SEVENTH DAY--STREATLEY TO SPARSHOLT, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY SCUTCHAMER
KNOB AND LETCOMBE CASTLE
When I was next at Streatley I took the Ridgeway westward chiefly
because I like the Ridgeway, partly because I wished to see it again,
now that it had to give up the title conferred on it by Bishop Bennet,
of the Icknield Way. I went up from the bridge and at the “Bull”
turned to the right and northward along the Wantage road, which is
probably the Icknield Way. After getting well up on the chalk above the
river this road maintains the same level of from two to three hundred
feet, and for two miles keeps within a mile of the river on a terrace
half-way up the slope of the hills. Streatley had spread itself in red
spots along the side of the road, past the fork to Wallingford and up
to where the Ridgeway turns off to the left and westward into the long
coombe leading to Streatley Warren. At its mouth this coombe was wide
and shallow, and was all grass, except on the left hand where there
were new houses. In places, as by Rectory Farm, the road, a hard one,
had a pleasant green terrace above it with wild roses rambling over
it. The coombe deepened and the road ascended above a golf course
near Warren Farm. Thus far it was hedged, but soon, still mounting the
right wall of the long coombe, it was rough and hedgeless, and old
parallel tracks were to be seen above and below it. It was now near the
southern edge of Thurle Down Woods on its right. Below, on the left,
were the steep walls of the winding coombe, dotted by thorn, juniper,
and elder, and here called Streatley Warren. Of the unwooded coombes
or inlets into the downs this is one of the most pleasing to me, and I
shall always remember it, as I do the great coombe winding into Butser
Hill on the north side, and others of those vast turf halls which the
sky roofs. As it passed the head of the coombe the road was six hundred
feet up, going a little north of westwards between sheep on the left
and corn on the right. It was two or three miles or more from the
villages on the north, Moulsford, Cholsey, the Astons, and Blewbury,
and two or three hundred feet above them; it was almost as far away
from the Wantage road, and as far above it. The villages on the south
were nearer, but not within a mile--Aldworth, the Comptons, and East
Ilsley. It gained a hedge near Warren Farm, but was a rough way, now
wide, now narrow, among the hazel, brier, elder, and nettle. Sometimes
there was an ash in the hedge, and once a line of spindly elms followed
it round a curve. It was high, but not yet free among these hedges.
Then it descended, deeply worn and rough, to where a signpost marked
roads to Aldworth and Compton on the left, Cholsey and Wallingford
on the right. Then all was open country, mostly turf, carved by many
trackways and with trees, as a rule, only to shelter the thatched,
solitary farm-house and barns, or to make a clump and landmark at
a summit where there was a tumulus, as on Churn Hill. The road was
scattered in pieces over the open turf among thorn bushes and alongside
a Scotch fir clump, as it went down towards Churn station. These tracks
were green with a central white one, and that had green banks and a
few thorns. On reaching the road from Moulsford to East Ilsley my way
seemed to be continued by one passing Chance Farm and keeping on the
north side of the hills through an uninhabited hollow among downs which
are bare of everything but grass, Churn railway station, and a farm,
except when dotted with soldiers’ tents. But there was now a little to
the south of this a clear and unbroken high ridge extending westwards
into Wiltshire, and this the Ridgeway undoubtedly followed: only the
connection between my way over Roden Downs and the higher ridge was no
longer a direct one. The connecting road was that from Moulsford to
Ilsley, and along it I had to turn round west and even south to gain
the ridge, where the Ridgeway left it at right angles to go north-west.
Hedges no longer bounded either side of the broad turf track. It was
as free as the blue paths in the snowy heavens. It looked down upon
everything but the clouds, and not seldom on them in the early morning
or in rain. On its left the downward slope was broken and very gradual,
so that it was far rarer to see a church tower like Ilsley within a
mile than a ridge of woods five miles off or a bare range that might be
twenty. It was already higher than the Icknield Way at Telegraph Hill;
it had climbed out of choice, and it would descend only of necessity.
