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Dorset Dear
It is impossible not to love it; it is one of the corners of England for which we all feel something like affection. It is old, very old and Nature has richly endowed it. It is smugly set between our seamen’s Devon and romantic Somerset on the one hand, and prehistoric Wiltshire and histories Hampshire on the other, and it seems to have gathered to itself something of the spirit of them all, to say nothing of the sense of mystery from the sea ever rolling past.
It has as great a place in literature as any county has been given by one of its own sons. It has a romantic associations with historic events. It was loved by King Alfred, who sent his friend to be Bishop of Sherborne and laid two brothers to rest in the Abbey there. It was loved by Sir Walter Raleigh who longed to end his days among these hills. It was Dorset Dear to him as it is Dorset Dear to all its people still.
There can hardly be a county that is older than this. Life was going on here in the dim centuries before the Romans came. The hills are strewn with earthworks, some impressive in size and strength, and a chain of strongholds ran along these hills before the Romans settled down in twenty parts of Hampshire.
A sense of time long past broods over the uplands as surely as over Thomas Hardy’s untamable primeval heath. All Dorset towns have a history back beyond the Conquest. We have only to think of their names to thrilled by them – Dorchester, Wareham, Shaftsbury, Wimborne, Sherborne and Corfe, they carry us back through time and fill the mind with wonder.
There is no other town like Wareham, with the great earthen walls ans Saxon chapel on them. There is no ruin in England quite like Corfe. Wimborne Minster and Sherborne Abbey both crown their towns with a thousand year old glory.
Shaftsbury, the old town on a height that cannot be hid, has in our own time snatched from the buried past the romance and tragedy of Corfe Castle, bringing to light the pathetic remains of the Saxon King who was murdered there. As for Dorchester, it comes into our own 21st century from the 20th century before Christ; it has not only a Roman amphitheatre at the heart of it, but has the unequalled Maiden Castle outside, a monument that takes us back for 40 centuries.
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