The village of Marnhull is situated in the Vale of Blackmoor, six miles from Shaftesbury. It is the "Marlott" of Hardy's novel _Tess_, the village home of the Durbeyfield family. It contains little of interest. The Pure Drop Inn, where "there's a very pretty brew in tap," may be the "Crown." Here John Durbeyfield kept up Tess's wedding day "as well as he could, and stood treat to everybody in the parish, and John's wife sung songs till past eleven o'clock." There is a Pure Drop Inn at Wooten Glanville and another at Wareham; one of these most probably suggested the name. The fine church is of the eighteenth-century Gothic (1718), and it has often been regarded by strangers as being three hundred years earlier. The font bowl, late Norman, was unearthed in 1898, also the rood staircase and squint and the piscina. Some ancient alabaster effigies, ascribed to the middle of the fifteenth century and representing a man in armour and two female figures, are placed on a cenotaph in the north aisle. Some authorities claim that they represent Thomas Howard, Lord Bindon, and his wives, and are of a later date. Nash Court, a little to the north, is a fine Elizabethan mansion, formerly the seat of the Husseys. CHAPTER III THE VALE OF BLACKMOOR My motor cycle had carried me without a hitch from London to Melbury Abbas--then Fortune scowled on me. With ridiculous ease I had rolled along the roads all day, and I had been tempted to ride through the warm autumnal darkness till I came to the Half Moon Inn at Shaftesbury, where the roads fork away to Melbury Hill, Blandford and Salisbury. But a few hundred yards out of Melbury Abbas, and then Fortune's derisive frown. From a deceptive twist in the road I dashed into a gully, and my machine bumped and rattled and groaned like a demon caught in a trap. It performed other antics with which this chronicle has no concern, and then refused to move an inch farther. But the song of a nightingale in a grove of elms near the road made full amends for my ill luck! It is beautiful to hear his sobbing, lulling notes when one is alone on a dark night, and Shelley was not far wrong in styling it voluptuous. "I heard the raptured nightingale Tell from yon elmy grove his tale Of jealousy and love, In thronging notes that seem'd to fall As faultless and as musical As angels' strains above. So sweet, they cast on all things round A spell of melody profound: They charm'd the river in his flowing, They stay'd the night-wind in its blowing."