On its right the slope was far steeper, and sometimes a little way from
the foot lay the villages; sometimes the land rose again in several
rolls this way and that, and the nearest village would be beyond the
last of them, three or four miles away. Either corn or pure turf and
scattered furze lay about the road. One piece of furze was called
“Poor’s Furze,” and what is more, the poor were gathering it for fuel
though it was Midsummer: tall rye came up to the edge of it.
[Illustration: Ridgeway, near Streatley.]
Now the Ridgeway had risen up to its perfect freedom, away from the
river and the low land, from the glaring roads and the collections of
houses. This way men of old came of necessity; yet I found it hard not
to think now that the road was thus climbing to heights of speculation,
to places suited for exploring the ridges and solitudes of the spirit;
it seemed in one mood a hermit road going out into the wilderness to
meditate and be in lifelong retirement; in another mood a road for the
young, eager warrior or reformer going up and away for a time from
cloying companions to renew his mighty youth.
I saw, however, more racehorses than confirmed hermits or aspiring
warriors or reformers. Before it was ordained that cricket should be
played on billiard tables, there were a pitch and a pavilion here
beside the Ridgeway near the Abingdon road. Elevens drove up from
Oxford, and a cheerful scene it was, albeit nobody’s fortune was made.
It was too good and rustic a custom not to decay. After that, they
say, the pavilion became an early-morning rendezvous for men with
lurchers after the hares, a refuge for belated soldiers, a convenience
for several breeds of idlers, philosophers, and adventurers. These it
was decided to centralize as much as possible in prisons, workhouses,
lunatic asylums, cemeteries, town “rookeries,” and the like. The
pavilion thus became useless and was pulled down. Nevertheless, there
it is, still very clear in a number of aging heads. So far as I could
learn, it was the nearest approach to a permanent hermitage on the
ridge of these downs. In their season there are shepherds’ shelters,
and caravans for the steam-plough men or for persons engaged in the
writing of books; but nothing permanent except Wayland’s Smithy.
[Illustration: Wayland’s Smithy.]
Suppose a philosopher were to live in and about these old stones, for
a year or two he might be quite undisturbed. Then he would be arrested
on suspicion after some crime. A ploughman would reveal that he had
seen the man about. It would reach a pressman with a camera. He would
get somebody to pose either in Wayland’s Smithy or a similar place at
Wimbledon or Balham. A column about “the simple life” would be printed
in a newspaper illustrated by these photographs. By this time the real
philosopher, a hairy and uncommunicative man, would have been released.
A rival pressman would travel to Wantage Road with a third-class
ticket, which he would call either second or first class in his list of
expenses. He would assail the philosopher, and with as much grace as is
compatible with haste and a preoccupied mind, would bid him describe
his experiences in answer to well-chosen leading questions. The
philosopher might possibly fail to understand the pressman’s object,
or even his English; he might seem to refuse. Then the other would
produce his card, claiming instant attention as the representative
of both the _Hourly Deceiver_ and the _Evening Tinkle-Tinkle_. This
would amuse, puzzle, or infuriate the hairy man. His laughter or his
anger would be mistaken for rudeness. The pressman would return to
Wantage Road and in the train invent far better things than ever were
on sea or land, and he would have no difficulty in illustrating his
article by photographs which the philosopher would never see. But
the people of the neighbourhood would see. Then boys would go up on
a Sunday afternoon and stare and perhaps trample down the wheat. A
town councillor or a retired missionary or other man of culture would
inspect the scene. In the philosopher’s absence it would be discovered
that Wayland’s Smithy was undrained and improperly ventilated. A woman
would be scared at a distant view of the philosopher. It would be time
for something to be done. Then one of two things would happen. Either
the man would disappear as quietly as mist or as last year’s books: or
he would be told to go, roused to eloquence or violence, arrested and
imprisoned, and his story told in twenty lines in the local papers.
