The station for Shaftesbury is Semley, just over the Wilts border, but it is proposed to take the longer journey to Gillingham, nearly four miles north-west, which is the next station on the South Western main line. This was once the centre of a great Royal "Chase," disforested by Charles I. It was also the historic scene of the Parliament called to elect Edward Confessor to the throne, and at "Slaughter Gate," just outside the town, Edmund Ironside saved Wessex for the Saxons by defeating Canute in 1016. The foundations of "King's Court Palace," between Ham Common and the railway, show the site of the hunting lodge of Henry III and the Plantagenet kings. Gillingham church was spoilt by a drastic early nineteenth-century restoration. The chancel belongs to the Decorated period. There are several interesting tombs and a memorial of a former vicar over the arch of the tower. He was dispossessed as a "malignant" during the Commonwealth, but returned at the Restoration. Gillingham cannot show many old houses and it has the appearance of a busy and flourishing manufacturing town of the smaller sort without any of the sordid accompaniments of such places. Its commercial activities--pottery and tile-making, breweries and flour mills, linen and silk manufacture, are mostly modern and have been fostered by the exceptional railway facilities. In its Grammar school, founded in 1526 by John Grice, it still has a first-rate educational establishment with the added value of a notable past, for here was educated Clarendon, the historian of the Great Rebellion, and several other famous men. [Illustration: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.] CHAPTER IX SALISBURY AND THE RIVERS There are three obvious ways of approaching Salisbury from Shaftesbury and the west: by railway from Semley; by the main road, part of the great trunk highway from London to Exeter via Yeovil; and by a kind of loop road that leaves this at Whitesand Cross and follows the valley of the Ebble between the lonely hills of Cranborne Chase and the long line of chalk downs that have their escarpment to the north, overlooking the Exeter road. These are all good ways, but there is even a fourth, only practicable for good walkers, that keeps to the top of the Downs until the Salisbury Race Course above Netherhampton is reached. This is a splendid route, with magnificent views to the left and north, and some to be lingered over in the opposite direction, and the finest of all when the slender needle of Salisbury spire pierces the blue ahead.