Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/260

 in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day.

It has a unique position on the summit of an almost perpendicular scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture—South, Mid, and Nether Wessex—being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs. Impossible to a railway, it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the northeast, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.

Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston, or Palladour. Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within living memory horses, donkeys, and men may have been seen toiling up the winding ways to the top of the steep, laden with tubs and barrels filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers retailing their contents at the price of a half-penny a bucketful.

This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd facts—namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof behind the church, and that in former times the town passed through a curious period of corruption, conventual and domestic—gave rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man such as the world afforded not elsewhere: it was a place where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple, where beer was more plentiful than water, and where there were more wanton women than honest wives and maids. It is also said that after the Middle Ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests, and hence were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain altogether from the public worship of God—a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on Sunday afternoons. In those days.