By 2PM – again, a half-day late! -- we left Winchester to explore the Land of Thomas Hardy. (Not completely sorry to say goodbye to the one-way streets and pedestrian walkways of that lovely city!)
This was the one leg of our trip which was not a straight shot from Place X to Place Y. Hardy was an architect and lover of landscape, as well as a writer. He knew the cities and villages, the churches and pubs in a 180° arc from his coastal city of Dorchester. As he wrote, he gave each city and town a fictional name and ultimately created, like Faulkner, a fictional county (actually a territory encompassing three or four southern counties) which he named Wessex, after Alfred’s lost kingdom. So our goal for this afternoon was to wander (with the help of Gladys) through the valleys and villages of Wessex; ultimately, we hoped to arrive at Dorchester, explore Hardy’s homes, and finally arrive at the seashore town of Lyme Regis for the night.
At the beginning we were on A roads, driving through Hampshire and Wiltshire; we were actually surprised to pass a casual football field’s length from Stonehenge, but we did not stop since we had those precious tickets for Sunday morning. Soon the route became narrow and windy, roads squeezed by hedgerows and topped by ancient trees meeting overhead. I persist in believing that humans borrowed the idea for Gothic cathedral ceilings from the natural arches created by the embrace of two trees, branches entwined …. If I had not spent my time digging my fingernails into the upholstery of the Kia every time Al cut too close to the left hedge wall to avoid an oncoming car, I would have taken 20 pictures of these glorious, arched-ceiled lanes.
After more than an hour of sinuous road, we arrived at the town of Shaftesbury. Our goal was Gold Hill….an extremely steep cobblestone walk past fairy tale cottages. At the top, a lovely café, The Salt Cellar. I think I remember having a delicious Panini and tea, but the view was all… I asked one young waiter whether we were looking at Blackmoor Vale (Tess’ territory). His answer: “As far as the eye can see is Blackmoor Vale.” Squares of green and golden fields with ribbons of hedgerows.
In Tess, Hardy describes the valley this way: “Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine..… with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.”
Hardy wrote/published this in 1891. The Vale has not changed. At one point an ominous dark cloud loomed over the Vale – incredibly appropriate, given the novel’s naturalistic predisposition.
From Shaftesbury, we wound down and do3wn and down through the valley to the tiny village of Marnhull (pronounced “Marnull” by the locals). I had thought, from some online research, that we might find the cottage that was the inspiration for Tess’ cottage, but after driving through the village several times, we finally spoke to a lady who pointed us to the Crown Inn. The Crown is a lovely pub with a newly renovated bed and breakfast, but, more to the point, one end of it was the original Pure Drop Inn, the local pub where Mr. D’Urbeyfield went to celebrate his newly-found nobility, where his wife went to bring him home, becoming just as intoxicated in the process, with the result that Tess, having brought them both home, wound up making the delivery that her dad was too drunk to undertake, with the disastrous results which ultimately propelled her into her tragedy. At 3:30, the Pure Drop was empty, and Chloe, the pub manager, kindly gave us a tour and allowed us to take pictures. Old wooden tables and booth benches, a huge fireplace, and a priest’s hole tunneling all the way to the church. The plaque we read told of priests holed up for days, cold and hungry and cramped, petrified to move for fear that a piece of brick or plaster would fall and alert the Protestant officials who were hunting for Catholic priests – which would have resulted in death, not only for the priest, but also for the keepers of the pub as well. Since Chloe had been so welcoming and informative, it was only appropriate that I should indulge in a half pint of Badger’s at the bar. I lifted this half pint to Thomas Hardy, to Tess, and to the fugitive priests.
We then stopped briefly at the church – St. George’s turned St. Gregory’s. I wanted to wander in the graveyard, remembering the parson’s refusal to allow Tess to bury her baby there. Thin, leaning gravestones under trees which cast green shadows. I’m guessing that since the time Tess was written, many “holy” people have been buried beyond the original graveyard limits, yes, even in the originally “unconsecrated” outskirts where, in the novel, Tess was forced to bury her illegitimate child.
It should be apparent by now that I connect very deeply with the settings of stories, even if they are fiction (in fact, last night, 8/31/11, I pulled out Mary Stewart’s Touch Not the Cat again, simply to find her descriptions of riding narrow lanes with hedgerows at 5AM …. Incredibly accurate, of course!). I have usually been able to conjure the presence of saints, authors, and assorted other real people in their home settings. I suppose it may seem weird that I do that with fictional characters as well. Very weird, except to me, that I looked for the desolate spot on the edge of the graveyard where Tess was “allowed” to bury Sorrow. But as I have read Hardy, I have come to understand that he deliberately set his fictional characters in real places. He did on location research. He visited. He chose. He intended that those places, despite a change of name, would hold the spirits of his characters. He was terribly successful, at least from the perspective of a literary pilgrim who can view a valley, caress a table top, or inhale a garden, and touch the spirits of human beings, real and imaginary.
