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THE RESIDENCE 



MAPPERTON 

 . . HOUSE, 



BEAMINSTER, 



REV. P. M. COMPTON.4 I 



M 



;ANY fine houses and beautiful 



gardens are in the Wessex 



county of Dorset. The land 



is ricli and fruitful if not 



pre-eminently in cornland, 

 yet in the abundant pastures wlrch 



maintain those splendid herds that make Dorsetshire one of the 

 chief dairying counties in England. In traversing it from north to 

 south the wayfarer passes through scenery that is wonderfully 

 varied and singularly picturesque. He journeys through a 

 great pastoral land, much diversified by hill and hollow, with 

 hawthorn hedges and apple orchards, and many a farmhouse 

 and cottage nestling among the trees, and presently he sees 

 rising before him the edges of the calcareous hills which lie 

 between that lower country and the sea. From the heights 

 there are distant prospects ever the land to the hills which 

 everywhere shut in the view, unless it be where the glistening 

 waters of the Channel, like a burnished shield, make a fair 

 margin to the outlook on the south. 



In ancient days the country by the rivers was rich in a 

 dense forest, in whose glades the grunting porkers fed on the 



mast of beech and oak. Can we not 

 hear tlu a m sti'l when we pass through 

 that village significmtly named of old 

 Latinity Teller Porcorum ? By that way 

 we may go in a wayfaring from the direc- 

 tion of Dorchester by the valley of the 

 Frome to the village of Mapperton, which lies between Toller 

 "of the Pigs " and Beaminster. As the crow flics, Mapperton lies 

 some seven miles from the s=-a at Bridport Harbour and within 

 a short two miles of Beaminster. It is not forgotten 

 that this is a region made known through the Wessex novels 

 of Thomas Hardy. Bridpoit is the " Port Breedy "of " Tess 

 of the D'Urbervilles," near which place she did dairy work in 

 her days of trouble ; while Beaminster is the Emminster of the 

 novel, the "hill-surrounded liltle town, with the Tudor church 

 tower of red stone, and the clump of trees near the vicarage," 

 where the father of Angel Clare was incumbent. Through the 

 district of Mapperton, then, we may follow Tess in some of her 

 weary journeys. 



It is now time to turn to the mansion we depict, and we 

 shall not err if we extol its true old English domestic 



THE OLD GARDEN AND GRASS TERRACE. 



