J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

The whole page is taken up with the following lines of verse:

Interspersed with drawings and the printed pages of Coltman’s British Itinerary, sixty-nine pages of this sketchbook are given over wholly or partly to these verses which Turner intended as a commentary for publication with the Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England which he sketched on the 1811 West Country tour (see the introduction to the sketchbook). The first lines are on folio 18 verso (D08396), and the last on folio 207 verso (D08736; CXXIII 204a).

The previous passage, on folio 83 verso (D08520; CXXIII 80a), is the conclusion of a brief narrative on the sad fate of a West Country girl. Here Turner returns to the main topographical strand of the poem, ‘Maiden’ being Maiden Castle, the vast Iron Age hill fort south-west of Dorchester; Turner had drawn the town in the Corfe to Dartmouth sketchbook (Tate D08834; Turner Bequest CXXIV 23). The fort is just west of the main Dorchester-Weymouth road, and he presumably passed it, or perhaps even explored it, before sketching Weymouth and Portland from a point a couple of miles further south (Tate D08835; Turner Bequest CXXIV 24). However, he was incorrect in assuming any Roman involvement in the construction of the earthworks, which were abandoned by the end of the first century AD after the Romans’ defeat of the local tribes.2

Previous transcriptions have given the word in line eight as ‘Norman’ rather than ‘Roman’ but the first letter appears to be a wayward ‘R’ and the next lines, on folio 93 verso (D08540; CXXIII 90a), are a digression on Roman history, before Maiden Castle is again considered on folio 98 verso (D08550; CXXIII 95a).

The partly illegible word in the last line may be intended as ‘cas[t]les’, as Wilton and Turner suggest, or perhaps ‘casts’. The word ‘deepfull’ on the previous line is smudged, probably to delete it.