WOOL HOUSE
Close to the Castle stands the Protestant church on the south side and the Catholic chapel on the north. The latter, built in 1786 by the special leave of George III, was described by Fanny Burney as "a Pantheon in miniature, and ornamented with immense wealth and richness. The altar is all of the finest variegated marbles, and precious stones are glittering from every angle", a description that holds good to-day.
From the castle a most charming walk through a wood and down over grassy fields leads to Arish Mell Gap, a narrow bay shut in by high grass-covered downs, and near which is situated the Monastery Farm, founded in 1794, for Trappist monks, by Thomas Weld and his son, who afterwards attained the dignity of cardinal.
From Lulworth the enterprising pedestrian can find an abundance of magnificent coast walks by Worbarrow Tout, the Kimmeridge Ledges, and St. Aldhelm's Head. The walk towards the last-named is one of the wildest solitude, the only living creatures being the white sea-birds, and the only sounds the murmur of the waves as they surge round the bleak pinnacles of rock. Here and there, where the track-way turns at an angle, we catch a glimpse of vast cavernous recesses, some natural and some the work of men's hands, where ponderous masses have been riven away from the face of the cliff, and tumbled headlong into the water, where they lie amid the swirling eddies of the tide.
It is impossible to describe adequately the manifold beauties of the Purbeck coast line, which concentrates in itself all the elements of the bleak and the picturesque, pastoral valleys and grassy downs that end seawards in great walls of barren rock and masses of fallen cliff. Some old muzzle-loading guns lying on the shore between Winspit and Seacombe mark the site of the wreck of the Halsewell, an East Indiaman that was driven ashore here with great loss of life on January 6, 1786.
While at Lulworth the reader of Mr. Hardy's romances will not fail to visit Wool, and the old manor house of the Turbervilles wherein was enacted one of the most dramatic scenes in English fiction. Crossing the old bridge of "five yawning arches" we stand before "Wellbridge House", where Tess and Angel Clare came to spend their honeymoon. "Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!" was the bridegroom's greeting, as his bride passed the threshold of the house. At the head of the stairway are the two panels on which are depicted the portraits of those ancestors, the sight of which caused Tess to shudder. The house itself is an interesting specimen of ancient domestic architecture, from which in the gloom of the evening the phantom coach and four drives out of the gateway; but this ghostly equipage is visible only to a member or near relative of the Turberville family. The house and bridge never look better or more romantic than when their masses of grey masonry loom out against the evening sky. At such times the soft murmur of the night wind through the rushes that edge the shimmering water, and a farewell gleam of sunlight through a rift in the long low clouds, seem to symbolize the spirit of Tess.
One of the best-known members of this old Dorset family was George Turberville (1540-1610). He was secretary to Sir Thomas Randolf, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador in Scotland and Russia. He was the author of several books on Falconrie and hunting, but the one by virtue of which he ranks amongst the Elizabethan poets was the Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonnets, the second edition of which was published in 1567.
Contemporary with Turberville were Barnabe Googe, Thomas Churchyard the soldier and poetaster, Thomas Phaer, the wellnigh forgotten lawyer of Norwich, who translated the first nine books of the Æneid into fourteen-syllable verse. Other contemporaries were Sir Thomas Chaloner, a soldier and diplomatist, who wrote both prose and verse; and Arthur Golding, an industrious translator of Latin and French theological works.
Half a mile away is Bindon Abbey, of which the whole of the Abbey Church can be traced among the ruins. Large portions also remain of the sacristy, chapterhouse, and calefactory. The original foundation belonged to the Cistercian Order, and was established in 1172, and Professor Windle tells us that after it was surrendered to the king in 1539, "its twelve bells were stolen and appropriated by the churches of Wool, Coombe, and Fordington; a tale which is embodied in the local rhyme:
"Wool streams and Coombe wells,