Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 14

A solitary fragment of the submerged tract which once occupied the entire dry bed of the English Channel still stretches in a long line due south of Weymouth to the Bill of Portland, and afterwards runs out for some distance under the sea as a submarine ridge, making for the opposite and corresponding French uplands of the Côtentin and the Cap la Hogue. Though now united to the mainland by a bold curve of accumulated shingle, the Chesil Bank, this solid mass of oolitic limestone nevertheless rightly deserves its ordinary popular name of “the Island”; for its three sides are all alike worn down into precipitous cliffs by the action of the waves; and the singular causeway which now joins its western face to the Dorsetshire coast some ten miles lower down, though itself of immemorial antiquity, does not date back by any means so far in geological time as the original isolation of the great triangular rock which forms its terminus. In other words, the modern peninsula was once a real island, and its reunion with the mainland is in fact a matter of comparatively recent physical rearrangement. Seen from the centre of the great West Bay, at Seaton or Lyme Regis, Portland even now resumes its insular appearance; for the Chesil Bank is there quite lost below the curve of the horizon, and the huge block of stone stands out against the sky-line in shape like a long wedge, with its high blunt end turned towards the mainland, and its sloping point running out seaward till it loses itself imperceptibly in the surging waters of the Race. From this point of view its outline suggests to fancy the notion of a gigantic basking whale, with his back just raised above the sea-level, but with his humped neck well elevated above the calm surface. Looked at from the Nothe directly opposite, however, the island recalls rather the rock of Monaco, but on a far larger scale—projected farther afield into a much grimmer, grayer, and more stormy sea. Here the highest portion of the mass, nearly 500 feet above high-tide mark, exactly faces the spectator, who thus looks down on it at once in its biggest and at least characteristic aspect. The tapering shape, which slopes so paradoxically from the land side to seaward, instead of from the sea-cliff to landward, as in most other promontories, is indeed entirely lost in this, the most familiar view from the neighbourhood of Weymouth; it is only from the two comparatively unfrequented bays to east and west, towards Lulworth and Charmouth, that the real contour of the huge slanting rock is seen to anything like advantage.

The reason why this solitary block of solid stone has survived the whole of the neighbouring lowland is not far to seek, from the geological point of view. Portland consists of an outlying mass of harder oolitic strata, which have resisted the waves of the Channel, while the softer surrounding clays and greensands, whose relics form the cliffs and slopes of the two lateral bays, have all been gradually washed away on either side by the ceaseless action of the water. Moreover, the Portland beds themselves are tilted up in an inclined plane, from the sea landward, so that the surface follows the natural dip of the strata; and the same beds are found at pretty nearly the same depth below the soil in all parts of the island. Indeed the whole of this Dorsetshire country is everywhere seamed and traversed by numerous faults, which have thrown up the rocks in adjoining places at very different angles. The southern half of Portland still retains something of its primitive appearance: a poor, bleak, barren, wind-swept plateau, destitute of tree or hedge, and divided by bare stone walls into small rectangular fields, where the black-faced sheep which become famous as Portland mutton find a scanty herbage under the shelter of these frequent artificial barriers against the omnipresent wind. Each wall is built of thin slate-like layers of stone from the unmerchantable beds (to adopt the local language): and instead of a gate, it is pierced by a broad gap filled in loosely with large round boulders, which can be easily removed by the hand to let in and out the flock or the farmer’s cart. Stone, in fact, forms the substratum and the whole raison d’être of Portland; it fulfils every function which would elsewhere be fulfilled by wood or any other possible material. Here and there one comes across a little hopeless-looking cultivation; but the mass of the plateau is down in rock, and the greater part of the population lives entirely by exporting the island piecemeal. The entire northern and higher half is a succession of quarries and stoneworks. The very summit of the slope is crowned by the ramparts of the Verne fortifications; and beyond this spot the convicts from Portland Prison are now busily engaged in levelling the surrounding inequalities, so as to give the guns of Fort Victoria a clean sweep across the entire peninsula. Farther on come the free-labour quarries, where acre after acre has been stripped of its useless surface-strata—the dirt-bed and the other Purbeck layers—in order to arrive at the good building-stone below. A large part of the island has already been shipped away to London and elsewhere: and innumerable tramways in a perplexing network are still employed in carrying off ship-loads of what yet remains. Even before the great excavations began to score its soil, Portland must have presented the dreariest and bleakest panorama in the British Isles. At the present day, when prison, military works, and quarries have done their worst, it is one of the most ugly sights to be seen in the world. Of course it attracts accordingly vast numbers of excursionists and sight-seers, who spend a happy day in toiling up to the summit of the highest hill in order to see the wretched prisoners working at their endless task under the charge of armed warders.

Repulsive as the island is, however, every part of it possesses a singular and melancholy interest of its own. To the south end, near the Bill and the lighthouses, where the ridge stretches seaward in the dangerous submerged bank known by the suggestive title of the Shambles, no quarrying has yet marred the native grimness of its rugged and honeycombed cliffs. Here, too, the Portland spurge and other peculiar wild flowers which once covered the island still linger on scantily in a few sheltered or unnoticed crannies. On the east side, again, the ivy-covered pentagonal tower of Rufus’s Castle, a rude Norman keep, caps an isolated block of stone and overlooks a fine tumbled mass of broken undercliff, with a craggy shore on either side and a magnificent view across the Weymouth bay to the white chalk bluffs of Lulworth and the jutting promontory of St. Aldhelm’s Head. These undesecrated spots fortunately lie well away from the beaten track; and hither, accordingly, the happy-day order of excursionists seldom penetrates. Even the central plateau itself is not without a certain fascination of a dismal sort. On its unverdured summit stand half-a-dozen considerable hamlets (for the whole population numbers more than 10,000 persons), each grouped around its own spring of water, and completely regardless of shade or shelter. Water, indeed, is the great natural want of the island; and the very names of the hamlets, such as Fortune’s Well and Southwell, clearly show why the houses were first placed in their present very uncomfortable situations. To this day the precious springs are kept religiously under lock and key, while even the rain-water is carefully hoarded in rough reservoirs. The streets and cottages have a straggling gaunt stony appearance, and withal a certain lost colonial air: one feels as though one had strayed suddenly from an English town into the midst of some broken-down Colorado mining settlement. The queer unfinished parish church of St. George’s, built in an indescribable quasi-classical style of eighteenth-century architecture, midway between Wren and a Byzantine basilica, helps to keep up this colonial local tone. Its predecessor was destroyed by a landslip at the pretty chine which still bears the memorial name of Church Hope. Yet the island is no new settlement; it has an ancient history, too: besides its oolitic fossils and its petrified trees, it can boast a British fossway, a Roman sarcophagus, and a fair display of [what used to be known as] “Samian” ware; while in purely English times it finds mention twice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a convenient landing-station for the northern pirates. Rufus’s Tower, whether rightly named or not, is at least as old as the days of Stephen; and Portland Castle dates from the reign of Henry VIII. In those times, however, the island was but a great lonely sheep-walk, held by under-tenants as a royal manor, and inhabited by a small race of peculiar people, who did not intermarry with the distant foreigners of the Dorset mainland. It was not till the seventeenth century that the Portland stone was brought into notice by Inigo Jones as the material for the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall; and since then it has been abundantly employed for St. Paul’s Cathedral and many other well-known buildings. Excavation has now apparently denuded more than half the surface [of the Isle]; while the heaps of useless upper stone with which it has littered the surrounding fields have made a naturally desolate piece of gray and dusty scenery more gray and more dusty in its outer aspect than ever.