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22 chapters
THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES
THE HEART OF ENGLAND SERIES
This Series opens with a new work by Mr. Edward Thomas , that curious and enthusiastic explorer of the English Countryside, whose prose style gives him a claim to be regarded as the successor, as he is the biographer, of Richard Jefferies. The Series includes a new edition of Mr. Thomas’s other work, “The Heart of England,” and Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s “The Historic Thames.” These two volumes were originally issued in limited editions at one Guinea net per volume. THE SOUTH COUNTRY. By Edward Thomas
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CHAPTER I THE SOUTH COUNTRY
CHAPTER I THE SOUTH COUNTRY
The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, beginning— The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking, it i
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SUFFOLK.
SUFFOLK.
There are three sounds in the wood this morning—the sound of the waves that has not died away since the sea carried off church and cottage and cliff and the other half of what was once an inland wood; the sound of trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead oak-leaves still on the bough, of others tripping along the path like mice, or winding up in sudden spirals and falling again, of dead boughs grating and grinding, of pliant young branches lashing, of finest twigs and fir needles
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HAMPSHIRE.
HAMPSHIRE.
The beeches on the beech-covered hills roar and strain as if they would fly off with the hill, and anon they are as meek as a great horse leaning his head over a gate. If there is a misty day there is one willow in a coombe lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a thousand lamps, when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide and windy day, is the jackdaw’s, and he goes straight and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an endless savannah, and, underneath, the rippled pon
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KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.
KENT, SURREY AND HAMPSHIRE.
The beam tree is bright on the soft hills all through the days of rain following upon the snow and sun. There are days when earth is absorbed in her delights of growth and multiplication. The rain is a veil which she wraps about her that she may toil and sing low at her myriad divine domesticities untroubled. Delicate snails climb the young stalks of grass and flower, and their houses, pearly, chocolate, tawny, pure or ringed or chequered, slide after them. The leaves, with their indescribable c
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HAMPSHIRE.
HAMPSHIRE.
The fields where the green is now greenest, those bounded on two or more sides by woods, are of a kind not peculiar to Hampshire. They are usually on the greensand and lie in smooth, often winding, hollows like the beds of rivers. Sometimes the banks of these beds are steep, and they are clothed in woods or in hedges of hornbeam, hazel, ash and thorn that have grown almost to woods. The meadows are green broad rivers running up between the dark trees that bathe their roots in primroses. Sometime
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KENT.
KENT.
Even the motor road is pleasant now when the nightingales sing out of the bluebell thickets under oak and sweet chestnut and hornbeam and hazel. Presently it crosses a common, too small ever to draw a crowd, a rough up-and-down expanse of gorse and thorn, pierced by grassy paths and surrounded by turf that is rushy and mounded by old ant heaps; and here, too, there are nightingales singing alone, the sweeter for the contrast between their tangled silent bowers and the sharp, straight white road.
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SURREY.
SURREY.
In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their folds; and the l
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CHAPTER IV AN ADVENTURER
CHAPTER IV AN ADVENTURER
In one of the new cottages at the edge of the town beyond lives, or tries to live, a man who fought for many years in one of the suburbs a losing battle against London. His father had farmed land now covered by streets. He himself was persuaded to sell all but his house and garden to raise money for a business which promised his sons great wealth. He retained barely enough to live upon; the business, an honest one, failed; and in a short time misfortunes compelled him to open a shop. He converte
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CHAPTER V SUSSEX
CHAPTER V SUSSEX
A few miles south of that great presiding pollard beech is the boundary line between Surrey and Kent on the north and Sussex on the south. A few miles over the line the moorland organ roll of heather and birch and pine succeeds the grassy undulations and the well-grown beech and oak. The yellow roving lines of the paths cut through the heather into the sand add to the wildness of the waste, by their suggestion of mountain torrents and of channels worn in the soft rock or clay by the sea. The sam
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CHAPTER VI A RETURN TO NATURE
CHAPTER VI A RETURN TO NATURE
I turn into my next inn with unusual hopes. For it was here some years ago that I met for the first time a remarkable man. It was nine o’clock on a late July evening, and the haymakers, only just set free, came stamping into the bar. The last waggon-load stopped at the door while the red-whiskered carter stood, one hand on the latch, and drank his pint before leading his horses into the stall. After the haymakers, in their pale corduroys and dirty white slops, came a tall, spare, shock-headed ma
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SURREY.
