T HOUGH this is not a book on angling, a life-long attachment to the fly-rod on the part of the author, and to the delightful scenes into which such predilections notoriously lead one, makes it at once more difficult and more easy to write than if one were approaching the subject as a stranger to the atmosphere, and merely to “write round” the pictures Mr. Palmer has so admirably painted. But in my case it is by no means only this. A predilection for British landscape in general, and all that th

T HERE is surely some peculiar fascination in the birthplace of a famous river when this lies in the heart of moors and mountains. For myself, I admit at once to but scant interest in the infant springs of even such slow running rivers as I have some personal affection for. There is neither mystery, nor solitude, nor privacy about their birth. They come into the world amid much the same surroundings as those in which they spend the greater part of their mature existence—amid ploughed fields, cat

I F the Severn under its infant name of Hafren leaps towards such modified civilization as Llanidloes and the lonely trail of the Cambrian railway implies, amid solitudes profound, the Wye, though running even longer in the wild, has the company almost from its source of that ancient coach-road that in the good old stay-at-home days took even persons of condition on their wedding tours to Aberystwith. It was a wild and long way though, and its solitudes must have struck something like terror int

P ARTICULAR distinction may be fairly ascribed to what is commonly known as the Chalk Streams. There are not many of them in the world, and nearly all of them are in England, being even here the possession of but a few counties. For Wilts, Hants, Dorset, and Berks, with Bucks, Kent, and Herts in a less degree, contain practically all the rivers of this type, and of these the two first-mentioned are more exclusively the home of the chalk stream. Wiltshire gives birth to the Kennet, the Christchur

N ORTHUMBERLAND is a county of generous limits as well as of character and distinction far above the common. For the entire space of its greatest length—which runs north and south, speaking freely, or from the Tweed to the Roman Wall and the South Tyne—a deep belt against its western frontier, spread the solitudes of Cheviot. Here, as in South Wales, is a vast watershed, covering a little matter of 700 or 800 square miles of silent mountain and moorland, not to reckon its overlap into Roxburgh a

T WO Avons join the Severn, if that of Bristol may be accounted a tributary at so late a period of its entry. Such hair-splitting, however, matters nothing, for, as the other Wiltshire Avon has claimed so much notice in our chapter on Chalk Streams, no process of selection would quite justify another pilgrimage by what is, on the whole, a less seductive stream. If the tidal reaches of a river count for aught, however, the North Wilts Avon should rank with the Thames, the Mersey, and the Tyne; fo

D EVONSHIRE is notoriously prolific in bold streams, a fact due to the presence of those two great areas of spongy moorland, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which lie in whole or part within her borders. Next to her splendid sea-coast, both north and south, the streams of Devon and the deep valleys they have cut are her chief glory. The actual moorland—Dartmoor, for instance, Exmoor being largely in Somerset—owes its celebrity in a great measure to the unexpected nature of its situation: a patch of South W

T HE physical attractions of the three south-eastern counties—Surrey, Sussex, and Kent—owe little in comparison with the regions hitherto treated of to their rivers. But use and custom are all powerful even in the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the great numbers of such for whom these counties and others, practically of the same class, represent the rural England with which they have any sort of intimac

T HE Rivers of Yorkshire present to the writer of these pages much the same embarrassment of riches and problems of compression on an only lesser scale than those presented by the general title of this work. One thing, however, reduces the rather bewildering amplitude of the subject as expressed upon the map by not a little, and that is the natural reluctance in a work like this to linger by rivers after they have lost their purity from the refuse of mines and factories, and most certainly after

T HE Ouse may fairly be called the most characteristic of East Anglian rivers, as it is unquestionably the most important of them. For in its higher reaches it has all of such sober charms as the leisurely streams of the east may boast of, while in its lower ones it loses itself in the great artificial canal-like arteries by which it drains the fen country. It rises near Brackley in Northamptonshire, begins to assert itself as it passes the town of Buckingham, and by the time it reaches Olney, o