Crowning the seaward hill of Saint Catherine, that rises in terraced slopes populous with rabbits, is an ancient chapel, small but immensely strong, built to withstand the winds that blow with tremendous violence from the sea. It commands wide-spreading views, to Portland on the one hand, to Lyme Regis and the Cliffs of Beer on the other, and inland stretch the rolling hills and wide downs of this impressive county. How to seize the characteristics of Dorsetshire when you have fared from end to end of the county only along the bold and cliff-girt scenery of its seaward side, from Purbeck Hills, by the Abbotsbury uplands, to the impressive heights of Golden-cap and Stonebarrow? How to pluck out the heart of its mystery and weird beauty when its heaths and inland vales are matters of reading only? Yet it should seem that Dorset is a Hampshire purged of mere pensiveness, more varied, more dramatic than its eastern neighbour, with a drama that rises to moving tragedies--fit scenes for that blood-drowned rebellion that began upon the beach at Lyme, and so surged through pastoral Somerset to be finally quelled by Monmouth’s capture in the vicinity of Wimborne. But a mile or so apart from those trim modern excrescences of the sea-board, the “watering-places,” risen and rising, the stolid county folk (Teutons chiefly) lead lives little touched with modernism in the fat valleys folded between the swelling shoulders of camp-crowned hills, whereon the Romans and the Britons, the Celt, the Saxon, and the Dane, have waged wars of extermination. Here, in that dim Wessex, were fought many battles in hand-to-hand fashion, and the sublimated memory of them, blurred and fantastic, lingers yet in traditions, even in turns of speech and place-names. The Dorset folk have a name for the rich red bloom of the wallflower that seems significant. They call them “bloody warriors.” Before we left Abbotsbury we visited the Swannery, where many hundreds of swans, the property of the Earl of Ilchester, are kept. There has been a swannery here for over eight hundred years, and, in addition, a decoy for wild duck.