[Picture: The “Duck” Inn, Original of the “Quiet Woman” Inn]
This land of fat kine and water-meads, to the south of the road, is neighboured to the northward by the outlying brown and purple stretches of Egdon Heath, into whose wilds we shall presently come. “Bloom’s End,” or a house that may well stand for it, we have noticed, and now come upon a humble little farm on the right hand, standing with front to the road and facing upon a strikingly gloomy heather-covered hill. This is the house, once the “Duck” inn, which figures in _The Return of the Native_ as the “Quiet Woman” inn, kept by Damon Wildeve, who, a failure as an engineer, made a worse shipwreck of life here. As described in the novel, a little patch of land has by dint of supreme exertions been reclaimed from the grudging soil:
“Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour: the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself in fertilising it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and received the honours due to those who had gone before.”
A casual talk with the small farmer who has taken the place reveals the fact that this soil is a hard taskmaster and yields a poor recompense. The heathery hill facing it is described exactly as it is in nature:
“The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. . . .”
“It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.”
The soil at the back of the house is better, which indeed it could well be without being even then particularly good. It slopes towards the river, at what is described in the book as “Shadwater Weir,” where the drowned bodies of Wildeve and Eustacia were found:
“The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream.”
The village of Tincleton, the “Stickleford” of casual mention in some of the short stories, is one of about a dozen cottages, clustering round a little church and school; and with presumably a few dozen more dwellings in the neighbourhood of the wide common on which Tincleton stands, to account for the existence of that school and that church. Past it and Pallington, whose hill and hilltop firs, known as Pallington Clump, are conspicuous for great distances, we turn to the left and explore a portion of Egdon Heath towards Bryan’s Piddle and Bere Regis. Everywhere the wilds now stretch forth and seem to bid defiance to the best efforts of the cultivator, but down at the hamlet of Hurst, where water is plentiful, there is an ancient red-brick farm of superior aspect, and yet with a thatched roof—an effect oddly like that which might be produced by a gentleman wearing a harvester’s hat. It is obviously an old manor-house, and besides showing evidences of former state, has two substantial brick entrance piers surmounted by what country folk, in their native satire, call “gentility balls.”