From London to Land's End

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The ladies here do not want the help of assemblies to assist in matchmaking, or half-pay officers to run away with their daughters, which the meetings called assemblies in some other parts of England are recommended for. Here is no Bury Fair, where the women are scandalously said to carry themselves to market, and where every night they meet at the play or at the assembly for intrigue; and yet I observed that the women do not seem to stick on hand so much in this country as in those countries where those assemblies are so lately set up--the reason of which, I cannot help saying, if my opinion may bear any weight, is that the Dorsetshire ladies are equal in beauty, and may be superior in reputation. In a word, their reputation seems here to be better kept, guarded by better conduct, and managed with more prudence; and yet the Dorsetshire ladies, I assure you, are not nuns; they do not go veiled about streets, or hide themselves when visited; but a general freedom of conversation--agreeable, mannerly, kind, and good--runs through the whole body of the gentry of both sexes, mixed with the best of behaviour, and yet governed by prudence and modesty such as I nowhere see better in all my observation through the whole isle of Britain. In this little interval also I visited some of the biggest towns in the north-west part of this county, as Blandford-- a town on the River Stour in the road between Salisbury and Dorchester--a handsome well-built town, but chiefly famous for making the finest bone-lace in England, and where they showed me some so exquisitely fine as I think I never saw better in Flanders, France, or Italy, and which they said they rated at above 30 pounds sterling a yard; but I suppose there was not much of this to be had. But it is most certain that they make exceeding rich lace in that county, such as no part of England can equal.

From thence I went west to Stourbridge, vulgarly called Strabridge. The town and the country around is employed in the manufacture of stockings, and which was once famous for making the finest, best, and highest-prize knit stocking in England; but that trade now is much decayed by the increase of the knitting-stocking engine or frame, which has destroyed the hand-knitting trade for fine stockings through the whole kingdom, of which I shall speak more in its place.

From hence I came to Sherborne, a large and populous town, with one collegiate or conventual church, and may properly claim to have more inhabitants in it than any town in Dorsetshire, though it is neither the county-town, nor does it send members to Parliament. The church is still a reverend pile, and shows the face of great antiquity. Here begins the Wiltshire medley clothing (though this town be in Dorsetshire), of which I shall speak at large in its place, and therefore I omit any discourse of it here.

Shaftesbury is also on the edge of this county, adjoining to Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, being fourteen miles from Salisbury, over that fine down or carpet ground which they call particularly or properly Salisbury Plain. It has neither house nor town in view all the way; and the road, which often lies very broad and branches off insensibly, might easily cause a traveller to lose his way. But there is a certain never-failing assistance upon all these downs for telling a stranger his way, and that is the number of shepherds feeding or keeping their vast flocks of sheep which are everywhere in the way, and who with a very little pains a traveller may always speak with. Nothing can be like it. The Arcadians' plains, of which we read so much pastoral trumpery in the poets, could be nothing to them.