NINTH DAY--STREATLEY TO EAST HENDRED, BY UPTON AND HAGBOURNE HILL FARM
When I started from Streatley to see the western half of the Icknield
Way it was with several uncertainties. I knew that the Icknield Way was
not the Ridgeway, but a lower road which was in several places not more
than a mile or two away from it. This lower road, it has been said,
was the Wantage-to-Reading turnpike for part at least of its course;
one writer’s road clearly lay south of this turnpike; another had
expressed a doubt whether it was the turnpike or a road to the south.
The decision that the Icknield Way in Berkshire was distinct from the
Ridgeway had added this difficulty; that the Ridgeway, supposing it to
have come up from the ford at Streatley, must have been a road from
beyond the Thames, and what that road was I had not discovered, though
it had been suggested that it was the Upper Icknield Way. But if the
Icknield Way of Oxfordshire and the Icknield Way of Berkshire were
linked, it must have been at Streatley, though it may also have been at
other fords.
[Illustration: Moulsford Bottom.]
The first half-mile of the main road through Streatley to Wantage is
the beginning of the Ridgeway’s ascent; but a little past the fork to
Wallingford the Ridgeway becomes separate from this main road, and goes
westward out of it. There was at first no possibility of an alternative
out of Streatley to the west, and I set out on the same road as when
I followed the Ridgeway. On my left I saw “Lyndhurst,” “Bellevue,”
and “Montefiore,” or their more expensive equivalents. I ignored the
first coombe, the turning up it of the Ridgeway, and went on upon the
roadside grass bordered with wormwood and traveller’s joy. Almost
at once the road crossed the entrance to another coombe running up
westward into the Moulsford Downs, and those woods which the Ridgeway
skirts on the south. It was a shallow coombe, the sides dappled with
thorns, the bottom covered with corn, and in the midst of it a barn
called Well Barn. Through the mouth of the coombe which opened towards
the river in the east I saw the pale corn, and the dark woods above it,
of the Chilterns. Crossing this coombe the road had no hedges, but corn
on both sides. It was usually hedgeless, but banked as it went up and
down, and dipped into another coombe of the same kind called Moulsford
Bottom, where a quarter-mile north of the thirteenth milestone from
Wantage a road came in from the South Stoke Ferry, the continuation,
perhaps, of a track from the Icknield Way near Ipsden. From Moulsford
Bottom the main road went visibly curving uphill, but from the top of
Kingstanding Hill, at three hundred feet, it went straight between its
low hedges and grassy banks towards Blewburton Hill. It had still corn
on both sides in stooks, downs on the left, and on the right the valley
of dark trees stretching far away into mist. It was a plain, well-kept
road of easy gradients, no corners, and such banks or hedges that
anything approaching in front could be seen. It lacked the company of
telegraph wires.
The villages of Aston were almost completely hidden on my right, as
I passed within a third of a mile of them. That was by the eleventh
milestone from Wantage, and there the road was following along and
under one of the low, natural walls of chalk which so often guide a
road and are in turn defined by it. My road, Icknield Way or not, went
hedgeless under this wall, with oats above and stubble below. The
flowers on its narrow green edges were chiefly yellow parsnip and white
carrot, both dear for their scents, and succory, that pale blue flower
which a strange fate has closely attached to the coarsest and stiffest
of dark stems and placed where dust is likely to be most thick.
Here the dust was thick, and I was glad to feel, to hear, to smell and
to taste, and to see the rain falling as I passed the “Barley Mow” at
Blewbury. According to custom I stood under the broad, overhanging
eaves of one of Blewbury’s thatched roofs and watched the rain, but it
was better to be in it and to smell the wetted dust which association
alone has made pleasant. Any road was good now, though mine was an
unadventurous, level, probably commercial, road.
But, rain or no rain, I was looking for an excuse to leave this road at
Upton, the next village, which is by the ninth milestone. The map had
shown me a road, or an almost continuous line of pieces running from
Upton westward to Lockinge Park, and on the east possibly connected
with the roads I had already travelled between Little Stoke and Upton
by way of Lollingdon Farm, Aston, and Blewbury, but traversing land
near Upton which is liable to floods. Either this road or the turnpike
was the Icknield Way, because a more northern road would be too low,
and no more southern one had left any traces.
A hundred yards or so before the road I was on bridged the Didcot,
Newbury, and Southampton Railway I noticed the line of a hedge leaving
on the left at an acute angle, and forming a triangle with the railway
and road for its other sides. As an old road is not likely to form
such triangular fields, except with the help of a new branch, it
occurred to me that this branching hedge marked an earlier or original
line of the same road, or of one coming from Upton village, and there
connected with the field roads from Blewbury and Aston. Across the
railway another hedge and a depression that might once have been a road
continued this line and led naturally into a lane turning out of the
main road on the left beyond the bridge and passing Upton Vicarage.