From time to time the police of neighbouring counties would torment
him until at last he could be certified as a lunatic. Instead of
giving him a large plate of ham and eggs, followed by apple dumplings
and then prussic acid, they would shut him up for ever in a building
with innumerable windows, from any of which he could look out and see
lunatics. Nevertheless, he would have had that one year unmolested at
Wayland’s Smithy.
This, however, is only a possibility comparatively picturesque. The
real thing was less amusing, and the scene of it was not Wayland’s
Smithy but Lone Barn. That winter a man might have picked up the paper
after breakfast and found descriptions of funerals and marriages, the
well-attended presentation to the local member of Parliament, the
successful meeting of his rival, the list of hunting appointments,
and a column and a half headed, “Suffering Children--Parental
Neglect--Queer Defence--Severe Sentences--Magistrate’s Scathing
Condemnation.” A capital fox-hunter presiding, the bench had given
four months’ hard labour to a man and wife for neglecting their seven
young children “in such a way as to cause them unnecessary suffering
and injury to their health.” Having scorched his back parts the reader
would turn his front parts to the fire and read on. These nine had been
living for some weeks at Lone Barn, which lies unexpectedly in a small
hollow at one of the highest points of the downs, three miles from the
nearest hamlet. It had long been deserted. The farm-house was ruinous,
and a fox taking refuge there could not be dislodged from the fallen
masonry and elder and yew tree roots. The hunters had noticed nothing
in the barn.
I knew the farm-house and had often wondered about the man who built
it in that solitude somewhere in the eighteenth century. It had walls
of unusual thickness, such as could not have been overthrown simply
by time and weather. It must long have been empty and subject to the
hostility of discontented spirits such as probably infest a house, as
they do a man, left utterly alone. I had not suspected that anybody was
living in the barn, but I remember a pale, shuffling man carrying a
child who begged from me monotonously as I came down the hill in mist a
little before dark. I had given him something without exactly realizing
that he was a man, so frail, subdued, and weak-voiced had he been--a
creation of the mist quite in harmony with the hour. This was probably
Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone, who was now in prison.
He and his wife and six children had arrived at the barn on Christmas
Eve. For a week before they had been at a barn nearer the village, but
as this had to be repaired they were turned out. They were allowed to
settle in Lone Barn because Bishopstone had done an occasional day’s
work for the farmer on whose land it stood. During January and February
he did several more days’ work. The wife and children remained in the
barn. The two eldest had measles, the sixth had pneumonia; all were
verminous. On Christmas Day a seventh had been born in Lone Barn. The
mother, who had fainted in court a week before and had been remanded,
pleaded guilty of neglect, but said that “she could not do in a barn
as she could in a cottage,” there being no bed, no furniture, and no
water except from a cattle pond half a mile away. The man had been
unable to get a cottage. The family had been found lying round a fire
in the barn, and after medical examination arrested. Bishopstone
hardly spoke in answer to the questions and insults of the bench, but
he was understood to say, “The Lord is on my side,” and several other
blasphemous or unintelligible things, which were no defence or excuse.
The nine were now condemned to the comfort of the workhouse and the
prison until haymaking time.
I went to Lone Barn again, the birthplace of Francis Albert Edward
Bishopstone.
The black brook, full of the white reflections of its snowy banks and
beginning to steam in the sun, was hourly growing and coiling all its
long loops joyously through the land. The dabchick was laughing its
long shrill titter under the alder roots. Faint, soft shadows fell on
to the snow from the oaks, whose grey skeletons were outlined in snow
against the clear deep blue of the now dazzling sky. Thrushes were
beginning to sing, as if it had always been warm and bright. In hedge
and thicket and tall wood, myriads of drops were falling and singing
in the still air. Against the south the smooth downs were white under
a diaphanous haze of grey, and upon them seemed to rest heavenly white
mountains, very still, dream-like, and gently luminous. Lone Barn lay
up in the haze invisible.
