THE MAP OF ENGLAND

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 236, 6 October 1938, Page 8

THE MAP OF ENGLAND

New Names Written by Hardy

and Blackmore

JT is pleasant to wander through the ancient towns, along the leafy lanes, and across the heaths of Hardy’s Dorset, the country which he has renamed Wessex, says a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. Hardy was born in Wessex, in a thatched cottage at Higher Bockhampton (where he wrote “Under the Greenwood Tree” and “Far from the Madding Crowd”), just on the point where “Egdon Heath” begins, and a granite monument has been erected to his memory. He was brought up in Wessex. He tramped its many miles as an ecclesiastical architect intent on the restoration or repair of many a beautiful old church that was afterwards to appear in his novels. He endowed it with names that are more to his readers than those on the current map. Dorchester is the “Casterbridge” of the Hardy novels, the place above all others where his folk are found, in many famous stories. It has changed in the 2000 years since the Romans settled there, though the lie of its streets remains, and the fair, which was a day to come, a da}* to stay, and a day to go home, has shrunk to strictly commercial proportions. But Michael Henchard, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene still walk its streets. To lovers of Hardy, the chief hotel is that in which Michael Henchard, the “Mayor of Casterbridge,” gave his great public dinner to “the gentle people and such-like leading folk, wi’ the Mayor (himself) in the chair.” So on the Maumbury Ring, where the Romans once held sport; but what is that compared to the fact that in Maumbury Ring the meeting between Henchard and his wife took place, after twenty years of separation? One may easily find the avenue leading to the “Chestnut Walk,” where Farfrae, armed with the borrowed rickclothes, gave his feast in opposition to that of Mayor Henchard in the neighbouring Poundbury. One may stand on the bride over the Frome where Maybold lingered after hearing of the approaching marriage of Dick Dewey to Fancy Day. One may see in a narrow street the blind arch with the battered keystone mask which the novelist placed on Lucetta’s house; and in the market place surely that is Gabriel Oak, standing on hire after he had sunk “from his modest elevation as a pastoral king into the very slim pits of Siddim.” “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” must be sought elsewhere; “Talbothays,” where she worked as a dairymaid under “Dairyman Dick,” cannot be identified, for it was a composite invention of Hardy’s, though Norris Hill Farm comes very near it; and any dairy in the Blackmore Vale must serve. Old Durbeyfield is still walking there. At Stinstead (“Mellstock”) Tess’s marriage took place. At the Turber-

ville Manor near Woolbridge (“Well, bridge”) she spent her brief honey, moon with Angel Clare. He placed hej in the abbot’s coffin at Bindon Abbey and at mysterious Stonehenge, with her capture at dawn by the officers oj the law, her pathetic story drawi swiftly towards its close. Wimborne also comes into Hardy’j novels, and for Americans the quainl old town has a further interest ir the “chained library’.’ in the Minslei containing the copy of Raleigh’s “History of the World” with a hole burned in it, tradition says, by Matthew Prior the poet, who was born in the town Weymouth is a delightful place foi Hardy admirers, too, especially if thes have read “The Trumpet Major” and “The Dynasts.” The market place a 1 Sherborne (“Sherton Abbas”) ij pleasant to readers of “The Woodlanders.” Salisbury and Shaftesburj (“Melchester” and “Shaston”) are well worth a call it for no other object than to see the place associated with “Jud« the Obscure.” The question often is asked: Wen the Doones real people? and the asser* tion often is made that Blackmore in* vented them, and that it was onlj after “Lorna Doone” was published that they were talked about in Somerset and Devon. Be this as it may, thej were very probably cattle-lifters and freebooters, known on the country, side before “Lorna” was born; and Blackmore admitted later, when questioned about their identity, that a certain article in a magazine had first put him on the track of these fascinating scoundrels. Blackmore knew Exmoor as well as Hardy knew Wessex. Exmoor was an ideal setting for his story, and those who study it on the spot will see how he has not only captured its physical features, but also the atmosphere. An excellent starting place for seeing the Lorna Doone coantry is Porlock, where at the Spit and Gridiron Jan Ridd bought the powder from Mr. Pook; and so on to Oare Church, where Lome and Jan Ridd stood before the altar to be married and black-hearted Carver Doone at the window fired the shot that almost killed her. Half a mile away from the church, you are at Malsmead, which some point to as the entrance to the real Doone Valley, where the Badgery Water joins the Lyn. It is hard by “Plover’s Barrows,” the home of the Ridds, and after a “good step,” as they say, you come to the “long pale side of water," somewhat smaller than in Blackmore’s imagination, up which little Jan Ridd made toilsome ascent, saying the Lord’s Prayer as he went, to find himself for the first time in the presence of Lorna, The district of the “Wizard’s Slough," connected with the end of Carver Doone, and “Warren’s Farm,” wherf Simon Carfax slew several of thr Doone family, is to be seen.