Via Jude the Obscure and Hovis
No-one knows exactly when, but around the year 888, Alfred the great king of the Anglo-Saxons founded an abbey and set up his daughter Æthelgifu there as Abbess. It became in time a powerful institution, home to several memorable and influential English women. And at one stage it was the richest Benedictine monastery in the land, until monstrous misogynist and monastery-plunderer Henry VIII’s bulldog Thomas Cromwell abolished it six and a half centuries later. The Abbey was built on a commanding Greensand prominence that is now the town of Shaftesbury in the top North-West corner of Dorset.
Today Shaftesbury has much to recommend it, not least the Portuguese custard tarts from Filomena’s coffee shop in the High Street and a beautifully curated bookshop (FOLDE) specialising in natural history and general loveliness. This may be a very specific perspective from our April 2022 holiday there, of course, but it is celebrated as a centre of the famous Dorset button industry for 200 years and as one of Thomas Hardy’s settings for Jude the Obscure. Some scenes happen in Ox House (with a blue plaque to prove it) just round the block from the ruins of the Abbey, hard by Castle Hill with wonderful views as far as the Glastonbury and the Quantocks. In Hardy’s fictional Wessex Shaftesbury appears as Shaston, one of several old Dorset names by which it was known.
The South side of the Abbey overlooks the famously picturesque Gold Hill. In the iconic Hovis advert of 1973, the massive stone buttresses of the Abbey walls are artfully out of shot. The baker’s boy has been pushing his delivery bike up those steep cobbles for nearly 50 years! The advert was voted Britain’s all-time favourite ad: generations are familiar with the scene, to the accompaniment of a brass band rendition of the slow movement from Dvořák’s New World Symphony. The director of this famous (and famously spoofed) 45 second classic was none other than Ridley Scott, who just 6 years later gave the world Alien.
So it is just a few short hops from the devout Æthelgifu via tragic cousin Sue Bridehead to Veronica Cartwright’s hysterics in the famous “chest-burster” scene, but in the immortal words of Ronnie Barker, “as Grandad always used to say … it were a bloody long way to get a loaf of bread.”
Credits
- Silver coin of Alfred the Great: by User:Saforrest – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6022487
- Blandford Forum milestone: by Trish Steel, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14436217
- Gold Hill, Shaftesbury: by Skez at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2227262
Links
- FOLDE Dorset Bookshop UK – landscape and nature celebrated in this gem of a bookshop
- Home (filomenas.co.uk) – “Dois pastels de nata, por favor” is all you need to say.
Veronica Cartwright had something to scream about. The story goes that none of the actors knew that the vicious little critter was going to burst from Ian Holm’s chest, and their shock was perfectly genuine.
Ah yes, I read that one of the fake blood nozzles shot straight into her eye. I also saw that for some scenes they were wearing nylon space suits, with no ventilation, in a heat wave. They had medics on hand with oxygen for when they passed out.