At the foot of the hills the land was divided by low hedges into broad
fields. There no birds sang and no stream gurgled. The air was full
of the pitiful cries of young lambs at their staggering play in the
shallow snow. One ewe stood with her new-born lamb in a stamped, muddy
circle tinged with blood amidst the pure white. The lamb was yellowish
green in colour; it stumbled at her teats, fell down and sucked upon
its knees. The big mother stood still, shaggy, stubborn, meek, with her
head down, her eyes upon me, her whole nature upon the lamb buried in
her wool, part of her.
The hill was hedgeless save where a narrow, ancient road deeply
trenched it in ascending curves, lined by thorns. The road had probably
not been trodden since that procession of ten had descended towards
the town six miles away. A kestrel had killed a gold-crest upon the
bank, and as I approached it sailed away from the crimson-centred
circle of feathers on the snow. But the wind had been the chief
inhabitant of the slopes, and unseen of mortal eyes it had been
luxuriously, playfully carving the snow which submerged the hedge.
The curved wind-work in the drift, deeply ploughed or deliberately
chiselled, remained in the stillness as a record of the pure joy of
free, active life contented with itself. It was the same blithe hand
which had shaped the infant born in this black barn.
An old plum tree, planted when barn and house were built, and now dead
and barkless, stood against one end, and up it had climbed a thick
ivy stem that linked barn and tree inseparably with a profusion of
foliage, emerald and white. The last of its doors lay just outside in
the dead embers of the tramps’ fire. Thus open on both sides to the
snow-light and the air the barn looked the work rather of nature than
of man. The old thatch was grooved, riddled, and gapped, and resembled
a grassy bank that has been under a flood the winter through; covered
now in snow it had the outlines in miniature of the hill on which it
was built. The patched walls, originally of tarred timber laid in
horizontal planks, were of every hue of green and yellow that moss,
lichen, and mould can bestow, each strip of board being of a different
date and a different shade. What gave them something in common with one
another was the fresh black stains which ran from the melting eaves
to the nettle-bed below. The porches, lofty enough to admit a waggon
piled as high as possible with sheaves of corn, had slipped somewhat
away: it was to them alone that the exterior of the building owed a
faint suggestion of a church and, consequently, a pathetic, undermined
dignity: without them it would have seemed wholly restored to nature,
amiably and submissively ruinous, with a silence in which not the
most perverse mind could have detected melancholy. But within it was
unexpectedly lofty, and the ponderous open timber-work, rough-hewn and
naturally curved, was obviously performing too efficiently the task of
supporting the roof: it at once inspired the thought that it should
ere now have relaxed the strain of its crooked arms and acquiesced and
slipped or collapsed. The oak floor was pierced in many places by wear
and by drippings from the broken roof; grass and corn had grown up
through the crevices and died. Some of the fallen thatch had been piled
in a dry corner for a bed. In the centre of the floor was another sign
of its late use--squares chalked by the children for the playing of a
game. I walked to and fro. There were no ghosts, or so it seemed.
A starved thrush lay dead in a corner. That was all. I stirred the bed
with my stick, meaning to set fire to it. An old coat was concealed
beneath it, and out of the pocket fell a book.
