Places associated with Thomas Hardy near to Chiselborough

by Colin Sherrard

The geographical area known as the ‘Yeovil Scarplands’ sweep in an arc from the Mendip Hills around the southern edge of Somerset Levels and Moors to the edge of the Blackdowns. As in our own Chiselborough, there are small hamlets and villages and the use of local stone in the older buildings is a unifying feature within the area. The soft yellow of Ham Hill Stone is widespread but there are also cream and pink-coloured limestones and sandstones.

The southern region of the Yeovil Scarplands in which we delight to live is sandwiched between two fantastic Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the Dorset AONB and the Blackdown Hills AONB. The boundary of the former coincides with the Dorset / Somerset border, just a short cycle ride from Chiselborough.

Dorset as a whole is the setting for the majority of the novels and short stories by the great Thomas Hardy. Just a few miles from us, within the AONB, there are many sights and sites of interest to Hardy afficionados. To me, even in this modern era, there are distinguishing features of countryside and vernacular architecture which transition quite distinctly at the Somerset / Dorset boundary and highlight the particular beauty, character and ‘Dorsetness’ of Hardy’s writing.

To highlight a few nearby…..

‘The Woodlanders’ (1887)

Wigmaker Percomb, making his way to Little Hintock (Melbury Bubb) to procure Marty South’s tresses, had indirectly entered upon the scene (Long Ash Lane, now the A37 !) from a stile hard by:

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by more dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of which is with what might be, probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.

Short story ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ (1884)

The north road from Casterbridge (Dorchester) is tedious and lonely, especially in winter-time. Along a part of its course it connects with Long-Ash Lane, a monotonous track without a village or hamlet for many miles, and with very seldom a turning. Unapprized wayfarers who are too old, or too young, or in other respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but who, nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully ahead, 'Once at the top of that hill, and I must surely see the end of Long-Ash Lane!' But they reach the hilltop, and Long-Ash Lane stretches in front as mercilessly as before.

They were travelling in a direction that was enlivened by no modern current of traffic, the place of Darton's pilgrimage being an old-fashioned village--one of the Hintocks (several villages of that name, with a distinctive prefix or affix, lying thereabout)--where the people make the best cider and cider-wine in all Wessex, and where the dunghills smell of pomace instead of stable refuse as elsewhere. The lane was sometimes so narrow that the brambles of the hedge, which hung forward like anglers' rods over a stream, scratched their hats and curry-combed their whiskers as they passed. Yet this neglected lane had been a highway to Queen Elizabeth's subjects and the cavalcades of the past. Its day was over now, and its history as a national artery done for ever.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

At a cottage (now named after her) just west of Evershead (Evershot) Church Tess stopped for refreshment on both her outward and return journeys to meet Angel’s family at Emminster (Beaminster). On her return journey the cottager describes a ‘ranty preacher’ nearby to whom the villagers have gone to listen. This is Alec D’Urberville after his short-lived conversion and represents the unfortunate Tess’s re-acquaintance with him.

At the Cross-in-Hand stone on the Holywell to Minterne Magna road high above the Vale of Blackmore, just west of High Stoy, Alec made Tess swear on the stone that she would never tempt him again. She later found out from a local shepherd that the stone signifies a bad omen. The actual purpose and origin of the stone is unknown.

Of all spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn …. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.

The nearby Inn the ‘Sow and Acorn’ (‘Acorn Inn’) is also mentioned in ‘Interlopers at the Knap’. Philip Hall returns destitute from Australia and on his way to King’s Hintock calls in at the Sow and Acorn to see an old friend.

Poem ‘Life and Death at Sunrise’ (1867)

At Dogbury Gate (now on the A352):

With a shouldered basket and flagon,

A man meets the one with the waggon,

And both men halt of long use.

‘Well’, the waggoner says, ‘what’s the news ?’

-‘Tis a boy this time. You’ve just met the doctor trotting back,

She’s doing very well. And we think we shall call him ‘”Jack”’.

‘And what have you got covered there?’

He nods to the waggon and mare.

‘Oh, a coffin for old John Thinn:

We are just going to put him in.’

‘-So he’s gone at last. He always had a good constitution’

‘-He was ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution.’

Poem ‘The Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ (1903)

Standing alone at a high point on the main A30 halfway between the small Somerset towns of Chard and Crewkerne, the aptly named Windwhistle Inn, is one of the halting places of the four characters in Thomas Hardy’s sad narrative poem about a deceitful woman.

Lone inns we loved, my man and I,

My man and I;

'King's Stag', 'Windwhistle' high and dry,

'The Horse' on Hintock Green,

The cosy house at Wynyard's Gap,

'The Hut', renowned on Bredy Knap,

And many another wayside tap

Where folk might sit unseen.