last come to South Newton a band of shooters, retrievers, and beaters
was breaking up. A trap weighted with two ordinary men and a polished,
crimson-faced god of enormous size drove off. Lord Pembroke’s cart
followed, full of dead hares.... Some years before that I was on
Crouch’s Down, on the other side of Grovely Wood, enjoying the green
road which runs between the ridge and the modern highroad. It was open
land, with some arable below, the Grovely oaks and their nightingales
above, and the spire of Salisbury far off before me. Out of a warm,
soft sky descended a light whisking rain, and on the Down seven hares
were playing follow-my-leader at full speed. All seven ran in a bunch
round and round, sometimes encircling a grass tussock in rings so
very small at times that only they knew which was leader. Suddenly
one leaped out of this ring, and all pursued him in a long, open
string like hounds. Several times this happened. For twenty, fifty,
or a hundred yards they ran straight; then they turned suddenly back
almost on their own traces, in the same open order, until their fancy
preferred circles or zigzags. Again they set off on a long race towards
a hillside beech clump, going down a cleft above Baverstock. They made
a dozen sharp turns in the cleft, always at full speed. Maintaining
the same long drawn out line, they next made for the woods above. In
this long run the line opened out still more, but no one gave up. They
entered the woods, to reappear immediately one at a time, and took once
more to encircling a tussock. As they were usually two hundred yards
away on downland of nearly their own colour, I could not be sure how
often they changed their leader, but I think they did at least once in
mid-career. They were as swift and happy as birds, and made the earth
seem like the air....
South Newton--church, smithy, “Bell” inn, and cottages--is built mostly
on the right side of the road, away from the river and its willows,
which are but a few yards off. The church, of flint and stone chequer,
stands a little back, the tower nearest the road, on a gentle slope of
flame-shaped yews and the tombs of many Blakes. Again the road touched
the river, and I looked over it to Great Wishford, its cottages and
hayricks clustering about the church tower, with flag flying, and to
a deep recess in the Down behind. The village has a street full of
different, pretty houses, mostly built of chipped flint alternating
with stone, in squares, or bands, or anyhow.
From Wishford onward the river has a good road on either side, each
with a string of villages, one or two miles apart. The “Swan” and an
orange-coloured plain small house with grass and a great cedar stand at
the turning which leads over the river to Great Wishford and the right
bank. I kept to the left bank, because I was about to leave the Wylye
and go north up its tributary Winterbourne. From the “Swan” I began to
climb up above the river, and had a steep meadow and the farm-yard and
elm trees of Little Wishford between it and me, but on my right a steep
bank of elms which had less for the eye than the farther side of the
river, its clean wall of down, terraced below, and the trees of Grovely
peeping over. Ahead I could see more and more of the long, broad vale
of the Wylye and its willows contained within slopes, half of pasture,
half arable; and above all, the curves of the Plain flowing into and
across one another. The earth was hazy, the sky clouded, and no one who
had ridden on that Good Friday and bad Saturday could have expected a
fine day with any confidence.
Had I been walking, I should have turned off this road between the
“Swan” and Little Wishford, on to the Plain, and so by a green road
that goes high across it as far as Shrewton. But I now kept on until
the road had risen, so as to touch the edge of the Plain, the arable
land, the home of pewits. Here I had below me the meeting of the Wylye
and Winterbourne, the thatched roofs of Stapleford scattered round it,
and the road going on westward with telegraph posts along the sparse,
willowy vale. I turned out of this vale at Stapleford. It is a village
of many crossing roads and lanes, of houses of flint and stone chequer,
in groups or isolated, under its elms and high grassy banks. The church
is kept open, a clean, greenish place with Norman arches on one side,
and a window illuminated by a coat of arms--a phœnix on a crown--and
the words, “_Foy pour devoir_.” There are no other inscriptions.