On the front page was written, “A. A. Bishopstone, ---- College,
Oxford, October, 1890.” The first pages were filled with accounts of
expenditure, subscriptions, purchases, etc., the items abbreviated
as a rule beyond recognition. Apparently he had soon ceased to keep
accounts. Several pages were torn out and a mere few left only to
save their other halves farther on. The book had then begun to serve
another purpose. Under the date March, 1891, there was a list of books
read during the term ending in that month--“_The Letters of Flaubert_,
Gilchrist’s _Blake_, etc.” He had meant to make a comment on this
reading, perhaps, but it was crossed out deliberately lest he should
be tempted to decipher the hateful thing. He had left only the words,
“It is a mistake to leave comments of this kind on record, as in after
years one is unable to get back at their meaning and the imperfectly
expressive words are irritating and humiliate. The mere names of books
read, people seen, places walked to and the like are more eloquent
far. This day I have burnt my old diaries. They help the past to
haunt us out of its grave.” Consequently there were from time to time
carelessly written jottings of names of books, lists of places visited
with dates: they were eloquent enough. On some pages short poems and
passages of prose were copied out in a very neat hand, showing a kind
of priestly sense of reverence for Claudian’s poem _On the Sirens_,
etc. These entries needed no comment, the serious worship implied in
the caligraphy was unmistakable; Bishopstone would have no difficulty
in recalling to his mind the mood in which they were copied out. They
were headed usually by no more than the year in which they were written
down, sometimes not at all. Thus he wrote “1892” at the head of a page
and apparently added nothing, for it was in an altered hand that the
prayer from Shelley was copied:--
Make me thy lyre even as the forest is.
Next, in March of the same year, he had written down, perhaps from
dictation, the names of historical books, with a few words showing that
in the following summer he would have to go up for the examination
which had qualified him for a degree. Evidently he was resolved to work
hard at special books and to put behind him the intellectual luxuries
of Rabelais, etc. Whether he read too hard or not is uncertain, but the
entry for September of that year was merely, “Brain fever and a 2nd
class. I am now alone.”
The next entry was in 1893: “Sell all thou hast and follow Me.” In the
same year came the words: “I possess my working clothes and a Greek
testament. I earn 14s. a week.”
There was no more for that year, but under 1894 were a number of
detached thoughts, such as:--
“‘All men are equal’ is only a corollary of ‘All men are different’--if
only the former had been forgot instead of latter. It might have
changed things less--and more.”
“Forgive we one another, for we know not what we do.
“Each man suffers for the whole world and the whole world for each
man. There is little distinction between the destinies of one man and
another if this is understood.
“Let us not exalt worldly distinctions, titles, etc., by saying that
they make no difference.”
In 1895 came the words, “East Anglia--the Fens--Yorkshire--the Lakes,”
and the isolated thought:
“To be alone in eternity is the human lot of a man, but to be alone in
time, alas! alas!”
The next year he had not touched the book: it was the year of his
marriage, for in 1897 he had written: “We have now been married one
year.” A list of villages followed showing a zigzag course right
across England; then the thought: “There is nothing like the _visible_
solitude of another soul to teach us our own. Two hungers, two thirsts,
two solitudes, begetting others.”
Was it perhaps at the birth of a child--the date is not given, it might
have been the same year, 1897--that he wrote this? “To him who is born
into eternity it matters little what happens in time, and a generation
of pain is as the falling of a leaf.” Then:--
“Unhappiness is apart from pain. When they tell us that in the Middle
Ages and even in the last century men suffered more pain and discomfort
than we, they do not tell us that they also had less unhappiness. Many
a battlefield has seen more joy than pain; many a festival as little of
either.”
And then, on a page to itself:--
“We are looking for straight oak sticks in a world where it is hazel
that grows straight.”
That he was still travelling was indicated only by names of places
written down without comment. A week’s accounts showed the expenditure
of 10s. on the food of himself, his wife, and John and Paul, two
children. In March, 1898, he wrote:--
“The road northward out of Arundel leads to Heaven”; to which he had
added, “So does Lavender Hill.”
Other thoughts were set down in the same year:
“The man who is discontented with this world is like a blackbird who
desires to be a plover that calls by night in the wandering sky.
“To have loved truly, be it for an hour only, is to be sure of
eternity. Love is eternity. And if we have not loved, then also we are
destined to eternity in order that in some other condition we may yet
love.
“If only we did not _know_ that in this world it is often well to
attempt what it would not be well to achieve.
