EIGHTH DAY--SPARSHOLT TO TOTTERDOWN, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY WHITE HORSE
HILL AND WAYLAND’S SMITHY
I was going through Sparsholt the next day just after the children had
gone into school after their mid-morning play. The road was quieter
than the church on that hot, bright morning. As I walked under the
garden trees I came slowly within hearing of a melody played so
lightly, or so far lost among winds or leaves, that I could hardly
distinguish it. It was an hour when nearly everyone is at work. A
poor, ragged girl was walking in front of me in awkward haste. But
she stopped at the same time as I did, to listen. The music was not
everything. The shadow and the filtered light, the silence of the music
half submerged, the busy hour so steeped in tranquillity, helped the
player to express perfect carelessness and freedom from the conditions
of life--summer, wealth, luxury, happiness, youth, gaiety, innocence,
and benevolence. They expressed it for us, as that river-side garden
picture at Watlington doubtless expressed it for others. But presently
the player lighted upon a melody which took me right away from
Sparsholt and the summer morning and the tranquillity. I could not
catch every note, but even the fragmentary skeleton of “Caradoc’s Hunt”
could not be mistaken. At a first hearing this old hunting song seemed
to be much the same thing as Scott’s
Waken, lords and ladies gay,
and little more than the north countryman’s
One morning last winter to Holm Bank there came
A noble brave sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name.
[Illustration: White Horse Hill.]
Many have heard it and thought it just one of the best, perhaps the
princeliest, of hunting songs. With a little change it might have been
a battle song; for it was martial and high-tempered, and would launch
cavalry as well as huntsmen. It was a little too nervously quick and
dancing for a battle song; such pace, such height of spirit could
not endure. Yet the trumpets before a charge have often brought the
song into the hearts of young soldiers, and their chargers and they
have done extravagant things for the gay tune’s sake. It suggested the
haughtiness and celerity of youth, audacious and fantastic pleasures,
voices of command and laughter, many-coloured and all splendid dresses,
neighing and prancing horses, hounds lazily quarrelling in the sun,
gallant March weather. The gates of a castle stood all wide open for
the first time since the beginning of winter, and arrowy winds and
humid fragrance were invading the stale shadows. As the first flowers
break out of the old, dark earth, so the youths and maidens with their
purple and gold, green and white, broke out of this old, dark castle
upon the Welsh moorland. The sharp horseshoes trampled the first
green of spring and the first yellow blossoms, even as the riders
would trample the hearts of men and women, and as freely upon their
own hearts, their own strength and health and happiness. The sunlight
played like a thousand sprites, on rippling waters, on the gold and
silver ornaments of riders and horses, on horns of gold. Bright as the
sun, clear as the west wind, joyous as the heart of man and hound and
horse sounded the horns.
There was nothing more in the three verses, there seemed little more
in the melody. After a little talk and much laughter and shouting
with deep and shrill voices, blowing of horns, cheering, and chiding
of steeds, summoning and urging of hounds, they rode away. They
climbed the wild hills and saw an angry sea of yet wilder hills in the
distance. They descended into the rich vales. They scattered joyfully.
They gathered together as joyfully. They feasted until better than any
wit or beauty or adventure seemed sleep. Then they slept.
Other listeners to the song might think rather of a later hunt
assembling before a cheerful Georgian mansion with many windows, and
behind one of them a lady playing “Caradoc’s Hunt” on a spinet, and
warbling it in Saxon. I thought of such a one as I heard the invisible
lady playing at Sparsholt.
Others, again, would be content with nothing later than the age
of chivalry and the _Mabinogion_. The hunters would all be auburn
or yellow-haired young men. They are clad in yellow tunics, green
hose, and shoes of parti-coloured leather clasped at the instep with
gold. Some carry bows of ivory strung with deer sinews, the shafts
of whalebone headed with gold and winged with peacock’s feathers.
Others have silver-headed spears of ash-wood coloured azure. All wear
whalebone-hafted and gold-hilted daggers and horns of ivory. Their
hunting is earnest, though elaborated with much decoration of custom,
style, and ceremony. They are men who must go hungry but for the chase.
