It is here, in the story of _The Well Beloved_, that Jocelyn Pierston, the weirdly constituted hero of that fantastic romance, elects to bid farewell to Avice Caro, and past it Anne Garland went on her way to Portland Bill, “along the coast road to Portland.” When she had reached the waters of the Fleet, crossed now by a bridge, she had to ferry over, and from thence to walk that causeway road whose mile-and-three-quarters of flatness, bounded sideways by the expressionless blue of the summer sky and the equally vacant vastnesses of the yellow pebbles of the Chesil Beach, seems to foot-passengers an image of eternity. It is but a flat road, less than two miles long, but the Isle ahead seems to keep as far off as ever, and the way is so bald of incident that a sea-poppy growing amid the pebbles is a change for the eye, a piece of driftwood a landmark, and a chance boat or capstan a monument.
But even the Chesil Beach has an end, and at last one reaches Portland and Fortune’s Well, referred to in that story of the Portlanders as “the Street of Wells.” The well—a wishing well of the good, or the bad, old sort, where you wished for your heart’s desire, and perhaps obtained the boon in the course of a lifetime—by striving and labouring for it—is behind that substantial inn, the Portland Arms, and it is a cynical commentary upon this and all such legends of faëry that, while the Portlanders in general, and the people of Fortune’s Well in particular, can one and all direct you to the inn, if so be you are bat-like enough not to perceive it for yourself, very few of them know anything at all of the magic spring, of where it is, or that the place took its name from the existence of such a thing.
One circumstance, above all other curious and interesting circumstances of this so-called “Isle” of Portland, is calculated to impress the stranger with astonishment. Its giant forts; its great convict establishment, “the retreat, at their country’s expense, of geniuses from a distance,” the odd nexus of almost interminable pebble beach that tethers it to the mainland and makes the name of “Isle” a misnomer, are all fitting things for amazement; but no one previously uninformed on the point is at all likely to have any conception of its numerous villages and hamlets and the large populations inhabiting this grim, forbidding, “solid and single block of limestone four miles long.” Eleven thousand souls live and move and have their being on what the uninstructed, gazing across the Roads from Weymouth, might be excused for thinking a penitential rock, reserved for forts and garrison artillery, and for convicts and those whose business it is to keep them in order. The number of small villages or hamlets is itself in the nature of a surprise. Entering upon this happily styled “Gibraltar of Wessex,” there is in the foreground, by the railway-station, Chesilton; succeeded by Fortune’s Well, Castleton to the left, Portland to the right, and, away ahead up to the summit of a stupendous climb on to the great elevated, treeless and parched stony plateau of the Isle, Reforne. Beyond the prison and the prison quarries, come Easton, Wakeham, Weston, and Southwell; all stony and hard-featured and like nothing else but each other. To-day an exploration of the Isle is easy, for a railway runs from Weymouth along the beach to Chesilton, and another, skirting the cliffs, takes you out almost to the famous Bill itself; but otherwise, all the circumstances of the place still fully show how the Portlanders came to be that oddly different race from the mainlanders they are shown to be in the pages of _The Well Beloved_, and in the writings of innumerable authors.