I supposed that when the railway cutting was made to have left these
crossing roads in their original state would have meant making two
bridges or one very broad one necessary. The courses, therefore, were
slightly altered, so that, instead of a crossing or “four-went way,”
there was a road receiving a branch at one side of the bridge, and
a second branch from an opposite direction, the left, at the other
side. But on referring to the old six-inch Ordnance Map, made before
the railway, I found that I was mistaken. The amended crossing may
have been made when the old road was superseded by the turnpike. This
left-hand road being the likely-looking road on the map, I followed it,
especially as the main road, half a mile beyond, by the “Horse and
Harrow,” at West Hagbourne, took a right-angled turn which suggested
a piecing together of two older roads, an east-and-west one and a
north-and-south one.
My conjectural road began as a hedged lane that formed a short cut into
the road to East Ilsley and Newbury. Crossing that road it was a cart
track--with a disused, parallel course on the right--over Hagbourne
Hill, past Hagbourne Hill Farm, which was derelict, but had sunflowers
in the garden and ricks in the yard. Less than a furlong south of the
farm is a supposed Roman burial-ground. A home-returning carter told
me that the first part of the road as far as the crossing was Baits
or Bates Lane. It was a cart track, or usually a strip of three or
four parallel cart tracks, going parallel with the downs, and almost
straight between one road and the next that came from over the downs
northward to the villages. It could easily make a straight course, like
all the other roads round about, because it was on an almost unbroken
plateau of cornland at the foot of the downs: so level was this piece
of country that in about four miles the altitudes varied only between
three hundred and eighty and four hundred feet. Between me and the
downs there were seldom any trees, except such few as stood by Downs
Farm, its thatched barns, its old and new ricks. On the right a slight
swell in the land often shut out everything but distant Oxfordshire
under a blue, bulging threat of storm. The road was for the most part
without hedges, and not a parish boundary. It was rarely or never
sunken, but in places might have been a little embanked. On one side,
shortly before reaching the Newbury road, there were two old thorns.
Half a mile farther, after crossing Hungerford Lane--a track from
Milton Hill to Farnborough--it had a line of elm trees on its left,
which was part of the enclosure of Arfield Farm, close by. I thought
Arfield--on the new one-inch Ordnance Maps spelt Aldfield--might be the
same as Halvehill. The cottage pronunciation, except that it lacked an
aspirate, was not discouraging. Halvehill barn was said to be on the
Ickleton Street or Meer, but on inquiry I learnt that it was some way
from my road down Hungerford Lane to the north, but on this side of the
main road, which was here about a mile distant. This barn is now called
Horn Down Barn.
Past Arfield Farm the road had hedges until it came to the tussocky
little “Arfield Common,” so called, but perhaps not so in fact. Here
there were several forking cartways. Mine seemed to go westward along
the northern hedge and its traveller’s joy, but at the west side of
the common, where Cow Lane comes in from Hendred, there was a gap of
a hundred yards or so before the old line was taken up by a road from
the south-east, which led me into the road to East Hendred. This was a
little more than three miles from the beginning of the road at Upton.
[Illustration: East Hendred.]
As I had had as much rain as I wanted on my skin, I turned downhill
under a long train of Lombardy poplars and very lanky ash trees into
East Hendred for the night. It was a thatched village built on the
slopes of a little valley, its houses standing snugly or in short rows
high above either side of the steep streets. They stood high because
the streets were very old and worn into deep hollows, and at the
edges of these ran narrow, cobbled paths; but the cottages were still
higher up, and four or five stone steps led up from the paths to their
doors. At the bottom stood the towered church, telling the hours and
the quarters, not with clock-face and hands, but with bells. Rain,
however, drowned that sweet noise in a mightier sweetness, heavy and
straight rain, and no wind except what itself created. For half an hour
everything--trees, mud walls, thatch, old weatherboards, pale-coloured,
timbered cottages, the old chapel at a crossing railed off as a sign of
private possession--everything was embedded in rain. Every sound was
the rain. For example, I thought I heard bacon frying in a room near
by, with a noise almost as loud as the pig made when it was stuck; but
it was the rain pouring steadily off the inn roof. Then in the dripping
quiet afterwards the sunset blazed in little fragments like gorgeous
glass and metal betwixt the black garden foliage.
Before I went to bed an intelligent, unprejudiced man told me that the
field-way I had followed was Ickleton Street or--he said it with some
shyness--Ickleton Meer. I had asked no leading questions, so that his
name seemed certainly the local though perhaps not invariable one. From
his description and map knowledge I felt no doubt that this was the
road mentioned in Wise’s _Antiquities of Berkshire_ (1695) as ploughed
up in Wantage east field, but visible from Lockinge Park, eastward
almost the whole way to Upton, through the parishes of Ardington, East
Hendred, Harwell, and West Hagbourne.
