From the castle a most charming walk through a wood and down over
grassy fields leads to Arish Mell Gap, a narrow bay shut in by high
grass-covered downs, and near which is situated the Monastery Farm,
founded in 1794, for Trappist monks, by Thomas Weld and his son, who
afterwards attained the dignity of cardinal.
From Lulworth the enterprising pedestrian can find an abundance of
magnificent coast walks by Worbarrow Tout, the Kimmeridge Ledges, and
St. Aldhelm's Head. The walk towards the last-named is one of the
wildest solitude, the only living creatures being the white sea-birds,
and the only sounds the murmur of the waves as they surge round the
bleak pinnacles of rock. Here and there, where the track-way turns at
an angle, we catch a glimpse of vast cavernous recesses, some natural
and some the work of men's hands, where ponderous masses have been
riven away from the face of the cliff, and tumbled headlong into the
water, where they lie amid the swirling eddies of the tide.
It is impossible to describe adequately the manifold beauties of the
Purbeck coast line, which concentrates in itself all the elements of
the bleak and the picturesque, pastoral valleys and grassy downs that
end seawards in great walls of barren rock and masses of fallen cliff.
Some old muzzle-loading guns lying on the shore between Winspit and
Seacombe mark the site of the wreck of the _Halsewell_, an East
Indiaman that was driven ashore here with great loss of life on
January 6, 1786.
While at Lulworth the reader of Mr. Hardy's romances will not fail to
visit Wool, and the old manor house of the Turbervilles wherein was
enacted one of the most dramatic scenes in English fiction. Crossing
the old bridge of "five yawning arches" we stand before "Wellbridge
House", where Tess and Angel Clare came to spend their honeymoon.
"Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!" was the bridegroom's
greeting, as his bride passed the threshold of the house. At the head
of the stairway are the two panels on which are depicted the portraits
of those ancestors, the sight of which caused Tess to shudder. The
house itself is an interesting specimen of ancient domestic
architecture, from which in the gloom of the evening the phantom coach
and four drives out of the gateway; but this ghostly equipage is
visible only to a member or near relative of the Turberville family.
The house and bridge never look better or more romantic than when
their masses of grey masonry loom out against the evening sky. At such
times the soft murmur of the night wind through the rushes that edge
the shimmering water, and a farewell gleam of sunlight through a rift
in the long low clouds, seem to symbolize the spirit of Tess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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