Outside I noticed the names of Goodfellow, Pavie, Barnett, Brown,
Rowden, Gamlen, Leversuch. The lettering survived on the headstone of
John Saph, who died in 1683, and his wife, Alice, who died in 1677.
I dipped to a withy bed, and went upstream along the Winterbourne
to Berwick St. James, and as the village lies on the right bank my
road took a right-angled turn by a chalk pit to cross the bridge, and
another to keep its course. At first sight Berwick St. James offered
an excellent dense group of cottages and farm buildings by the river,
new and old thatched roofs, and walls of flint or of black boarding.
The church tower peered up on the right, with a mill bestriding the
stream: on the left a white house and blossoming fruit trees stood
somewhat apart in their enclosure of white mud wall. The sky over
all was dim, the thin white clouds showing the blue behind them. The
street ending in the “Boot” inn was a perfect neat one of flint and
stone chequer and thatch. The church is kept locked. It was open at
that moment, but occupied. Its broad tower, which is at the road end,
is almost as broad as itself. It has a gray, weedy churchyard, far too
large for the few big ivy-covered box tombs lying about in it like
unclaimed luggage on a railway platform.
The Winterbourne guides you through the heart of the Plain. It has,
I believe, no very strict boundaries, but the Plain may be said to
consist of all that mass of downland in South Wiltshire, which is
broken only by the comparatively narrow valleys of five rivers--the
Bourn, the Avon, the Wylye, the Nadder, and the Ebble. Three of these
valleys, however, those of the Bourn on the east, and of the Wylye and
the Nadder on the south, have railways in them as well as rivers. The
railways are more serious interruptions to the character of the Plain,
and whether or not they must be regarded as the boundaries of a reduced
Plain, certainly the core of the Plain excludes them. Even so it has
to admit the Amesbury and Military Camp Light Railway, cutting across
from the Bourn to the Avon, and there ceasing. Within this reduced
space of fifteen by twenty miles the Plain is nothing but the Plain. As
for the military camps, nothing may be seen of them for days beyond the
white tents gleaming in the sun like sheep or clouds. When they are out
of sight the tumuli and ancient earthworks that abound bring to mind
more forcibly than anywhere else the fact that, as the poet says, “the
dead are more numerous than the living.”
The valleys are rivers not only of waters, but of greenest grass and
foliage. The greatest part of the Plain is all treeless pasture,
treeless arable land. Some high places, as at meetings of roads,
possess beeches or fir trees in line or cluster. Where the ground
falls too steeply for cultivation a copse has been formed--a copse
in one case, between Shrewton and Tilshead, of beautiful contour,
following the steep wall of chalk for a quarter of a mile in a crescent
curve, with level green at its foot, the high Down rising bare above
it. A space here and there has been left to thorns and gorse bushes.
In several places, as at Asserton Farm above Berwick St. James,
plantations have been made in mathematical forms. But as you travel
across the Plain you come rarely to a spot where the chief thing for
the eye is not an immense expanse of the colour of ploughed chalkland,
or of corn, or of turf, varying according to season and weather, and
always diversified by parallelograms of mustard yellow. Sometimes this
expanse rolls but little before it touches the horizon; far more often,
it heaves or billows up boldly into several long curving ridges that
intersect or flow into one another. The highest of these may be crowned
by dark beeches or carved by the ditch and rampart of an ancient camp.
Hedges are few, even by the roads. The roads are among the noblest,
visiting the rivers and their orchards and thatched villages, but
keeping for the main part of their length high and dry and in long
curves. They are travelled by an occasional (but not sufficiently
occasional) motor car, or by a homeward going farm-roller with children
riding the horses.
