In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale
levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold at
their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows
only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of
beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort
in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and
in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their
folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon
their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks
beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam
and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims' Way. Once more the sky empties
heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver
while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye has
done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of
branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over
with blossoming cherry trees.
The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes,
dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together
in low ridge after ridge so that the South Country seems a dense
forest from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of
level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between
them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks
and beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo
flowers among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The
English game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however
precious, it has only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when
met, most courteous to all but children and not very well dressed
women. The burglar's must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the
pleasures of the trespasser's unskilled labour.
In the middle of the road is a four-went way, and the grassy or white
roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved
shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant
and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims' Way, in
the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes
over whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the
yews and beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by
straight clear waters--a woodland church--woods of the willow
wren--and then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead
rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another church, dark,
squat, small-windowed, old, and from its position above the world
having the characters of church and beacon and fortress, calling for
all men's reverence. Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the
old roads behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then
deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels. I wish they
could always be as accessible as churches are, and not handed over to
land-owners--like Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield--because straight
new roads have taken their places for the purposes of tradesmen and
carriage people, or boarded up like that discarded fragment,
deep-sunken and overgrown, below Colman's Hatch in Surrey. For
centuries these roads seemed to hundreds so necessary, and men set out
upon them at dawn with hope and followed after joy and were fain of
their whiteness at evening: few turned this way or that out of them
except into others as well worn (those who have turned aside for
wantonness have left no trace at all), and most have been well content
to see the same things as those who went before and as they themselves
have seen a hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet
and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant folds in the
grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark tower on the hill, and
tread softly because your way is over men's dreams; but not too long;
and now descend to the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow
your own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under men's
feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old dreams of men.
_Edward Thomas._