There is a monument here to that fortunate and successful time-server, Sir John Tregonwell, who so neatly trimmed the sails of his public conduct in those times of quick-change, between the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, that, although a Roman Catholic, he managed to enrich himself at the expense of the old religion’s misfortunes, and to die at peace with all men, although in the possession of property belonging to others. There is also a most exquisitely sculptured marble monument by Carlini to Lady Milton, who died in 1775. It represents her in the costume of that period, with her husband bending anxiously over her. A quaint little piece of Gothic fancy will be seen on one of the walls, in the shape of the sculptured rebus of one Abbot William Middleton, with the Arabic date, 1514, and the device of a mill on a tun, or barrel. Thus did the strenuous minds of the Middle Ages unbend to childish fancies and puns in stone.
A sign of the times may be noted, in the restoration and re-dedication of the long-desecrated Chapel of St. Catherine, on the hilltop to the east of the abbey. When the monastery was dissolved, the chapel of course fell out of use, and so remained until recently. It had in turn been used as a pigeon-house, a labourer’s cottage, a carpenter’s shop, and a lumber-room, and was falling into complete decay when Mr. Everard Hambro in 1903 decided to restore it. The varied Saxon, Norman, and Perpendicular architecture was accordingly repaired, and the building reconsecrated on St. Catherine’s night of the same year.
Through Winterborne Houghton, and Winterborne Stickland, two of the eleven Dorsetshire Winterbornes, named from a chalk stream that flows into the Stour at Sturminster Marshall, we come to another Woodlanders landmark, Turnworth House, the “Great Hintock House,” where Mrs. Charmond, fascinator of the surgeon Fitzpiers, lived. It is situated just as in the tale, in a deep and lonely dell:
“To describe it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the manor-house; it stood in a hole. But the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds’-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the grey lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights. . . . The front of the house was an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. . . . Above the house was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys.”
From Turnworth the way out of Rainbow-land by way of Durweston, Stourpaine, and Blandford is easy: a facilis descensus, as well in spirit as in the matter of gradients, for thus you come out of the untravelled and the unknown into the well-worn tracks and intimate life of every day.
INDEX.
Abbot’s Ann, [23]