The little old-world village of Corfe has also many architectural attractions in the way of projecting upper stories supported on columns, gabled houses, and the fine old manor house of the Dackombes. The ruined castle on its scarped hill is fascinating from every point of view. Whether flushed with the warm tints of sunset, veiled by opalescent haze, or looming stern and dark against a dull and stormy sky, it has always great pictorial charm, and a rugged beauty that suggests the embodiment of mediaevalism, its grandeur, pride, cruelty, arrogance, and death. In the Wessex novels Corfe Castle appears under its ancient name of Corvsgate, and it figures as such in _The Hand of Ethelberta_, a novel in the early editions of which it is also referred to as "Coomb Castle". Here came Ethelberta on the donkey she had hired at Knollsea (Swanage) on the occasion of the meeting of the Imperial Association, to which she had been invited by Lord Mountclere. "Accordingly Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the first archway of the outer ward.... The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a visit to the spot." Among these historic ruins and the fashionable company that had come to inspect them, Ethelberta disowned her donkey, the faithful steed that had served her so well; and here Lord Mountclere presented her to "Sir Cyril and Lady Blandsbury; Lady Jane Joy; also the learned Dr. Fore; Mr. Small, a talented writer, who never printed his works; the Reverend Mr. Brook, Rector; the Very Reverend Dr. Taylor, Dean; and the rather reverend Mr. Tinkleton, Nonconformist, who had slipped into the fold by chance." Five miles from Corfe Castle is Swanage, a town that is rapidly coming to the front as a fashionable watering-place. During the summer an excellent steamboat service connects it with Bournemouth and Weymouth, from both of which it is also easily reached by rail. The place has changed vastly since it served as a background for Ethelberta's life history, the place where she retired to marry Lord Mountclere, with Sol and the bridegroom's brother vainly endeavouring to reach "Knollsea" in time to stop the ceremony. Mr. Hardy writes: "Knollsea was a seaside village, lying snug within two headlands as between a finger and thumb. Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half, and had been to sea." "The row of rotten piles" to which the steamer was moored in the days when _The Hand of Ethelberta_ was penned, have long since been supplemented by a substantial pier, while in place of the boatmen and quarriers the inhabitants to-day seem to depend for a living on attending to the needs of the many tourists attracted to Swanage by its splendid climate and beautiful surroundings.