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Beyond Teffont Magna, where there is a very small and ancient church, are the famous quarries which supplied some of the stone for Salisbury Cathedral and were almost certainly worked by the Romans. They are now roomy caverns, that, like Tilly Whim at Swanage, have every appearance of being natural.
When morning came, the high cliffs of Swanage were on our bow, the wind was yet steady from off shore, and beyond the headland lay Poole Harbour, at whose head is Wareham, where the Danes were. It is a great sea inlet with a narrow mouth, and one must have water enough on a rising tide to enter it. Now the ebb was running, and if the Danes came this morning, it would be soon.
The yacht stood on until Christchurch Head was passed, and Bournemouth, peeping out amid pine groves, and Studland Bay, and the pretty little town of Swanage appeared, when she hauled her wind to save the tide back, as with a light breeze she would require every inch of it to reach Ryde before nightfall. The ladies, who had never sailed down the Solent before, were delighted with the scenery.
"Oh, that's not her real name." He filled the cans vigorously. "She is really Swanson or Swanage or something like that but I never know what it is, so I call her Swastika. She is rather like the individual in the 'Hunting of the Snark, who 'answered to Hi or to any loud cry, but it's handy having a name to call her by sometimes."
Apart from the crown quarries, where convict labour is employed, the stone is worked by a kind of guild, very similar to that in operation near Swanage; the employment being handed down from father to son. To make a brief exploration of the country east of Weymouth the road should be taken that keeps close to the shore until the coastguard station at Furzy Cliff is reached.
Every guide to Swanage enumerates in exhaustive detail the objects which make the town a sort of "marine store" of stony odds and ends. The best of these cast-offs is the entrance to the Town Hall, once in Cheapside as the Wren frontage to Mercer's Hall. The "gothic" tower at Peveril Point at one time graced the southern approach to London Bridge as a Wellington memorial.
The chaps concerned in it thought they had managed to throw dust into the eyes of Captain Downes, and to get the Boxer away to Swanage, and how he got wind of the affair, and where it was to be, is more nor I can tell.
South of the Foreland, and protected by the chalk range from the northern blasts, is Swanage Bay, bordered by its little town, which in past times has been variously called Swanwich, Sandwich, and Swanage.
Helen had dropped her hand now, and he had steered her past the whole party to the seaward side of the house. Beneath them was the bourgeois little bay, which must have yearned all through the centuries for just such a watering-place as Swanage to be built on its margin.
"Dackhams," the Elizabethan manor standing back from the Swanage road, and now called Morton House, is a fine specimen of Tudor building. The architecture of Corfe, as in most of the inland villages of the "island," is most pleasing; a distinctive note being the pillared porch with a room above. Corfe Castle retained a mayor and eight "barons" until 1883.
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