They run or ride to hunt the stag or the boar, and nobly beautiful and
blithe look they as they begin to move away from the castle, and their
tall, brindled white-breasted greyhounds, wearing collars of rubies,
are sporting like sea-swallows from side to side of them. But they may
encounter foes instead of quarry; they may kill or be killed by young
braves from other borders. So with all the gallantry of dress and
harping there is something grim in their going forth; nor is it idle
bombast for one among them to ride out carrying only what he calls the
mightiest of all weapons--the harp--on which he plays “Caradoc’s Hunt”
at the starting.
These things and others, according to the singer and the hearer,
the song readily suggested. But they are mistaken who are contented
by these suggestions, sufficient as they are for a warm summer’s
morning in a green lane. They are deceived by the qualities which
“Caradoc’s Hunt” has in common with other hunting songs, especially
by the galloping rhythm and the notes like a challenge of horns. Even
when that boastful riding harper played it the tune was old. He was a
bard, and though he played it for the young hunters for the flashes of
gaiety and mettle upon its surface, it intrigued his own heart with
a rich mystery of antiquity. Already legend as well as the bards and
harpers had begun to play with the melody. It was said, for example,
to have been the favourite hunting song of the “Lady of the Night” in
her earthly days, and even that she sang it, or had it sung and harped
to her, now that she was an inhabitant of night and the underworld.
Solitary, benighted peasants or travellers saw her black hair streaming
over her green vest and crimson mantle as she galloped fiercely over
the mountains or in the heavens. Her horse was white. She hallooed as
she rode in a wild voice, at times harsh and abrupt like a heron’s,
at others clear and laughing like a wood-owl’s. The hounds streamed
after her, howling in tumultuous chorus, and the sound grew louder
as the pack raced farther and farther away. They were the hounds of
the underworld. They followed her in a stream or fan as closely as
if the foremost held the tip of her mantle. In some packs the hounds
were small, and were white all over except the shells of their ears,
which were rose-coloured; and they had eyes like lighted pearls. Some
were black with red spots, others red with black spots. There were
also hounds all blood-red, with eyes of flame. They hunted the spirits
of men destined to die soon, or of the dead who were unfit either
for heaven or for hell. They prophesied deaths and calamity. However
fierce, they were always even frantically joyous, but some thought the
hallooing of the lady was often close to lamentation. Only when the
sound of “Caradoc’s Hunt” was heard was she as joyous as her hounds.
Her sadness made it believed in places that she was no huntress at all,
but the quarry, or at least that she hunted for a punishment, that she
was doomed by god or devil thus to flee all night through cloudland or
the most desert regions of earth. Hunting or hunted, it was certain
that she was powerless to change her fate. Hunting was what she most
loved on earth. Perhaps she still loved it, or she was being punished
for the crime of pride or immoderate love of the chase. One story
was that she had been very beautiful and vain of her beauty, and on
her death-bed had exacted a promise to bury her in her most radiant
apparel. Another story, more venerable, was that she had so loved
hunting as to cry out once in a strong passion: “I care nothing for
heaven if I cannot hunt there.” When she died, therefore, her spirit
was cursed with an everlasting compulsion to slake this most dear
desire. She had to hunt eternally with the hounds of the underworld.
When she heard “Caradoc’s Hunt” she could not but start or follow the
chase. “If I forget ‘Caradoc’s Hunt,’ then I shall be dead indeed,” she
said. “I shall be quiet and sleepy as anyone else among the ghosts.”
When men saw her dark eyes flashing at thought of the song they could
not believe that if anything of this beautiful creature was to survive
the immortal remnant would not take with it “Caradoc’s Hunt.” She heard
it at many different and some monstrous times. People thought that the
tune was in her head, but she averred that she heard it outside--in
the clouds or the trees or the hallooing woods--and her immediate
attendants knew this to be true. She would break away from marriage or
funeral to ride. She would suddenly rise up from mass to mount. She
would dress at dead of night, uncouple the hounds, and hunt alone.
Love, wine, sleep, religion were impotent against the melody. Everyone
admitted that it was a beautiful melody; they called it gay, or
spirited, or said that it was perfectly suitable to a knightly company
of riders. This lady heard it and rode away. Hers was not the fate of
the lord of Radnor Castle. He and his hounds impiously passed the night
in the church of Llan-Avan, near Builth, to be near the day’s coverts
early; but when he rose at the dawn he found himself blinded and his
hounds mad, so that he escaped only with difficulty, to earn pardon by
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The lady’s life was charmed. She rode
anywhere without fear. She died young, but it was in bed. On horseback
she could defy man or God.
