For the rest, a gruesome little cottage will be found by taking the road out of High West Street known as Glydepath Lane, and following it to a fine damp situation near the river. It is only gruesome when you know its old story; otherwise it is a quite idyllic little thatched cottage, and stands in a nice garden. But it is handy to Dorchester Gaol, and it was the hangman’s cottage. In this same street is a mingled grim and stately great early eighteenth-century mansion, known as Colyton House. The hideously battered keystone mask in the blocked-up archway of one of its outbuildings has been appropriated, and made literary capital of, by Mr. Hardy in _The Mayor of Casterbridge_. “High Place Hall,” the home of Lucetta, Henchard’s lady-love in that story, is really a house at the corner of South Street and Durngate Street, but he transfers the unlovely thing from Colyton House to it. He has an extraordinary aptitude for seeing something malignant and inimical in lifeless objects, and you are almost persuaded that there was some malevolence in this that wrought Henchard’s ruin.
The village stands upon a steep bank above the Frome at the eastern extremity of Porchester, and looks picturesquely out upon the water-meadows.]
Comparatively few are those who explore from Dorchester along the old Exeter road to Bridport, for the scenery is wild and the road lonely and steep. Well, then, what of that? Those places are few indeed where level roads accompany rugged scenery. Explore those fourteen miles. Truly they will reward the amateur of scenery: the lofty ridge whose summit is reached three parts of the way revealing widespreading views out to sea on the left, and over wonderful hills and vales inland on the right. You have a taste of what this route is like immediately after leaving Dorchester and its western avenue behind, for cresting the sky-line of the downs on the left are the giant prehistoric earthworks of Maiden Castle, glooming darkly upon the road. Who delved the deep and lofty ditches and embankments, the amazing concentric and overlapping circles enclosing the vast camp on yonder height? Nay, who among the ancient peoples that warred in Britain from the earliest prehistoric times until the dawn of history did _not_ have a hand in that immense fortification and camp of refuge? It was old when the Romans came and added their quota of spade-work to it. But this at least we may deduce from those cyclopean earthworks: that those who made them and added to them must have been horribly afraid, thus to seek the defensive so diligently, instead of going out to battle in the open. Unquestionably, ancient warfares must have raged along this way, for prehistoric tumuli are plentiful along the downs as we progress.