Chapter 41

The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify-descents, although, to be sure, there are sudden curves in the road which it behoves the cyclist to take slowly, for they may develop anything in the way of traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine advance-guard of a travelling circus.
BRIDPORT

At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border, the country already begins to lose something of the Dorset character, and to look like the county of junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is{291} difficult to say what character it possesses, for its featureless High Street is redeemed only from tediousness by the belfry of the Town Hall which, with the fine westward view, including the conical height of Colmer’s Hill and the high table-land of Eype to the left, serves to compose the whole into something remotely resembling an effect.

Bridport is a town which would very much like to be on the sea, but is, as a matter of fact, situated rather over a mile from it. Just where the little river Bredy runs out and the sea comes banging furiously in, is a forlorn concourse of houses sheltering abjectly one behind the other, called variously Bridport Harbour and West Bay. This is the real port, but it matters little, or nothing at all, by what name you call the place; it remains more like a Port Desolation.

Bridport almost distinguished itself in 1651 by the fugitive Charles the Second having been nearly captured at the ‘George Inn’ by the Harbour, an ostler recognising his face, which, it must be conceded, was one that once seen could scarce have been mistaken when again met with. Charles was then trying to reach the coast after the disastrous battle of Worcester, and it is quite certain that if Cromwell’s troopers had laid their hands on him, there would never have been any Charles the Second in English history.

The tragical comedy of the Stuarts throws a glamour over the Exeter Road to its very end. The fugitive Charles, fleeing before the inquisitive stare of the ostler, is a striking picture; and so, thirty-four years later, is the coming of his partly acknowledged son, the Duke of Monmouth, to upset James the{292} Second. Bridport was seized, and one of the ‘Monmouth men’ slew Edward Coker, gentleman, of Mappowder, on the 14th of June 1685, as the memorial tablet to that slaughtered worthy in Bridport parish church duly recounts. For their share in the rebellion, a round dozen of Bridport men were hanged before the eyes of their neighbours, ‘stabbed,’ as the ancient slang phrase has it, ‘with a Bridport dagger.’ The ghastly imagery of this saying derives from the old-time local manufacture of rope, twine, and string, and the cultivation of hemp in the surrounding country. Rope-and twine-walks still remain in the town.

Leaving Bridport behind, the coach passengers by this route presently came to its most wildly romantic part; only it is sad to reflect that the travellers of a hundred years ago had not the slightest appreciation of this kind of thing.
Through Bridport’s stony lanes our way we take,
And the proud steep descend to Morcombe’s lake.

Thus the poet Gay, but he writes from the horseman’s point of view, and if he had bruised his bones along this road in the lurching Exeter Fly, his tone would probably have been less breezy. Travellers, indeed, looked upon hills with loathing, and upon solitude (notwithstanding the poets of the time) with disgust; therefore it may well be supposed that when they came to the rugged scenery around Morecomblake, and the next village Chideock (called locally ‘Chiddick’), they did not enjoy themselves.
A ROYAL FUGITIVE

Here Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, with many{293} lesser eminences, frown down upon the steep highway on every side, and render the scenery nothing less than mountainous, so that strangers in these parts, overcome with ‘terrour’ and apprehensions of worse to come, wished themselves safe housed in the roadside inn of Morecomblake, whose hospitable sign gave, and still gives, promise of good entertainment.
Image unavailable: CHIDEOCK.
CHIDEOCK.

The run down into Charmouth from this point is a breakneck one. At this remote seaside place, in that same year, 1651, Charles the Second had another narrow escape. Travelling in bye-ways from the disastrous field of Worcester on horseback, with his staunch friends, Lord Wilmot and Colonel Wyndham, arrangements had been made with the master of a trading vessel hailing from Lyme, to put in at Charmouth with a boat in the stillness of the night. But they had reckoned without taking into account either the simplicity of the sailor, or the inquisitiveness{294} of his wife, who wormed the secret out of him, of his being engaged in this mysterious affair with a party of strangers. All the country was ringing with the escape of Charles from Worcester and the hue and cry after him, and the woman rightly guessed whom these people might be. She effectually prevented her husband from putting in an appearance by the threat that if he made any such attempt she would inform the magistrate.
Image unavailable: SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.
SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.

Wearied with watching for the promised boat, the King’s companions reluctantly had to make Charmouth the resting-place of the party for the night. In the morning it was found that the King’s horse had cast a shoe. When it was taken to the blacksmith, that worthy remarked the quaint circumstance that the three others had been replaced in three different counties, and one of these three in Worcestershire.{295}
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

When Charles heard that awkward discovery he was off in haste, for if a rural blacksmith was clever enough to discover so much, it was quite possible that he might apply his knowledge in a very embarrassing manner.

The little band had not hurried away a moment too soon, for the ostler of the inn (what Sherlock Holmes’s all these Dorsetshire folks were, to be sure!) who had already arrived independently at the conclusion that this was King Charles, had in the meanwhile gone to the Rev. Bartholomew Wesley, a local Roundhead divine, and told him his thoughts. Thence to the inn, where legends tell us the landlady gave Mr. Wesley a fine full-flavoured piece of her mind, and so eventually to the ears of a captain of horse, this wondrous news spread. Horsemen scoured the country; clergyman returned home to think over the loyal landlady’s abuse; ostler, probably dismissed, had leisure to curse his officiousness; while King and companions were off, whip and spur, to Bridport, whence, after that alarming recognition at the Harbour, to Broadwinsor.
Image unavailable: INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.
INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.

This historic Charmouth inn is still existing. The ‘Anchor,’ as it is now known, was for many years the ‘Queen’s Arms,’ but although the sign has thus{296} been altered and half of the building partitioned off as a separate house, the interior remains very much the same as it was then, and the original rough, stone-flagged passages, dark panelling, and deep-embrasured windows add a convincing touch to the story of the King’s flight through England with a price on his head.

For the rest, Charmouth, which stands where the tiny river Char empties itself into the sea, consists of one long street of mutually antagonistic houses, of all shapes, sizes, and materials, and is the very exemplar of a fishing village turned into an inchoate seaside resort. But a sunny, sheltered, and pleasing spot.

On leaving Charmouth, the road begins to ascend again, and leaves Dorsetshire for Devon through a tunnel cut in the hillside, called the ‘New Passage,’ coming in four miles to ‘Hunter’s Lodge Inn,’ picturesquely set amid a forest of pine trees. From this point it is two and a half miles on to Axminster, a town which still gives a name to a particular make of carpets, although since 1835 the local factories have been closed and the industry transferred to Wilton, in Wiltshire. It was in 1755 that the industry was started here.
SHUTE HILL

There is one fine old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ at Axminster, with huge rambling stables and interminable corridors, in which one ought to meet the ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road. But they are shy. There should, in fact, be many ghosts in this old town of many memories; and so there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ‘mind’s eye.’ But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ, and it is only to a vivid imagination that the streets{297} are repeopled with the excited peasantry who, in that fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of the Duke of Monmouth, whom ‘the Lord raised vp’ as the still existing manuscript narrative of an Axminster dissenting minister says, to champion the Protestant religion—with what results we already know.

Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded roads from Axminster by the river Axe to Axmouth, Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues inland.