Next to the dead the most numerous things on the Plain are sheep,
rooks, pewits, and larks. To-day they mingle their voices, but the
lark is the most constant. Here, more than elsewhere, he rises up
above an earth only less free than the heavens. The pewit is equally
characteristic. His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men
both the sadness and the wildness of these solitudes. When his Spring
cry breaks every now and then, as it does to-day, through the songs
of the larks, when the rooks caw in low flight or perched on their elm
tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines, and the couch fires burn
well, and the wind blows their smoke about, the Plain is genial, and
the unkindly breadth and simplicity of the scene in Winter or in the
drought of Summer are forgotten. But let the rain fall and the wind
whirl it, or let the sun shine too mightily, the Plain assumes the
character by which it is best known, that of a sublime, inhospitable
wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatness of
Time, Space, and Nature; the littleness of man even in an aeroplane,
the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth.
And this feeling, or some variety of it, for most men is accompanied
by melancholy, or is held to be the same thing. This is perhaps
particularly so with townsmen, and above all with writers, because
melancholy is the mood most easily given an appearance of profundity,
and, therefore, most easily impressive.
The Plain has not attracted many writers, though in the last few
years have appeared Miss Ella Noyes’s careful collection of notes and
observations, and Mr. W. H. Hudson’s “Shepherd’s Life,” the best book
on the Plain, one of the best of all country books, and one that lacks
all trace of writer’s melancholy. John Aubrey wrote one or two of his
casual immortal pages on it. Drayton called it the first of Plains, and
gave some reasons for it in his great poem on this renowned isle of
Great Britain. Hundreds of archæologists have linked themselves to it
in libraries. But the most famous book in some way connected with it
is Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia.” Perhaps this is one of those famous
books which are never buried because the funeral expenses would be too
large, though much still remains to be done before we shall know, as we
should like to know, why and how “Arcadia” and similar books appealed
to the men and women of England from 1590 to 1680, during which ten
editions were called for; what kind of truth and beauty they saw in it;
what part of their humanity was moved by it; whether they detected the
influence of Wilton and Salisbury Plain....
Our own attitude towards it is not so hard to explain. That it is
called “Arcadia” and is by Sidney is something, and in these days of
docile antiquarian taste it may be enough for the few or many who read
it first in the most recent edition, the third issued during the last
century and a half. I doubt whether even these will do more than dream
and doze and wake, lazily turning over page after page--nearly seven
hundred pages of painfully small type--without ever making out the
plot, often forgetting who is the speaker, where the scene, only for
the sake of the most famous passage of all,--
“There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately
trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the
refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of
eye-pleasing flowers; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant
shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many
well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober
security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’
comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he never should be
old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it
seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept
time to her voice-music.” ...
(A charming companion to this first view of Arcadia is where FitzGerald
speaks of the home-brewed at Yardley, in the days before “he knew he
was to die.”) For a page or two the least learned of us can enjoy the
ghostly rustle of these vaporous, eloquent forms that never were alive,
yet once gave joy to men who were friends of Shakespeare and Drake; the
phantoms of their felicity in gardens and fair women. Then the beauty
of visible things, of dress, for example, abounds and is very real,
especially Pyrocles’ dress in his Amazon’s disguise--the hair arrayed
in “careless care” under a coronet of pearl and gold and feathers,
the doublet “of sky-coloured satin, with plates of gold, and, as it
were, nailed with precious stones.” The princeliness of the Arcadians’
manners and morals may seem to reflect Sidney’s self “divinely mild,
a spirit without spot.” There are thoughts, too, beyond such as the
convention demanded, as when Pyrocles says,--
“I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex
of whom I have my life, since if I be anything, which your friendship
rather finds than I acknowledge, I was, to come to it, born of a
woman, nursed of a woman.... Truly we men, and praisers of men, should
remember that if we have such excellences it is reasonable to think
them excellent creatures, of whom we are--since a kite never brought
forth a good flying hawk.” And some of the situations, conventional
enough, only the weary or those that never loved can pass unsaluted;
such as Amphialus’ too felicitous courtship of Queen Helen on behalf
of his foster-brother, Philoxenos. The conceits, too, do not tower
so often, so bravely, so rashly, into the cloudy altitudes without
meeting what would not have been found at home: as in Kalander’s
hunting,--
“The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens [that
is, the stags], dispersing their noise through all his quarters, and
even the nymph left to bewail the loss of Narcissus and became a
hunter.”
