badonicus—Badbury Rings—the scene of the overwhelming victory gained in A.D. 520, over Cerdic and his Saxons by King Arthur and his Britons. In later years, when at last Saxon dominion had spread, and this had become Wessex, Saxons themselves encamped where of old they had been defeated, and after them the Danes occupied this inhospitable height. It is now tufted with a clump of fir-trees, and, solemn and darkly looming against a lowering sky, looks a fitting scene for any national portent of evil.
They are less impressive roads that lead by the Stour to Corfe Mullen and Sturminster Marshall. There the farmer reaps his heavy crops of hay and cereals, and ploughs and sows and reaps again, and history is only a matter of comparison between this year of a poor harvest, when prices are high and marketable produce little, and last year of a bumper, when the horn of Ceres was full and prices low. No matter what the yield, there is ever a something to dash the farmer’s cup from his expectant lips.
At Bailey Corner, three miles from Wimborne, a broad main road branches off from our route, going to Bere Regis and Dorchester. This is the road made at the suggestion of Mr. Erle-Drax of Charborough Park, whose property, it may be supposed, gained in some way from it. Charborough Park is one of the originals whence Welland House and the tower of Two on a Tower were drawn, and therefore demands a deviation of two miles from our route.
It is a straight road and a lonely that leads to the main entrance-lodge of this seat of the Erle-Drax family, past a long-continued brick boundary-wall that must have cost a small fortune, and decorated at intervals with arches surmounted by effigies of stags and lions. Time has dealt very severely with some of the squire’s stags, shorn here and there of a limb, and in one instance presenting a headless awfulness to the gaze of the pilgrim, who can scarce repress a shudder at sight of it, even though the destruction provides a little comedy of its own, in the revelation that these imposing “stone” decorations are really of plaster, and hollow.
The principal entrance to Charborough Park, the one feature that breaks the long, straight perspective of this undeviating road, seems to have been erected by the squire as a species of permanent self-advertising hoarding, for it is boldly inscribed: “This road from Wimborne to Dorchester was projected and completed through the instrumentality of J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, Esq., M.P., in the years 1841 and 1842.” Cæsar himself could have done no more than was performed by this magnate of the many names, and could not with greater magnificence have suppressed the fact that what his Parliamentary influence procured, the public purse paid for.