Beyond and above Sea Town rose the peaks and table-land of Golden Cap , a 620 feet sea cliff , the front of which has been eaten away by the sea to a depth of three or four hundred yards , so that all the different strata stand out very clearly .sx The foot of the cliff is of a light grey colour like molten lava , which fades into an exquisite shade of slate blue .sx The middle is orange sandstone , and at the top , under the golden gorse-covered turf , is a thin layer of white marble .sx For beauty of line and colour it has no rival in England .sx It has to be seen to be believed .sx Oddly enough , in spite of the drought , I found two patches of bog , not on the sides , but in the actual cliff-face which I tried to cross .sx Trees and shrubs grow fantastically and riotously out of the disturbed and everywhere the gorse was in full bloom .sx The hedge-banks on the sides were covered with yellow celandines and primroses ; jackdaws were chattering over the top ; and when at last I scrambled up the last blackened slope , at an angle of about one in two , on to the gorse-covered plateau at the top I lay on the edge in the hot sun and watched two ravens , after dismissing a too impertinent kestrel who tried to mob them , play far below over the waves and among the lower cliffs .sx The view from Golden Cap is superb .sx Westward I could see the shining windows of Lyme , the white cliffs of Beer , and the red cliffs of Seaton ; eastward , the orange cliffs of Burton Bradstock , and the grand sweep of the long Chesil Beach fading into the grey nose of Portland Bill .sx If you want a really lonely walk try the eighteen miles along Chesil Beach from Burton Bradstock to Portland , where the pebbles grow gradually in size from tiny specks of sand to giant potatoes .sx Immediately below Golden Cap is a little ruined white stone church in a field .sx Its name is Stanton St. Gabriel .sx The aisle is full of elder-bushes , brambles and sloes , and the altar has a wild-rose tree growing out of it .sx Cows were grazing outside and a donkey stood pensively in the porch as I passed by .sx Just below the church is a red-brick thatched farm among trees where I got a cup of milk before climbing on to Stonebarrow , a fine stretch of open moorland over-looking the sea on one side and the green wooded pasture land of Marshwood Vale on the other .sx This was one of the jolliest walks I have had this year , .sx because I had the wind at my back and the sun on my face , an ideal combination .sx As I crossed Charmouth Bridge I saw a notice to the effect that any person injuring any part of the bridge was liable to be transported for life .sx At Tolpuddle some farm labourers were transported for life a hundred years ago for daring to suggest that their wages should be raised from 8s .sx to 9s .sx a week .sx After tea I collected my baggage from the hotel at Lyme Regis and drove by way of many inns made gay by flamboyantly painted signposts , along the moorland road above the Chesil Beach , to Abbots-bury , where there is a famous Swannery , a magnificent tithe barn , and an ancient chapel on the summit of a knoll .sx Then I climbed by way of Portesham to the monument of Nelson's friend , Admiral Hardy , which stands high on Black Down among cromlechs and tumuli , and so came by way of the chalk down to Winterborne St. Martin , where the stream flows by the side of the road .sx Thence I went by way of the queer earthworks of Britain's finest prehistoric camp at Maiden Castle to the home of another Hardy , the author of " Tess of the D'Urbervilles , " in Dorchester .sx I know Dorchester well , but it was the first time that I had actually stayed at Max Gate , the quiet red-brick house among the trees , in which Thomas Hardy lived for forty-three years .sx Mrs. Thomas Hardy not only showed me the manuscripts of her husband's novels and poems , and the very rare Roman pottery that hehad dug up on the garden , but she also gave up the whole of the following day to taking me round to places associated with his name and work .sx We went first to Stinsford Churchyard where his heart lies buried under the ancient yew by the side of his father and mother .sx In the grey church I saw the pew in which he sat as a small boy under a monument with a skull carved under it and the Christian name of Angel on it ( both factors of some importance in his development ) , and the stained-glass memorial-window to him with his favourite passage about the " still small voice .sx " Stinsford , the Mellstock of the novels , is a most attractive hamlet with a grey church and rectory wedged in between two great houses , one the home of the romantic Lady Susan , the other the country-seat of the Hanburys , and a foot-path leading down to a wooded walk by the side of a crystal-clear , shallow chalk stream .sx Close by is the village stile on which Hardy sat to read the unfavourable review of his first novel , " Desperate Remedies , " and also the house where the little girl lived whom he as a boy used to pass daily and greet with a blush , but never dared to speak to , so deep was his love for her .sx About a mile away is Upper Bockhampton , a secluded collection of about a dozen houses dotted about in a wooded dell at the top of which , hidden among orchard trees , is the two-storeyed , white-washed , thatched cottage where Thomas Hardy was born .sx If ever a house was remote from a restless world this is .sx It exudes peace .sx No traffic .sx passes it , for the lane ends at its gate .sx It is so quiet that when he was a boy Hardy used to hear the tranters in the cottage far below treading out their measures in the country dances .sx Beyond it , behind a curtain of tall pines , lies an undulating , bracken-covered common protected from the outer world by a thick plantation of firs .sx Away over the top lies Rainbarrow , from