The nymphs themselves, enchanted by the pleasant ways of the pastoral,
are sometimes lured out of their fastnesses to bless it with a touch
of eternal Nature or of true rusticity, as in the Eclogue in the third
book: “The first strawberries he could find, were ever in a clean
washed dish sent to Kala; thus posies of the spring flowers were
wrapped up in a little green silk, and dedicated to Kala’s breasts;
thus sometimes his sweetest cream, sometimes the best cake-bread his
mother made, were reserved for Kala’s taste. Neither would he stick to
kill a lamb when she would be content to come over the way unto him.”
Delightful, too, is the use of experience when it is said of Pyrocles
that his mind was “all this while so fixed upon another devotion, that
he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child
that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson.”
This has nothing to do with the Plain. We know, indeed, that Sidney
wrote it below there at Wilton, in his sister, the Countess of
Pembroke’s house. But what has “Arcadia” to do with Wilton, save that
it was written there? There, says Aubrey, the Muses appeared to Sidney,
and he wrote down their dictates in a book, even though on horseback.
“These romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt,” says he, a Wiltshire
man, “conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip Sidney’s phansie.” It
cannot be said that they did more, that they reflected themselves in
the broad, meandering current of the “Arcadia.” At most, perhaps,
after heightening the poet’s fancy, they offered no impediments to
it. If Salisbury Plain was not Arcadia, it contained the elements of
Arcadia and a solitude in which they could be mingled at liberty. Every
one must wish for a larger leaven of passages like that one where he
compares Pyrocles to the impatient schoolboy, for something to show us
what he and the countess said and did at Wilton, and what the Plain was
like, three hundred years ago, when the book was being written. Even
so it is a better preparation for Salisbury Plain than it would be for
Sedgemoor or Land’s End; but I shall not labour the point since I had
seen the Plain before I had read the book, and Berwick St. James is as
little affected by “Arcadia” as “Arcadia” by Berwick St. James.
As soon as my road was outside Berwick St. James it mounted above the
river and was absolutely clear of houses, hedges, and fences for a
mile, and showed me nothing more than the bare and the green arable
land flowing away on every side in curves like flight, and compact
masses of beeches on certain ridges, like manes or combs. At the end
of the mile my northward road ran into a westward road from Amesbury,
turned sharp along it for a hundred yards or so, and then out of it
sharp to the left and north again, thus seeing nothing of the village
of Winterbourne Stoke but a group of sycamores and a thatched white mud
wall round which it twisted. Out and up the road took me again to the
high arable without a hedge, and the music of larks, and the mingling
sounds of pewits and sheep-bells. Before me scurried partridges, scarce
willing to give up their love-making in the sunlit and sun-warmed dust.
Looking over my shoulder I saw two hills striped with corn, and one of
them crested with beeches, curve up apart from one another, so as to
frame in the angle thus made between them the bare flank of Berwick
Down and the outline of Yarnbury Castle ramparts upon the bare ridge
of it. Very far northward hung the dark-wooded inland promontory of
Martinsell, near Savernake, and in the east the Quarley and Figsbury
range, their bony humps just tipped with dark trees.
