"It has often seemed to me a pity, from many points of view—and from the point of view of language among the rest—that Winchester did not remain, as it once was, the royal, political, and social capital of England, leaving London to be the commercial capital. The relation between them might have been something like that between Paris and Marseilles or Havre; and perhaps, in that case, neither of them would have been so monstrously overgrown as London is to-day. We should then have had a metropolis free from the fogs of the Thames Valley; situated, not on clammy clay, but on chalk hills, the best soil in the world for habitation; and we might have preserved in our literary language a larger proportion of the racy Saxon of the West Country. Don't you think there is something in this?"
Returning from Bincombe and passing through Sutton to Preston we come in a mile to Osmington. A short distance beyond the village a narrow road leads off seawards to Osmington Mills. Crossing the hills, this narrower road descends to the coast and the Picnic Inn—a small hostelry noted for "lobster lunches" and "prawn teas." If we strike inland from Osmington we come to Poxwell, the old manor-house of the Hennings, a curiously walled-in building with a very interesting gate-house. This is the Oxwell Manor of The Trumpet Major and the house of Benjamin Derriman—"a wizened old gentleman, in a coat the colour of his farmyard, breeches of the same hue, unbuttoned at the knees, revealing a bit of leg above his stocking and a dazzlingly white shirt-frill to compensate for this untidiness below. The edge of his skull round his eye-sockets was visible through the skin, and he walked with great apparent difficulty."
Pressing onward from this village, we arrive, after a two-mile walk, at "Warm'ell Cross," three miles south-west of Moreton station. The left road leads to Dorchester, the right one to Wareham, and the centre one across the immemorially ancient and changeless "Egdon Heath." Here we turn to the right and Owermoigne, the "Nether Mynton" in which the events of The Distracted Preacher take place. Here indeed is a nook which seems to be a survival from another century; a patch of England of a hundred years ago set down in the England of to-day. The church where Lizzie Newberry and her smugglers stored "the stuff" is hidden from those who pass on the highroad and is reached by a little rutty, crooked lane. The body of the church has been rebuilt, but the tower where the smugglers looked down upon the coastguard officers searching for their casks of brandy remains the same.
The highway leads for two miles along the verge of Egdon Heath, and then we come to a right-hand turning taking us past Winfrith Newburgh and over the crest of the chalk downs steeply down to West Lulworth.
Lulworth Cove is justly considered one of the most delightful and picturesque retreats on the coast. It is a circular little basin enclosed by towering cliffs of chalk and sand and entered by a narrow opening between two bluffs of Portland stone. It exhibits a section of all the beds between the chalk and oolite, and owes its peculiar form to the unequal resistance of these strata to the action of the sea. The perpetually moving water, having once pierced the cliff of stone, soon worked its way deeply into the softer sand and chalk.
Lulworth is the "Lullstead Cove" of the Hardy novels. Here Sergeant Troy was supposed to have been drowned; it is one of the landing-places chosen by the Distracted Preacher's parishioners during their smuggling exploits, and in Desperate Remedies it is the first meeting-place of Cynthera Graye and Edward Springrove.
The cove is most conveniently reached from Swanage by steamer. By rail the journey is made to Wool and thence by bus for five miles southward. By road the short way is by Church Knowle, Steeple, Tyneham and East Lulworth—but the hills are rather teasing; however, the views are wonderful. It is nine miles if one takes the Wareham road from Corfe as far as Stoborough, there turning to the left for East Holme, West Holme and East Lulworth.
The entrance to the cove from the Channel is a narrow opening in the cliff, which here rises straight from the sea. Mounted on a summit on the eastern side of the breach is a coastguard's look-out, while in a hollow on the other side are the remains of Little Bindon Abbey. The cove is an almost perfect circle, and in summer the tide, as it flows in, fills the white cove with a shimmering sheet of light blue water. Each wave breaks the surface into a huge circle, and the effect from the heights is a succession of wonderful sparkling rings vanishing into the yellow sands. To the east rise the ridges of Bindon Hill and the grey heights of Portland stone that terminate seaward in the Mupe Rocks, then the towering mass of Ring's Hill, crowned by the large oblong entrenchment known as Flower's Barrow, which has probably been both a British and a Roman camp.
In the summer steamers call daily at the cove. The landing is effected by means of boats or long gangways. After having climbed the hill roads into Lulworth, the pilgrim will not, I am certain, look with any delight upon a return to them, and will welcome an alternative trip to Swanage, Weymouth or Bournemouth by an excursion steamer.