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25 chapters
NOTE
NOTE
I an obliged to Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Co. for permission to make use of an article entitled "A Shepherd of the Downs," which appeared in the October and November numbers of Longmans' Magazine in 1902. With the exception of that article, portions of which I have incorporated in different chapters, the whole of the matter contained in this work now appears for the first time. Chapter. I. SALISBURY PLAIN II. SALISBURY AS I SEE IT III. WINTERBOURNE BISHOP IV. A S
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
Wiltshire looks large on the map of England, a great green county, yet it never appears to be a favourite one to those who go on rambles in the land. At all events I am unable to bring to mind an instance of a lover of Wiltshire who was not a native or a resident, or had not been to Marlborough and loved the country on account of early associations. Nor can I regard myself as an exception, since, owing to a certain kind of adaptiveness in me, a sense of being at home wherever grass grows, I am i
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
To the dwellers on the Plain, Salisbury itself is an exceedingly important place—the most important in the world. For if they have seen a greater—London, let us say—it has left but a confused, a phantasmagoric image on the mind, an impression of endless thoroughfares and of innumerable people all apparently in a desperate hurry to do something, yet doing nothing; a labyrinth of streets and wilderness of houses, swarming with beings who have no definite object and no more to do with realities tha
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
Of the few widely separated villages, hidden away among the lonely downs in the large, blank spaces between the rivers, the one I love best is Winterbourne Bishop. Yet of the entire number—I know them all intimately—I daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and is more exposed in winter to the bleak winds of this high country, from whichever quarter they may blow. Placed high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or depression, with
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
It is now several years since I first met Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd of the South Wiltshire Downs, but already old and infirm and past work. I met him at a distance from his native village, and it was only after I had known him a long time and had spent many afternoons and evenings in his company, listening to his anecdotes of his shepherding days, that I went to see his own old home for myself—the village of Winterbourne Bishop already described, to find it a place after my own heart. But as I
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Caleb's shepherding began in childhood; at all events he had his first experience of it at that time. Many an old shepherd, whose father was shepherd before him, has told me that he began to go with the flock very early in life, when he was no more than ten to twelve years of age. Caleb remembered being put in charge of his father's flock at the tender age of six. It was a new and wonderful experience, and made so vivid and lasting an impression on his mind that now, when he is past eighty, he s
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
To me the most interesting of Caleb's old memories were those relating to his father, partly on account of the man's fine character, and partly because they went so far back, beginning in the early years of the last century. Altogether he must have been a very fine specimen of a man, both physically and morally. In Caleb's mind he was undoubtedly the first among men morally, but there were two other men supposed to be his equals in bodily strength, one a native of the village, the other a period
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
There were other memories of deer-taking handed down to Caleb by his parents, and the one best worth preserving relates to the head-keeper of the preserves, or chase, and to a great fight in which he was engaged with two brothers of the girl who was afterwards to be Isaac's wife. Here it may be necessary to explain that formerly the owner of Cranbourne Chase, at that time Lord Rivers, claimed the deer and the right to preserve and hunt deer over a considerable extent of country outside of his ow
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
When Caleb was at length free from his father's tutelage, and as an under-shepherd practically independent, he did not follow Isaac's strict example with regard to wild animals, good for the pot, which came by chance in his way; he even allowed himself to go a little out of his way on occasion to get them. We know that about this matter the law of the land does not square with the moral law as it is written in the heart of the peasant. A wounded partridge or other bird which he finds in his walk
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
Caleb related that his friend Shepherd Gathergood was a great fox-killer and, as with hares, he took them in a way of his own. He said that the fox will always go to a heap of ashes in any open place, and his plan was to place a steel trap concealed among the ashes, made fast to a stick about three feet high, firmly planted in the middle of the heap, with a piece of strong-smelling cheese tied to the top. The two attractions of an ash-heap and the smell of strong cheese was more than any fox cou
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its most interesting birds—the species that were best worth preserving. Its great bustard, once our greatest bird—even greater than the golden and sea eagles and the "giant crane" with its "trumpet sound" once heard in the land—is now but a memory. Or a place name: Bustard Inn, no longer an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars on Salisbury Plain; and there is a Trappist monastery in a village on t
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
The subject of starlings associating with sheep has served to remind me of something I have often thought when listening to their music. It happens that I am writing this chapter in a small village on Salisbury Plain, the time being mid-September 1909, and that just outside my door there is a group of old elder-bushes laden just now with clusters of ripe berries on which the starlings come to feed, filling the room all day with that never-ending medley of sounds which is their song. They sing in
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
One of the shepherd's early memories was of Dan'l Burdon, a labourer on the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid recollection of this person, who had a profound gravity and was the most silent man in the parish. He was always thinking about hidden treasure, and all his spare time was spent in seeking for it. On a Sunday morning, or in the evening after working hours, he would take a spade or pick and go away over the hills on his endless search after "something he cou
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CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
The prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above twenty miles in length from its rise to Salisbury, where, after mixing with the Nadder at Wilton, it joins the Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a small, unimportant town with a nobler-sounding name than any other in Wiltshire. Trowbridge, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, do not stir the mind in the same degree; and as for Chippenham, Melksham, Mere, Calne, and Corsham, these all are of no more account than so many villages in com
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CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
Perhaps the most interesting of the many sheep-dog histories the shepherd related was that of Watch, a dog he had at Winterbourne Bishop for three years before he migrated to Warminster. Watch, he said, was more "like a Christian," otherwise a reasonable being, than any other dog he had owned. He was exceedingly active, and in hot weather suffered more from heat than most dogs. Now the only accessible water when they were out on the down was in the mist-pond about a quarter of a mile from his "l
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CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
Caleb and his wife invariably spoke of their time at Doveton Farm in a way which gave one the idea that they regarded it as the most important period of their lives. It had deeply impressed them, and doubtless it was a great change for them to leave their native village for the first time in their lives and go long miles from home among strangers to serve a new master. Above everything they felt leaving the old father who was angry with them, and had gone to the length of disowning them for taki
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CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
The incident of the unhappy young man who was transported to Australia or Tasmania, which came out in the shepherd's history of the Ellerby family, put it in my mind to look up some of the very aged people of the downland villages, whose memories could go back to the events of eighty years ago. I found a few, "still lingering here," who were able to recall that miserable and memorable year of 1830 and had witnessed the doings of the "mobs." One was a woman, my old friend of Fonthill Bishop, now
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CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
The story of her early life told by my old friend Joan, aged ninety-four, will serve to give some idea of the extreme poverty and hard suffering life of the agricultural labourers during the thirties of last century, at a time when farmers were exceedingly prosperous and landlords drawing high rents. She was three years old when her mother died, after the birth of a boy, the last of eleven children. There was a dame's school in their little village of Fonthill Abbey, but the poverty of the famil
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CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
Caleb's shepherding period in Doveton came to a somewhat sudden conclusion. It was nearing the end of August and he was beginning to think about the sheep which would have to be taken to the "Castle" sheep-fair on 5th October, and it appeared strange to him that his master had so far said nothing to him on the subject. By "Castle" he meant Yarnborough Castle, the name of a vast prehistoric earthwork on one of the high downs between Warminster and Amesbury. There is no village there and no house
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CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
I have sometimes laughed to myself when thinking how a large part of the material composing this book was collected. It came to me in conversations, at intervals, during several years, with the shepherd. In his long life in his native village, a good deal of it spent on the quiet down, he had seen many things it was or would be interesting to hear; the things which had interested him, too, at the time, and had fallen into oblivion, yet might be recovered. I discovered that it was of little use t
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CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XX
To Caleb the proper training of a dog was a matter of the very first importance. A man, he considered, must have not only a fair amount of intelligence, but also experience, and an even temper, and a little sympathy as well, to sum up the animal in hand—its special aptitudes, its limitations, its disposition, and that something in addition, which he called a "kink," and would probably have described as its idiosyncrasy if he had known the word. There was as much individual difference among dogs
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CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXI
It will appear to some of my readers that the interesting facts about wild life, or rather about animal life, wild and domestic, gathered in my talks with the old shepherd, do not amount to much. If this is all there is to show after a long life spent out of doors, or all that is best worth preserving, it is a somewhat scanty harvest, they will say. To me it appears a somewhat abundant one. We field naturalists, who set down what we see and hear in a notebook, lest we forget it, do not always be
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CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
In my roamings about the downs it is always a relief—a positive pleasure in fact—to find myself in a village which has no squire or other magnificent and munificent person who dominates everybody and everything, and, if he chooses to do so, plays providence in the community. I may have no personal objection to him—he is sometimes almost if not quite human; what I heartily dislike is the effect of his position (that of a giant among pigmies) on the lowly minds about him, and the servility, hypocr
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CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
Caleb was one of five, the middle one, with a brother and sister older and a brother and sister younger than himself—a symmetrical family. I have already written incidentally of the elder brother and the youngest sister, and in this chapter will complete the history of Isaac's children by giving an account of the eldest sister and youngest brother. The brother was David, the hot-tempered young shepherd who killed his dog Monk, and who afterwards followed his brother to Warminster. In spite of hi
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CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXIV
During our frequent evening talks, often continued till a late hour, it was borne in on Caleb Bawcombe that his anecdotes of wild creatures interested me more than anything else he had to tell; but in spite of this, or because he could not always bear it in mind, the conversation almost invariably drifted back to the old subject of sheep, of which he was never tired. Even in his sleep he does not forget them; his dreams, he says, are always about sheep; he is with the flock, shifting the hurdles
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