The next village was five villages in one--Rollestone, Maddington,
Shrewton, Orcheston St. George, and Orcheston St. Mary. Here many
roads from the high land descended to the river and crossed mine. The
cluster of villages begins with orchard and ends in a field where
the grass is said to grow twelve feet high. After passing over the
Winterbourne and running along under its willows to Shrewton’s little
domed dungeon of blackened stone, and an inn that stands sideways to
the road, with the sign of a Catherine-wheel, the road again bridges
the river from waterside Shrewton to waterside Maddington. But I kept
along the Shrewton bank on a by-road. The stream here flows as clear
as glass over its tins and crockery, between roadside willows and a
white mud wall, and I followed it round past the flint-towered church
and the “Plume of Feathers” and its pair of peacock yews. I was looking
for Orcheston St. Mary. One sunny February day, when the fields by
the road hither from Tilshead were flooded with pools and channels of
green, peacock blue, and purple by the Winterbourne, I had seen below
me among the loops of the water a tiny low-towered church with roof
stained orange, and a white wall curving and long, and a protective
group of elms, which was Orcheston St. Mary. I continued along the
stream and its banks of parsley and celandine, its troop of willows,
beeches, and elms, but found myself at Orcheston St. George. A cottage
near the church bore upon its wall these words, out in stone, before
Queen Victoria’s time,--
“Fear God
Honour the King
Do good to all men.”
Probably it dates from about the year of Alton Workhouse, from the
times when kites and ravens abounded, and thrived on the corpses of
men who were hanged for a little theft committed out of necessity or
love of sport. The fear of God must have been a mighty thing to bring
forth such laws and still more the obedience to them. And yet, thanks
to our capacity for seeing the past and the remote in rose-colour, that
age frequently appears as at least a silver age; perhaps even our own
will appear German silver. I confess I did not think about the lad who
was hanged for a hare when I caught sight of the church at Orcheston
St. George, but rather of some imaginary, blissful time which at least
lacked our tortures, our great men, our shame and conscience. It
is a flint church with an ivied tower standing on terms of equality
among thatched farm buildings and elms. The church was stifling, for a
stove roared among dead daffodils and moss and the bodies of Ambrose
Paradice, gent, dead since 1727, and Joan his wife, and the mere tablet
of John Shettler of Elston, who died at Harnham (“from the effects of
an accident”) on December 6, 1861, when he was fifty-two, and went to
Hazelbury Brian in Dorset to be buried. Outside, the sun was almost as
warm on the daisies and on the tombstone of Job Gibbs, who died in 1817
at the age of sixty-four, and proclaimed, or the sexton did for him,--
“Ye living men the Tomb survey
Where you must quickly dwell.
Mark how the awful summons sounds
In ev’ry funeral knell.
Give joy or sorrow, care or pain,
Take life and blends away,
But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.”
Close by, Ann Farr from Shropshire, a servant for fifty years at the
Rectory, had a tablet between her and oblivion.
From Orcheston St. George the road advances three miles with hardly a
hedge. On the right rose and spread broad pastures mainly, on the left
arable lands, new ploughed, or green with young corn, or cut up into
squares of swedes or mustard for the long-horned sheep. There was no
flooded river now to shine in the sun. Clouds began to thicken over the
sky. The dust whirled. The straw caught in the hawthorns fluttered. A
motor car raced by me. Therefore I did not get off my bicycle to visit
that crescent beech and fir wood against a concavity of the chalk upon
my right. A farm road curves past it, the wood hanging above it as
beautifully as if above a river. I hoped to reach Tilshead before it
rained, or, better still, the elms and farm buildings at Joan-a-Gore’s
at the crossing of the Ridge Way. Tilshead’s trees lay visible before
me for a mile or more. Its street of cottages and houses that are
more than cottages I entered before the rain. I even stopped at the
church--a flint and stone one--to see the tower and the churchyard, and
its white mud wall, and the chestnut tree, and the ash that weeps over
the box tombs of people named Wilkins and Parham, and the graves of the
Husseys and Laweses, and that boast of William Cowper the schoolmaster
in 1804,--
“When the Archangel’s trump shall sound,
And slumbering mortals bid to rise,
I shall again my form assume
To meet my Saviour in the skies.”
A man was just stepping out of a motor car into the “Black Horse,”
carrying a scarlet-hooded falcon upon his wrist; but I did not stop
here, nor at the “Rose and Crown,” or the “Bell.”