“Preach extravagance and extremes and ideals that haply we may achieve
something above mediocrity. If we preach compromise we may not achieve
more than desolation. And yet even out of desolation may bloom the rose.
“Exactly the same proportion of marriages as of illicit unions are
immoral, even in a worldly sense.”
In 1899 it must have been the death of a child that dictated the
words:--
“I do not shed tears: I did that when she was born, for I saw her lie
dead in the cot where she smiled.”
There was a long interval and then one short entry:--
“I possess everything, but in the world’s sense nothing but my
name--A. A. B.; if I could lose that I should be a better citizen, not
of the world, but of the universe of eternity. Are the stars called
Procion and Lyra except by astronomers? Then why should I have a
name?--unless, indeed, there were a name which described me as a poem
describes an emotion. I will be nameless. I will no longer condemn
myself to this title of A. A. B.”
The next and final entries all belonged to the winter which he spent in
the barn.
On Christmas Eve:--
“Life will never be better or nobler, nor has ever been, than here at
this instant in my breast. But--may I never be content to know it lest
to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow be the less for it.”
Then:--
“What is man? One moment he is a prayer, another a flower of God,
another a flame to consume he knows not what save that it is himself.
And, again, he is but a dungeon in which an infant’s cry is echoing.
One day I saw soldiers, and I was nothing but, as it were, a sea-shell
to record the clattering hoofs, the scarlet, the shattering trumpet.
“The children have a doll that was given to them. They are talking to
it and about it--as I talk to and about another man.
“I heard the wind rustle in the dead leaves this morning, I heard it
rustle over my grave, and over the world’s, and over the embers of all
the stars, and I was not afraid.
“What name has my beautiful barn in heaven? In it was born a man in
the sight of his brothers and sisters. God has told me my seed shall
be multiplied as the sands of the sea. Can it be that out of this barn
will grow the regeneration of the world, or will the forgotten memory
of it trouble the well-being of some citizen far hence in time and so
give birth to a flame, a prayer, a rose out of the soul of him? It is
cold, yes, but the frost is one of the angels.
“A doctor has been here, a man not used to our life. He too felt that
it was cold. He said that little Francis--whom Mary calls Albert
Edward--is ill and may die. If he does, then it may be from the corpse
of an infant the saviour of society will be born.”
These were the last words. On the day after the doctor’s visit the
arrest was made. Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone and two of the children died
in the infirmary of the prison. Francis Albert Edward, born at Lone
Barn on Christmas Day, recovered from the effects of his birth and left
the workhouse at the end of June with his mother and four brothers. I
believe that after Lone Barn there was nothing they missed less than
Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone. If they had been given to considering such
matters, they would have said that he ought to have lived solitary and
let his hair grow in Wayland’s Smithy instead of marrying and begetting
seven children, of whom only two were able to die in infancy.
Lone Barn has since been burnt to the ground, and should Francis Albert
Edward (his real name) or the world visit the scene of his nativity,
to worship or verify the facts, they would find in that hollow of the
downs only a square space of nettles, poppies, and bachelor’s buttons,
amidst the turf....
Coming to the telegraph posts of Abingdon Lane--the Abingdon and
Newbury road--the turf was furrowed this way and that. Gorse and thorn,
surrounding the crossing of the straight, white road and the green
way, made a frame as for some wayside event of no common kind, such as
the birth of Francis; but the sun shone and the wind blew and betrayed
nothing. Then the road was a central track of very little rutted turf,
and flowers and long grass on either side; it had banks, but no thorns
growing on them. The valley was beautiful, the mile-distant tedded hay
looking like sea sand, the elms very dark in their lines or masses
above the green corn, the villages hidden and the single farm-houses
dim among trees, and the land rising beyond to a ridge saddled here and
there with dark clumps on the horizon. In one place a far-off upland of
newly ploughed chalk was almost snowy in misty whiteness. The clouds
of the sky and the hot mist of earth dimmed the pale ploughland and
the corn until the trees appeared to be floating on them as on a sea.
