Nowadays the only vestiges of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury are the fragments of encaustic tiles and carved stones, rarely and with difficulty brought to light by antiquarian societies, painfully digging on the spot once occupied by it; and the great abbey estates, the booty at the Dissolution seized by, or granted to, Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, now belong to the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor crest of a wheatsheaf is prominent in the town.
There are three parish churches at Shaftesbury; St. James’s, as you climb upwards towards the town, and Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s in the town itself. It is St. Peter’s which is seen in the illustration of Gold Hill, by whose incredibly steep ascent the pilgrim takes his way up from the deep recesses of the Vale. This is the most difficult approach, paved with granite setts divided off into broad steps, so that in wet weather the hillside shall not slip away into those depths; and with the craggy sides shored up by ancient stone buttresses of prodigious bulk. The building that closes in the view next the church tower, leaving but a narrow entrance alley into the town, is the Town Hall and Market House.
There are, of course, wider and less steep entrances to Shaftesbury, but this shows it on its most characteristic side.
Shaftesbury is chiefly associated in the pages of the Wessex novels with _Jude the Obscure_, for here it was that the long-suffering and inoffensive Phillotson—who (why?) always reminds me of Wordsworth—obtained the school, which he and the distracting Sue were to jointly keep. Their house, “Old Grove’s Place,” is easily recognisable. You come to it past Bimport, near the fork of the roads that run severally to Motcombe and to East Stower, on the edge of the plateau. It is an old house with projecting porch and mullioned windows through which it would be quite easy, as in the story, to see the movements of any one inside; and the upper room over the entrance is not too high above the pavement for any one who, like Sue, leaped from the window, to alight without injury. Those people are probably few who feel an oppressiveness in old houses such as that which worried the highly strung and neurotic Sue Bridehead: “We don’t live in the school, you know,” said she, “but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old Grove’s Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully. Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live in. I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent. In a new place like these schools, there is only your own life to support.”