Both villages will some day be more sought after than at present, for at Burton lived Southey, with his friend Charles Lloyd, and sang the praises of the valley in better verse than usual. At Mudeford, Stewart Rose, the author of _The Red King_, built Gundimore, where, in 1807, Scott stayed, writing _Marmion_, and riding over the Forest exploring the barrows. In the same village Coleridge lodged during the winter of 1816.[179]
A little way along the main road lies Somerford, once one of the Granges of Christchurch Priory. Its barns and stables are partly built from the prior’s lodgings, whose site may here and there be faintly traced; and the chapel, which in Grose’s time was still standing, with the initials of the last prior, John Draper, cut on the window labels.[180]
The best plan, however, is not to go along the road, but the shore as far as Chewton Glen, and there climb up the cliff. The sands are white and hard, strewed with fragments of iron-stone, and large _septaria_, from which cement is made, and for which, farther on, a fleet of sloops is dredging a little way from the shore. In the far distance gleam the white and black and orange-coloured bands of sand and clay scoring the Barton cliffs.[181]
The glen, or “bunny,” as it is locally called, runs right down into the sea; the high tide rushing up it, and driving back its Forest stream. Down to the very edge it is fringed with low oak copses, covered in the spring, as far as high-tide mark, with blue bells, and strewed with yellow tufts of primroses. In the summer, too, the ground is as deep a green with ferns as the oak leaves above; whilst the stream flows between banks bordered with blue skull-cap and purple helleborine.[182]
[Illustration: _Christ Church Bay_ _From the Ordnance Survey._]
A.—Middle Marine Bed. B.—Fresh-water Clays and Marls. C.—Crocodile Bed, &c., exposed. D.—Olive Bed, well exposed. E.—Lignite Bed at the top of Cliff. F.—Chama Bed. G.—Barton Clay. Fossils abundant. H.—Green Clay, with sharks’ teeth, and bones of fish. I.—High Cliff Sands rise. J.—Pebble Bed. K.—Grey Sands, interstratified with fossil-wood and iron-stone. L.—Bracklesham Sands.
Then, as you climb up to the down, on the opposite side, stretches a view, hard to be matched in England either for extent or beauty. On one side rolls the English Channel, indenting the shore with its deep bay as far as the land-locked harbour of Christchurch, shut in by Hengistbury Head and the white Swanage rocks; and, on the other, it sweeps away by the long beach of Hurst and its round gray castle. Opposite, glitter the coloured sands and chalk cliffs of Alum Bay, and the white Needle Rocks running wedge-shaped into the sea. Farther eastward, rise the treeless downs, and the breach opens across the Island to Freshwater Gate, and the two batteries, built into the cliff, one by one appear: the long scene ended at last by the houses of Yarmouth—the Solent still winding onward, like some great river.