They were cutting hay a little way off to my left, and as the horses
and the mowing-machine came into sight at some speed it seemed to me
that but for the seat it was probably much like a British war chariot.
To the right the slope of the down was turf. Sometimes the road had
a bank on each side, sometimes only on one; near the crossing of the
road to East Hendred it was for a time without a bank; in other places
the ditch was clearer than the bank. There was corn with its poppies,
white campions, and charlock on the right, hay on the left. Woods,
now on the left and now on the right, sometimes touched the road; but
they never reached it from both sides at once--it never passed through
a wood. In one of the roadside woods on the left a great tumulus
stood disembowelled among the beeches: this was Scutchamer Knob on
Cuckhamsley Hill--or, as I have heard it called, “Scotchman’s Hob.”
This name an old carter had apparently justified to himself in part
by the fact that an old road coming from the north--perchance from
Scotland--passes close by, namely Hungerford Lane, which has a separate
existence from Milton Hill near Steventon to Land’s End on Knoll End
Down near Farnborough.
Above Lockinge Park the road was about forty yards wide of level turf,
between a bank and fence on the right and a natural low wall of turf
above it on the left. But the new reservoir, the new plantation of
firs and their iron fences, at this point might have persuaded the
traveller that Lockinge Park was going to absorb the Ridgeway as it
did the Icknield Way two centuries ago. At a very high point near by
was a slender white column and cross upon a mound of turf erected in
memory of Robert Loyd Lindsay, Baron Wantage, by his wife. The road
went lightly away from this over the bare turf, having on its left the
thorny slopes of Yew Down and on the right a sunken tumulus. Several
deep tracks descended towards Lockinge, and at a tumulus beyond the
first road to Wantage a branch entered on the left from Farnborough
exactly like the main track--if it can be called a branch that was
itself a parish boundary and gave its course to the main track for some
distance. This tumulus formed part of the right bank of the Ridgeway.
I noticed that I seldom did more than glance at the country southward
on my left. The steep downward slope that was never far off on the
right, the wide vale below and the very distant hills sometimes visible
beyond, could always draw my eyes from the south. On that side there
was a beautiful region falling and then rising again to a height not
much lower than the Ridgeway, and crowned with trees at the top of
the rise, as e.g. beyond Fawley. There were several rough, thorny
slopes on that side, each thorn distinct; and these are peculiarly
attractive. Yet I could not look at them long. It was the same when
I walked back in the opposite direction. The vale spread out in the
north was satisfying, and the horizon was distant enough to quiet
if it ever awakened desire: I never wished to descend. The two or
three miles of country visible in the south was far more positively
attractive, as well as by chance less known to me. Perhaps the horizon
was too near and was soon merely tantalizing: certainly it gave no
rest. Also the land fell away very little before rising again to this
horizon, and consequently gave none of the pleasure of a low and, as
it were, subject landscape. The scene awakened desire, but I could not
turn aside to satisfy it. Therefore, perhaps, since it could not be
satisfied and stilled as by the distant northern horizon, I turned away.
The road was going broad and green and straight between bare banks in
the course set by the tributary from Farnborough, when suddenly it
bent to the south for a few yards, and then again west by a little
pond under some willows. It descended, much narrowed and hedged, past
the ash trees and sycamores of White House, and then, with a sharp
northward turn along the Wantage road and in a few yards another to
the west at Red House, it recovered its direction and presumably its
original course. Probably the half a mile or more between the two
crooks is not an innovation, but the crooks themselves are, as it were,
the punishment inflicted on the old road by two newer or at some time
more vigorous roads cutting across it.
[Illustration: Letcombe Castle.]