which the sensitive boy looked out over that wide expanse of dark heath with the occasional stunted tree that played so large a part in moulding his outlook on life .sx A visit to his birth-place explains exactly the source of Hardy's inspiration .sx More than any other writer this ancient Briton of English literature owes his genius to the place that bred him .sx He is the articulate expression of that place .sx Those of us who are accustomed to the much wilder scenery of the North find it hard at first to understand how this heath could justify the epithet of haggard , colossal , or mysterious , but , as Hardy explicitly states , it is only at the point of its nightly roll into darkness that the great and particular glory of Egdon Heath begins .sx into account the fact that the rest of Dorset is soft , colourful , and fertile , a place of water-meadows , comfortable , grey , gabled manor-houses , warm , stone cottages with thatched roofs and stone-mullioned windows , big dairy farms , rolling chalk downs , and woods , a land of sleeping beauty .sx To anyone accustomed to the serene soft colours of Stinsford stream and Bockhampton woods the rugged , unkempt , irreclaimable , wild , brown heath on which only gorse , heather and bracken can grow , must seem elemental , and awe-inspiring .sx There stands on Cliff Clump a lonely outpost of tall , ragged pines .sx Barrows and tumuli like titanic molehills join with isolated thorns and lightning-blasted , dead tree-trunks to break the sea-like wave of the arid dark waste .sx At Culpepper's Dish there is a mysterious cone-shaped pit in which grows a tall tree whose top does not reach the surface of the ground .sx Its origin nobody knows .sx Where all else is shifting Egdon Heath alone seems abiding and eternal , its origins , like its end , beyond human conjecture .sx Its gaunt eeriness struck me most forcibly as we crossed it to find the church of Bere Regis where the flitting family of Tess put up the four-post bedstead in the churchyard under the very window of their Turberville ancestors .sx The canopied , Purbeck marble tombs are just as they were in Tess's time , their carvings defaced and broken , " their brasses torn from the matrices , the rivet-holes remaining like marten-holes in a sand-cliff .sx " And still the twelve .sx carved figures of bishops and pilgrims in their gay panoply of red and blue and yellow look down from their horizontal projections in the roof overhead as they have since the days of Henry VII .sx From Bere we drove on to Wareham , whose grass-covered walls serve as a reminder that no other town in England has suffered such a succession of sieges , sackings , slightings and burnings .sx It now lies genially half asleep among the water-meadows between Frome and Puddle , its peace ruffled only by the motorists to Corfe .sx We then climbed past the peacock-crowded avenue of Creech Grange to the top of Creech Hill , and thence went westward along the main Purbeck ridge , with Worbarrow Bay and the sea on our left , and the bare , dark waste of Egdon below on our right , now turning purple in the changing light .sx If you want a cliff walk full of strange colours , walk from Worbarrow to Lulworth .sx It is like walking through a rainbow , for here you may see cliffs of yellow , dazzling white , rusty red , bright green , and jet black in the space of a mile , and always the sea is changing from deepest blue to lightest emerald .sx After bread and cheese lunch at the " Weld Arms " outside the castle walls of Lulworth we went to Woolbridge to see the tall-chimneyed , seventeenth-century gabled home of the Turbervilles that stands on the banks of the glistening Frome close by an ancient , grey , five-arched bridge .sx It was here that Angel Clare brought Tess for their honeymoon , here that she made her confession , here that she was terrified by the two sinister portraits of the hooked-nosed , arrogant , treacherous Turberville women , her ancestors , painted on the panels built into the landing wall , portraits which still have the power to work ill on all who look on them .sx We were taken over the lofty rooms by the daughter of the house , who said that , though she had lived there since birth , she had been troubled by no Turberville ghosts .sx She was more concerned about draughts .sx The portraits are still visible , but faint .sx Close by , though hidden in a fold of the smooth , green downs , is the attractive rambling village of East Chaldon , the home of Mr. T. F. Powys , whose interpretation of the Dorset rustic character serves as so odd a commentary to Thomas Hardy .sx It has been said that no railway company is likely to issue , on the strength of Mr. Powys's Dorset novels , a poster , " Come to Powys land .sx " I suggest that it would be wise if they did so , for the land is as lovely as the novels are brilliant , while as for the truth in them , human behaviour is erratic and unaccountable everywhere , and searchers after the macabre will find instances of the gruesome as plentiful here as in less happy-seeming areas .sx Tragedy , alas , does not confine itself to ugly places .sx As I waited for my train from Dorchester I sat on the grass slopes of the great amphitheatre of Maumbury Rings , and watched twenty-two small boys .sx kicking a football about in an arena where once Roman gladiators had fought , and just over two hundred years ago ten thousand spectators assembled to watch the nineteen-year-old girl , Mary Channing , publicly strangled and burned eighteen weeks after the birth of her child for having poisoned the husband whom she had been forced by her parents to marry .sx It was here that the Mayor of Casterbridge renewed his acquaintance with Susan and , according to Thomas Hardy , that appointments of a furtive kind , but not those of happy lovers , used always to take place .sx