It is strange that that same identification was not made in a book
published in 1905. I mean Miss Eleanor G. Hayden’s _Travels Round our
Villages_. She lived at West Hendred, yet described her village as
lying between two roads known on the map as the “Portway” (the main
road between Wantage and Reading) and Ickleton Street, adding that they
were known “locally as the ‘Turnpike’ and the ‘Ridgeway.’” Evidently
she had not heard the people talk of “Ickleton Street” or “Ickleton
Meer.” Yet her books prove her familiar with country people and country
places as are few writers of country books. Her _Travels_ and her
_Turnpike Travellers_ and _Islands of the Vale_ gave the materials for
an exceptionally full picture of country life. Nothing was beneath her,
and her love was equal to her curiosity. She was exceptionally modest,
and put down everything with no obvious intention except fidelity to
her own eyes and ears. She could be dull, and if you opened the book
at random you might be disappointed; but if you read a whole chapter
you were certain to be delighted. So many books are written by bungalow
countrymen that we have got used to pretty things, surprising things,
pathetic things, country equivalents of the music-halls and museums of
towns. There were plenty of good things in Miss Hayden’s books. She was
not afraid of quoting country talk at some length for its own sake, but
she did not miss such things as the cottager’s “strutty little hen,”
who was “a deal better Christ’n nor many what calls themselves sich,”
and the lonely shepherd’s answer to the question what he and his family
did without a doctor--“We just dies a nat’ral death.” She appeared to
make good books as others darn stockings, because of the abundant
material. She gave a natural monotony and a natural charm. She showed
us a village girl curtseying seven times to the crescent moon; children
playing with the old mill machinery after the cheap loaf had killed it;
labourers at a tug-of-war over a brook; a cavalier and lady of the old
manor-house; a crossing stream, a beautiful garden, a village kitchen,
a recipe for Christmas pudding and one for sloe gin, and many things
from old parish accounts. But nobody bought her books. If she had given
them to some journalist to mince, spice, warm, and dish up, he might
have made a book of the season from them, and by now it would have been
dead. Hers will last somehow or another as long as an old wall.
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant
to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell
asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead
of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing
judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain,
and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a
ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out
summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from
invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is
annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight
rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am
alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping
in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so
will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears
can hear it no more. I have been glad of the sound of rain, and wildly
sad of it in the past; but that is all over as if it had never been;
my eye is dull and my heart beating evenly and quietly; I stir neither
foot nor hand; I shall not be quieter when I lie under the wet grass
and the rain falls, and I of less account than the grass. The summer
is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any
more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to
go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the
window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and sound of rain.
Neither when I shut my eyes can I see anything. I am alone. Once I
heard through the rain a bird’s questioning watery cry--once only and
suddenly. It seemed content, and the solitary note brought up against
me the order of nature, all its beauty, exuberance, and everlastingness
like an accusation. I am not a part of nature. I am alone. There is
nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the
rain without. Once there was summer, and a great heat and splendour
over the earth terrified me and asked me what I could show that was
worthy of such an earth. It smote and humiliated me, yet I had eyes
to behold it, and I prostrated myself, and by adoration made myself
worthy of the splendour. Was I not once blind to the splendour because
there was something within me equal to itself? What was it? Love ...
a name! ... a word! ... less than the watery question of the bird out
in the rain. The rain has drowned the splendour. Everything is drowned
and dead, all that was once lovely and alive in the world, all that
had once been alive and was memorable though dead is now dung for a
future that is infinitely less than the falling dark rain. For a moment
the mind’s eye and ear pretend to see and hear what the eye and ear
themselves once knew with delight. The rain denies. There is nothing to
be seen or heard, and there never was. Memory, the last chord of the
lute, is broken. The rain has been and will be for ever over the earth.
There never was anything but the dark rain. Beauty and strength are as
nothing to it. Eyes could not flash in it.
I have been lying dreaming until now, and now I have awakened, and
there is still nothing but the rain. I am alone. The unborn is not more
weak or more ignorant, and like the unborn I wait and wait, knowing
neither what has been nor what is to come, because of the rain, which
is, has been, and must be. The house is still and silent, and those
small noises that make me start are only the imagination of the spirit
or they are the rain. There is only the rain for it to feed on and to
crawl in. The rain swallows it up as the sea does its own foam. I will
lie still and stretch out my body and close my eyes. My breath is all
that has been spared by the rain, and that comes softly and at long
intervals, as if it were trying to hide itself from the rain. I feel
that I am so little I have crept away into a corner and been forgotten
by the rain. All else has perished except me and the rain. There is
no room for anything in the world but the rain. It alone is great and
strong. It alone knows joy. It chants monotonous praise of the order of
nature, which I have disobeyed or slipped out of. I have done evilly
and weakly, and I have left undone. Fool! you never were alive. Lie
still. Stretch out yourself like foam on a wave, and think no more of
good or evil. There was no good and no evil. There was life and there
was death, and you chose. Now there is neither life nor death, but only
the rain. Sleep as all things, past, present, and future, lie still
and sleep, except the rain, the heavy, black rain falling straight
through the air that was once a sea of life. That was a dream only.
The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it.
Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the
rain. In a little while or in an age--for it is all one--I shall know
the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days
of nature, in the days before the rain: “Blessed are the dead that the
rain rains on.”