“Unapprised wayfarers, who are too old, or too young, or in other respects too weak for the distance to be traversed, but who, nevertheless, have to walk it, say, as they look wistfully ahead: ‘Once at the top of that hill, and I must surely see the end of Long Ash Lane!’ But they reach the hill-top, and Long Ash Lane stretches in front mercilessly as before.”
After many miles this tiresome road at last comes in touch with modern life, for Evershot station and the hamlet of Holywell are placed directly beside it. Here we may turn right, or turn left, or go onward, sure in all directions of finding many scenes to be identified with the novels. Turning to the right, a road not altogether dissimilar in its loneliness from Long Ash Lane is found, but differing from it in the one essential respect of ascending the ridge of lofty downs overlooking the Vale of Blackmoor, and thus, while to the right hand disclosing a dull expanse of table-land, on the left opening out a romantic view, bounded only by distance and the inadequacies of human eyesight. This is the road along which Tess was travelling—in the reverse direction—from Dole’s Ash Farm at Plush, the “Flintcombe Ash” of those tragical pages, to Beaminster or “Emminster,” to visit the parents of Angel Clare, her husband, when she came to that ill-fated meeting with Alec D’Urberville at the spot we now approach, Cross-in-Hand:
“At length the road touched the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand.’ Of all spots on the bleached and desolate upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand.”
The history and meaning of this lonely pillar on the solitary ridgeway road are unknown. Thought by some to mark the old-time bounds of property under the sway of the Abbot of Cerne, others have considered it to be the relic of a wayside cross, while others yet have held it to be a place of meeting of the tenants and feudatories of the old abbey, and the hollow in the stone to have been the receptacle for their tribute. But, “whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the most phlegmatic passer-by.”