Such was the Lady of the Night, and her legend was at least not
unworthy of “Caradoc’s Hunt.” But as the belief in the hounds of the
underworld is earlier than the Middle Ages and the ghostly hunter in
darkness more venerable than the Norman lady, so is the tune. The
legend might have grown to explain the tune, and it does help to
illuminate the depths of which the surviving words, the mere cheerful
chivalry, are no more than the glancing surface. But the tune has depth
under depth, and when it is heard the plummet of the soul sinks to a
profound far below the region of the lady who rides by night. What
darkness the plummet fathoms, what “bottom of the monstrous world” it
touches, is not to be understood. Perhaps the mystery is only that
which at once haloes and enshrouds common things when we no longer feel
them as common. But if at the sounding of the melody the mind’s eye
still sees a cavalcade of antique hunters, it is not stag or boar or
questing beast that they are to follow; the castle that sends them out
of its gates and may receive them at nightfall is no feudal or faery
stronghold, but an image, perhaps, of the great world itself.
[Illustration: The Blowingstone.]
But I must confess the melody did not lighten my step as I mounted
again to the Ridgeway by Blowingstone Hill. The Blowingstone is a block
of brown, iron-like sarsen stone standing on end, and of such a height
that a man can bend over and comfortably blow into the mouthpiece at
the upper side. This natural mouthpiece is the small roundish entrance
to a funnel through the stone which emerges at a larger hole lower down
at the back. A well-breathed person blowing bugle-fashion can make a
booming that is said even now to carry five miles, if sustained for
some time. At the hill-top, where it stood before it became a procurer
of charity, a skilled and deep-chested hillman might have made himself
heard much farther. From this hill-top, nearly seven hundred feet high,
the Ridgeway rises to its greatest height. Hitherto it had hardly ever
had higher land on either side of it for very many miles. At Uffington
Castle it is over eight hundred feet high, but a little lower than the
highest part of the camp. From the rampart about this circle of almost
level turf I could see the Quarley Hill range and far over the Lambourn
Downs to Martinsell Hill by Savernake; I could see Barbury Castle and
the wooded hills of Clyffe and Wroughton, and Badbury, the Cotswolds,
the Oxfordshire hills, Sinodun, and the Chilterns. The Dragon Hill
below it is an isolated eminence shaped like the butt of an oak tree,
and similar to that one in the hollow between Gramp’s and Hackpen
hills, but ruder and more distinct.
Past the south and lower side of Uffington Castle the Ridgeway went
fairly straight, with a thorn or two on either side, towards the thick
beech clump above Wayland’s Smithy, sometimes a green road, sometimes
worn white. The hill-side was divided among charlock and different
greens in squares and triangles, and here and there a thatched barn
or rick at a corner. Southward I saw the pleasant, dappled scatter of
Knighton Bushes over the turf, sometimes considerable woods like those
of Ashdown by Alfred’s Castle; in several places the long stretch of
turf reared itself up with beautiful but detached hills, like Tower
Hill, as high as the main ridge. The hot, misty sun drew out all the
odour from uncut grass, clover, cockscombs, yellow bedstraw, ox-eye
daisies, and bird’s-foot trefoil, and the light air mixed them.
Whatever was visible or hid on the left, the road always commanded the
northward valley, the main expanse, and also for the most part the
nearer land where the villages lay, close to the foot of the hills on
which it was travelling. An enemy might have lain or moved concealed
within a very short distance on the south, but never on the north, and
it might be conjectured, therefore, that attack was to be feared from
that side only, and that the other was friendly country to those most
commonly upon the road. The camps of Lowbury, Letcombe, and Uffington
were all to northward; Alfred’s Castle alone was on the south, at
Ashdown, among the greatest woods now surviving on this part of the
Downs. It is hardly possible for unhistorically minded men to think of
war on these hills, unless troops are manœuvring over them. Yet the
Ridgeway is like nothing so much as a battlement walk of superhuman
majesty. The hills between Streatley and Liddington form a curve in
the shape of a bow, a doubly curved Cupid’s bow. Following this line,
always keeping at the edge of the steep northward slope and surveying
the valley, the Ridgeway carries the traveller for thirty miles as if
along the battlements of a castle. He begins at Streatley by having the
early morning sun of spring over his right shoulder; the full light of
midday is on his left as he passes Letcombe Castle; the sun is going
down on his right hand as he descends to Totterdown and the pass for
the Roman road and modern traffic between the hills.
