Near Maiden Castle.
The prehistoric earthworks frown darkly against the skyline to the west of Dorchester.
There is an unmistakably “county-town” atmosphere in Dorchester, which is a distinctly urban place, and not now of that thinly-modified rusticity described long ago by Thomas Hardy: “The farmer’s boy could sit under his barleymow and pitch a stone into the window of the town clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa’ that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
No, modern Dorchester is not like that, and its chief features—the noble elm avenues, that struck the traveller by road into and out of the town with admiration—have had their exquisite nobility qualified by time and change. Those grand avenues extended north, south, east, and west; but to-day they have in some cases disappeared, and in others have been obscured by suburban buildings, that have shut out the views of the fields from the pavements. Dorchester, however, is rich in notable things. As you enter it from Piddletown and Ten Hatches, and rise up along High East Street to Cornhill, which is the very centre of the town, you approach the grey old church of St. Peter, and note in the flagged space beneath the tower the bronze statue of William Barnes, the “Dorset poet,” 1801–1886, with a verse aptly chosen from his own writings:
Zoo now I hope his kindly fëace
Is gone to vind a better plëace,
But still wi’ vo’k a’ left behind
He’ll always be a’ kept in mind.
Thus appropriately, in the olden Wessex folk-speech he did so much to preserve, is the memory of the amiable “Pa’son Barnes” kept alive.
Much else is changed, but still on market-days the country-folk come pouring into what they to this day call “Darchester.” They come into it chiefly by carrier’s cart, or by dogcarts and other road vehicles, just as of yore; and although the market-day assemblage of carriers’ tilt-carts is an astonishing survival in numerous old English towns, there are nowhere to be seen so astonishingly many as here; and the occupants of them are not infrequently such genuine old crusted characters as you read of, and wag the same old Wessex tongue. For the rest, Dorchester has the Roman encampment of Poundbury and the amphitheatre of Maumbury to show; in High West Street is the house, duly marked, where the infamous Judge Jeffreys lodged when on his Assize of Blood in 1685, and in the Town Hall his chair is shown. While some things have changed, other trivial details have remained the same for considerably over a century. Thus, Rowlandson in 1797 made a drawing of King George III. being driven in a post-chaise to the “King’s Arms.” The “King’s Arms” Hotel still stands where it did, and looks in every respect the selfsame place, which is itself a remarkable proof of the abiding nature of our institutions; but what is yet more remarkable is the fact that the selfsame, indubitable individual old flower-pots are on the roof of the portico yet. In the face of the destiny of all flower-pots to be resolved at some time into potsherds, and in view of the many times when the roof of that portico must have been used, on election and other occasions, as a convenient place whence to harangue excited crowds, their survival is strange indeed.
For the rest, a gruesome little cottage will be found by taking the road out of High West Street known as Glydepath Lane, and following it to a fine damp situation near the river. It is only gruesome when you know its old story; otherwise it is a quite idyllic little thatched cottage, and stands in a nice garden. But it is handy to Dorchester Gaol, and it was the hangman’s cottage. In this same street is a mingled grim and stately great early eighteenth-century mansion, known as Colyton House. The hideously battered keystone mask in the blocked-up archway of one of its outbuildings has been appropriated, and made literary capital of, by Mr. Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge. “High Place Hall,” the home of Lucetta, Henchard’s lady-love in that story, is really a house at the corner of South Street and Durngate Street, but he transfers the unlovely thing from Colyton House to it. He has an extraordinary aptitude for seeing something malignant and inimical in lifeless objects, and you are almost persuaded that there was some malevolence in this that wrought Henchard’s ruin.
Fordington.