The Hardy Country. Charles G. Harper

      In the city the curfew bell still rings out from the old Guildhall every evening at eight o’clock, the sentimental survival of an old-time very real and earnest ordinance; the West Gate remains in the wall, hard by the fragments of the royal castle; down in the lower extremity of the city the bishop’s palace and castle of Wolvesey rears its shattered, ivy-covered walls: much in fine remains of Winchester’s ancient state.

      But now to make an end and to leave Winchester for Salisbury.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      WINCHESTER TO STOCKBRIDGE AND WEYHILL

      From Wintoncester to Melchester—that is to say, from Winchester to Salisbury—is twenty-three miles if you go by way of Stockbridge and Winterslow; if by the windings of the valley roads by King’s Somborne and Mottisfont, anything you like, from thirty upwards, for it is a devious route and a puzzling. We will therefore take the highway and for the present leave the byways severely alone.

      The high road goes in an ascent, a white and dusty streak, from Winchester to Stockbridge, the monotonous undulations of the chalky downs relieved here and there on the skyline by distant woods, and the wayside varied at infrequent intervals by murmurous coppices of pines, in whose sullen depths the riotous winds lose themselves in hollow undertones or absolute silences. But before the traveller comes thus out into the country, he must, emerging from the West Gate, win to the open through the recent suburb of Fulflood; for “Winton” as its natives lovingly name it, and as the old milestones on this very road agree to style it, has after many years of slumber waked to life again, and is growing. It is not a large nor a bustling suburb, this recent fringe upon Winchester’s ancient kirtle, and you are soon out of it and breasting the slope of Roebuck Hill. Here, looking back, the tragic outlines of the prison, with grey-slated roof and ugly octagonal red-brick tower, cut the horizon: an unlovely palimpsest set above the mediæval graciousness of the ancient capital of all England, but one that has become, in some sort, a literary landmark in these later years, for it figures in the last scene of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In the last chapter of that strenuous romance you shall read how from the western gate of the city two persons walked on a certain morning with bowed heads and gait of grief. They were Angel Clare, the husband, and ’Liza-Lu, the sister of poor Tess, come to witness the hoisting of the black flag upon the tower of that inimical building. They witnessed this proof that “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Æschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess,” not from this Stockbridge road, but from the first milestone on the road to Romsey, whence the city may be seen “as in an isometric drawing” set down in its vale of Itchen, “the broad cathedral tower with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St. Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the college, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St. Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.”

      Turning away from the contemplation of these things, and overpassing the crest of Roebuck Hill and its sponsorial inn, the road dips down suddenly into the tiny village of Weeke, whose name is sometimes, with romantic mediævalism, spelled “Wyke.” For myself, did I reside there, I would certainly have my notepaper stamped “Wyke next Winchester,” and find much satisfaction therein. Wyke consists, when fully summed up, of a characteristic rural Hampshire church, with little wooden belfry and walls of flint and red brick, of some scattered farms and of a roadside pond, a great prim red-bricked house of Georgian date, and a row of pollard limes on a grassy bank overlooking the road.

      And then? Then the road goes on, past more uplands, divided into fields whose smooth convexity gives the appearance of even greater size than they possess: every circumstance of their featureless rotundity disclosed from the highway across the sparse hedges, reduced by free use of the billhook to the smallest semblance of a hedge, consistent with the preservation of a boundary. Wayside trees are to seek, and the wayfarer pants in summer for lack of shade, and in winter is chilled to the bone, as the winds roam free across Worthy downs.

      Such is the way up Harestock Hill; not so grim as perhaps this description may convey, but really very beautiful in its sort, with a few cottages topping the rise where a signpost points a road to Littleton and Crawley, and where the white-topped equatorial of an observatory serves to emphasise a wholly unobstructed view over miles of sky. It is only from vast skyfields such as this that one hears the song of the skylark on those still summer days when the sky is of the intensest azure blue and the bees are busy wherever the farmer has left nooks for the wild-flowers to grow. On such days the dark woods of Lainston, crowning the distant ridge, lend a welcome shade. Fortunately they are easy of access, for the road runs by them and an inconspicuous stile leads directly into one of the rook-haunted alleys of those romantic avenues with which the place is criss-crossed. A slightly marked footpath through undergrowth thickly spread with the desiccated leaves of autumns past, where the hedgehog hides and squirrels and wild life of every kind abound, leads by a crackling track of dried twigs and the empty husks of last year’s beech-nuts to another stile and across a byroad into another of the five grand avenues leading to Lainston House, a romantically gloomy, but architecturally very fine, late seventeenth-century mansion embowered amid foliage, with a ruined manorial chapel close at hand in a darkling corner amid the close-set mossy boles of the trees. The spot would form an ideal setting for one of the Wessex tales, and indeed has a part in a sufficiently queer story in actual life. That tale is now historic—how Walpole’s “Ælia Lælia Chudleigh” was in 1745 privately married, in this now roofless chapel, to Captain Hervey, a naval officer who afterwards succeeded to the title of third Earl of Bristol. “Miss Chudleigh,” however, she still continued to be at Court. Twenty-five years later she was the heroine of a bigamy case, having married, while her first husband was living, Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. This was that lively lady who, Walpole tells us, “went to Ranelagh as Iphigenia, but as naked as Andromeda.”

      The ruined chapel has long been in that condition. Its font lies, broken and green with damp, on the grass, and the old ledger-stones that cover the remains of Chudleighs and Dawleys, successive owners of the manor, are cracked and defaced. The “living” of Lainston is worth £60 per annum, and goes with that of the neighbouring village of Sparsholt, the vicar holding it by virtue of preaching here once a year. Stress of weather occasionally obliges him to perform this duty under the shelter of an umbrella, when his congregation, like that of the saint who preached to the birds, is composed chiefly of rooks and jackdaws. But their responses are not always well timed, and the notes of the jackdaw sound uncommonly like the scoffings of the ribald.

      One emerges from Lainston woods only to perceive this