I have often wondered how much of the sacred Dorset described by Mary Butts still survives. If you can find time to write about that, I would be grateful.
Badbury Rings is an Iron Age hill fort 10 miles from Mary Butts’ childhood home. She visited it often, and had various mystical experiences there. She described in The Crystal Cabinet that it was there that she discovered “the equivocal nature of the contact between visible and invisible, the natural order and the supernatural, between time and eternity”. Badbury Rings is now a National Trust property, and is still accessible to the public. Its magical qualities remain.
The country house In Armed with Madness is based on S Egliston cottage on the Purbeck Coast, where Butts had stayed earlier in the 1920s. The cottage is now derelict, and totally inaccessible, as it is part of the firing ranges that were set up in the Second World War and remain to this day. The village of Starn in Armed with Madness is clearly based on Corfe Castle, a village in Purbeck with a castle that was ruined in the English Civil War. Corfe is a major tourist attraction, and the description in Armed with Madness could apply just as much a century later - “There was an unusual number of tourists, two and two on the footpaths, swarming the square … The stage surpassed all romantic expectations, a town with towers, in hills high enough and low enough to set and display it equally.”
I have often wondered how much of the sacred Dorset described by Mary Butts still survives. If you can find time to write about that, I would be grateful.
Badbury Rings is an Iron Age hill fort 10 miles from Mary Butts’ childhood home. She visited it often, and had various mystical experiences there. She described in The Crystal Cabinet that it was there that she discovered “the equivocal nature of the contact between visible and invisible, the natural order and the supernatural, between time and eternity”. Badbury Rings is now a National Trust property, and is still accessible to the public. Its magical qualities remain.
The country house In Armed with Madness is based on S Egliston cottage on the Purbeck Coast, where Butts had stayed earlier in the 1920s. The cottage is now derelict, and totally inaccessible, as it is part of the firing ranges that were set up in the Second World War and remain to this day. The village of Starn in Armed with Madness is clearly based on Corfe Castle, a village in Purbeck with a castle that was ruined in the English Civil War. Corfe is a major tourist attraction, and the description in Armed with Madness could apply just as much a century later - “There was an unusual number of tourists, two and two on the footpaths, swarming the square … The stage surpassed all romantic expectations, a town with towers, in hills high enough and low enough to set and display it equally.”
Thank you so much for this! I hope to visit one day.