The Exeter Road begins to rise immediately on leaving Dorchester. Leaving the town by a fine avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a mile, the highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of a Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and open expanse of Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet by the stripling trees newly planted as a continuation of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four miles of road from the town are identical with the Roman _Via Iceniana_, the Icen Way or Icknield Street; and on the left rises, at the distance of a mile away, the sombre Roman earthwork of Maiden Castle crowning a hill forming with the earthen amphitheatre of Poundbury on the right hand, evidence, if all else in Dorchester were wanting, of the importance of the place at that remote period. At the fourth milestone the Exeter Road leaves that ancient military way, and, turning sharply to the left, goes down steeply, amid loose gravel and rain-runnels, to Winterborne Abbas, with an exceedingly awkward fork to the road to Weymouth on the left hand half-way down. Bold and striking views of the sullen ridge of Blackdown, with Admiral Hardy’s pillar on the ridge, are unfolded as one descends. XL Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints. Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure on the strip of grass on the left-hand side of the road attracts the wayfarer’s notice. This serves to protect from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of eight prehistoric stones called the ‘Broad Stone.’ [Sidenote: _THE RUSSELLS_] [Illustration: WINTERBORNE ABBAS.] The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick, lying down. A notice informs all who care to know that this group is constituted by the owner, according to the Act of Parliament, an ‘Ancient Monument.’ The cynically-minded might well say that the hundreds of similar ‘ancient monuments’ with which the neighbouring downs are peppered might also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade in iron fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every misshapen stone without a story is the New Idolatry. Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of the park of Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The place obtains its name from the little river Bride or Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to enter the sea at Burton (= ‘Bride-town’) Bradstock, eight miles away; passing in its course the two other places named from it, Little Bredy and Long Bredy.