The Isle of the Race
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face,
—is especially the district of The Well Beloved. It is a “wild, herbless, weather-worn promontory,” sour and treeless, with its beak-like point stretching out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. On the east side is an unexpected wooded dell, narrow and full of shade, on the summit of which rises Pennsylvania Castle—“Sylvania Castle” of the novel—a modern castellated house, built in 1800 for John Penn, Governor of the Island, who planted the trees around it.
Perhaps Mr. Hardy’s most inalienable possession is not the town but the wild, the “obscure, obsolete, superseded country,” a “tract in pain,” which, with one form but many names, stretches from Poole in the east to almost within sight of Dorchester on the west, from near Bere Regis in the north to Winfrith in the south, where it joins the heathland of the Isle of Purbeck. Though “Egdon” Heath is broken up into many tracts, into Morden and Bere, and Wool and Duddle and other heaths, it has an essential unity, and the attempts at cultivation have met with desperate and, as it were, voluntary resistance, so that the breaks into green strips of cornfield slip the memory on a back-look at that lonely land. It is a place inviolate and “unaltered as the stars,” a sweep of moorland, a tract of land covered with heather and bracken and furze, practically unbroken, where, “with the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow, themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance, even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pick-axe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.” In appearance its colours are by distance blended into the purple brown called, in The Return of the Native, “swart”—its “antique brown dress.” The swart, abrupt slopes appear to be “now rising into natural hillocks masquerading solemnly as sepulchral tumuli, now dipping into hollows, where the rain-water collects in marshy pools and keeps green the croziers and fully-opened fronds of the bracken much longer than the parched growths at the crests of these rises, and again spreading out into little scrubby plains.”[81]
Its quality is “prodigious, and so as to frighten one to be in it all alone at night,” as Pepys said of another solitary place—the great earthwork of Old Sarum. In Mr. Hardy’s words, “the face of the heath by its mere complexion adds half an hour to evening: it can, in like manner, retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.” It is an agent among agents, and what Wordsworth finds that nature becomes seen by man’s intellect, “an ebbing and a flowing mind.” Its lonely face, and the face of all solitary heath-lands, are interpreted for ever in The Return of the Native.
Sidney Heath 1901
Came Rectory.
The home of William Barnes.
SOME DORSET SUPERSTITIONS
By Hermann Lea