Beyond Red House I passed Letcombe Castle or Segsbury Camp, the
road running close and parallel to its straight south side. A road
crossed mine and penetrated the green ramparts of the camp from a
corrugated-iron farm that stood with a thatched barn under some ash
trees--behind it a grassy down with clumps beyond. The road was now
so broad that it was hardly at all marked except downhill, or where a
crossway roughened it, or at some busy section between one cross-road
and another, where it would have one narrow, well-worn strip. At the
right-hand turning to Letcombe Bassett stood a sycamore and some ash
trees, and there were roses in the thorn hedge. Letcombe Bassett was
at the foot of a round buttress of the downs called Gramp’s Hill, but
was half hidden in grouped trees which continued above and alongside
the winding white road to Letcombe Regis a mile beyond. Gramp’s Hill
and the next and far more prominent hill formed between them a long,
deep hollow, winding up into the hill and terraced on its slopes with
flights of green steps. This winding made almost an island of a small
hill, round and flat-topped, and the top of this hill had been mown and
a waggon in the centre was being loaded with hay. Here was the place to
build a castle in the air--and also on the turf of the downs. The man
who did so would probably inhabit somewhat longer than the philosopher
did Wayland’s Smithy. He might live there even until he died. But it
is not likely that his heir--supposing that he had an heir--would
continue after him. In any case it would at once be called the “Folly.”
Clumps of trees planted on high places to please the eye and to be
a landmark are now called “Follies” almost as a matter of course.
Any house built high or in a great solitude is likely to be called a
“Folly.” A house may earn the name by having walls more than a foot
thick, in a district of jerry-builders where builders are bankrupt once
a month. Thus people condemn the extraordinary. If it is a little thing
like a white blackbird, they shoot at it: if it is a big, helpless
thing like a whale stranded in Cornwall, they carve it alive. But to
call it a “Folly” and have done with it is the most innocent form of
condemnation. In fact, it is by this time rather venerably pretty. They
call the far-seen clump of beeches on Liddington Hill the “Folly”; the
clump a quarter-mile north-west of Wayland’s Smithy is Odstone Folly;
Ashbury Folly is the clump at the crossing over the Ridgeway down to
Ashbury Church. They call a house a “Folly” with less benevolence. They
see--or they feel--in the strange, high, or solitary situation part of
an attempt to mould the course and conditions of life, or to escape
from them. They see--or they dimly imagine--a being who is trying to
make his, or some woman’s, like a poem, or like a work of art--
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver’s brain....
It is not that they see the blasphemy of it like that of Babel or of
the Titans. But they know that the builders of Babel and the Titans
will fail, and if they cannot beat them themselves they will be on the
side of the one who can. I should myself be sorry to see a house--such
a one as is likely to be built--on that island between Gramp’s and
Hackpen hills. But if it were such a house as Morgan’s Folly! I
warmed with the thought of transporting that hill-top tower to this
peninsulated table of turf, by the expenditure of a sum sufficient to
have given a free library to Letcombe Bassett.
I do not know if it was called a Folly, but there was a plantation
at the cross-road from Sparsholt to Lambourn which I liked--a long,
narrow plantation of beeches close together alongside the cross-road
and touching the Ridgeway on one side; on the other was a tumulus. Here
it was a broad road with no hedges, there being corn on the right, and
sheep, enclosed by a wire fencing, on the left. It was now near its
highest point, nearly eight hundred feet, at the Hill Barn that stands
with its company of stacks amidst a group of ash trees above Sparsholt.
The purple meadow crane’s-bill was growing beside the road near Hill
Barn.
I left the Ridgeway that morning by the Blowingstone Hill and its
woods, and went to Sparsholt, which has a quarter-mile of chestnut and
lime, and then beech and elm shadow on the road to its church. One bee
was buzzing inside as I walked over the stones and brasses of the floor
and looked at the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the
royal arms, on the wall, but chiefly at three recumbent stone effigies
lying asleep and private within a chapel, guarded by stone lions,
railings, and a locked gate.