It is still debated whether most or little of the downland was once
covered with trees. Those recently planted on very high places have
often failed to make more than a spindly and ruinous growth, as at
Chanctonbury Ring, Liddington Hill, and Barbury. But wherever there is
a tertiary deposit beech and oak, not to speak of lesser trees, abound
and even flourish in great size and noble forms. Gorse, hawthorn, and
elder rapidly take possession anywhere of neglected ground, and make
an impenetrable scrub. Yews expand and beeches grow tall and close on
steep and almost precipitous slopes where the chalk is easily bared by
rain, traffic, or rabbits. There is thus some reason for thinking that
the open downland is largely the product of cultivation and nibbling
flocks.
The flocks no longer feed much on the hills, and, except when folded in
squares of turnips or mustard, are seldom seen there. They have become
more and more a kind of living machinery for turning vegetables into
mutton, and only in their lambhood or motherhood are they obviously
of a different tribe from sausage-machines, etc. In time, with the
discovery of a way of concentrating food and sunlight and of adapting
the organs of the sheep to these essences, it will be possible to dine
carnivorously on Sunday upon what was grass on Friday; but “for ever
climbing up the climbing wave,” men shall sigh for lambs born filleted
with a double portion of sweetbreads.
From Uffington Castle the road descended slowly, and reached six
hundred feet at the Wiltshire border, a third of a mile past the
road from Idstone to Ashdown. Then gradually it rose towards a point
much above seven hundred feet between two distinct breasts of down
south-westward. In places it had a good hedge of thorn, maple, and
brier on one side, at others only isolated little thickets of thorn,
brier, and black bryony, or groups where the last May-blossom met the
first guelder roses. Once at a corner before Ridgeway Farm five beeches
stood together making a shadow. The highest point showed me the beeches
of Liddington clump, each stem distinct, the fall of clear turf down
to the plain, and beyond that the Barbury clump and the long down wall
bending to Avebury.
The Ridgeway was now rapidly descending, with a disused track on the
left, to the gap where the Roman Ermine Street from Silchester to
Gloucester, now the Swindon and Hungerford road, penetrated the hills.
Without this descent from its ridge the road must have turned back so
as to point almost to Streatley again, and it would have done this to
avoid only about a mile of lowland before rising again to the hills
which were its natural soil. Probably it did so rise, though the road
called the Ridgeway in Ordnance Maps keeps to the lowland for five or
six miles.
I crossed Ermine Street at Totterdown and an inn called “Shepherd’s
Rest,” and the Ridgeway became a hard road of ordinary width
between hedges and ditches. It was more like the Icknield Way than
the Ridgeway, and still greater was this likeness when it reached
Liddington, but made no effort to climb again to the ridges, or to keep
Liddington Camp on its north side. One road does climb the ridge, going
south-westward to Liddington Hill, and then south, having turned from
this present road to the left at a point marked by the “Ridgeway Bush”
in the time of Hoare--three-quarters of the way from Totterdown to the
Swindon road. But the Ordnance Map gives the name of Ridgeway to a
road going straight across the low land to Barbury, mounting the hill
on the north side of that camp, and continuing along the ridge beyond
Barbury to near Avebury, up over the downs again to the Avon Valley,
up to Salisbury Plain, and across it, perhaps, to the Dorset coast,
or skirting it to Warminster and the west. But the site of “Ridgeway
Bush” is within a few yards of the westward boundary of Wanborough, and
beyond Wanborough there is so far no sufficient evidence for tracing
the course of the Icknield Way. The two roads came very near to one
another in that parish; they may even have touched before the Ridgeway
returned to its own place high up; and it is possible that as the
Ridgeway in Berkshire has been mistakenly called the Icknield Way, so
the lower part of what is now called the Ridgeway in Wiltshire may be
the Icknield Way.