SURREY.
Then I saw a huge silence of meadows, of woods, and beyond these, of hills that raised two breasts of empurpled turf into the sky; and, above the hills, one mountain of cloud that beamed as it reposed in the blue as in a sea. The white cloud buried London with a requiescat in pace . I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flow
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SUSSEX.
SUSSEX.
The road skirts the marshland, the stream and the town, and goes through a gap in the Downs towards another range and more elms and farms at its feet. Stately walks the carter’s boy with his perpendicular brass-bound whip, alongside four waggon-horses, while the carter rides. It is a pleasant thing to see them going to their work in the early gold of the morning, fresh, silent, their horses jingling, down the firm road. If they were leading their team to yoke them to the chariot of the sun they
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HAMPSHIRE.
HAMPSHIRE.
Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper,
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CORNWALL.
CORNWALL.
In Cornwall, where the wrinkles and angles of the earth’s age are left to show, antiquity plays a giant’s part on every hand. What a curious effect have those ruins, all but invisible among the sands, the sea-blue scabious, the tamarisk and rush, though at night they seem not inaudible when the wild air is full of crying! Some that are not nearly as old are almost as magical. One there is that stands near a great water, cut off from a little town and from the world by a round green hill and touc
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CHAPTER X SUMMER—SUSSEX
CHAPTER X SUMMER—SUSSEX
Far up on the Downs the air of day and night is flavoured by honeysuckle and new hay. It is good to walk, it is good to lie still; the rain is good and so is the sun; and whether the windy or the quiet air be the better let us leave to a December judgment to decide. One day the rain falls and there is no wind, and all the movement is in the chaos of the dark sky; and thus is made the celestial fairness of an earth that is brighter than the heavens; for the green and lilac of the grasses and the
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CHAPTER XI HAMPSHIRE—AN UMBRELLA MAN
CHAPTER XI HAMPSHIRE—AN UMBRELLA MAN
A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, especially one I know, whom first I met some Augusts ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon had sprinkled the quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men and white-dressed women, the older married couples and their trains of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most straightforward paths, the younger, with one child or none, choosing rather the green lanes, while the lovers and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the footpaths acro
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CHAPTER XII CHILDREN OF EARTH—HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX
CHAPTER XII CHILDREN OF EARTH—HAMPSHIRE AND SUSSEX
At the end of the lane, at the head of one of the beechen chalky coombes, just where the beeches cease and the flinty clay begins, stands a thatched cottage under five tall ash-trees. A grassy lane runs by, but on three sides the place is surrounded by huge naked concave sweeps of grey ploughland which take the February sunshine and cloud shadow as delicately as beaten silver. The walls are of grey-white soft stone, but only a little of them is visible, because the steep thatch sweeps almost to
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CHAPTER XIII AUGUST—GOING WEST—HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE
CHAPTER XIII AUGUST—GOING WEST—HAMPSHIRE AND WILTSHIRE
Rain begins as I set out and mount under the beeches. The sky is dark as a ploughed field, but the leaves overhead are full of light like precious stones. The rain keeps the eyes down so that they see one by one the little things of the wayside, the strings of the grey-green and of the scarlet bryony berries, the stony bark of the young ash unveiled by the moving leaves, the million tall straight shoots which the strong nature of ash and hazel has soared into since the spring. Then follows field
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CHAPTER XIV AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK—WILTSHIRE
CHAPTER XIV AN OLD HOUSE AND A BOOK—WILTSHIRE
The country is deserted in the rain, and I have the world to myself, a world of frenzied rain among the elms of the lowland, an avenue of elms up to a great house, hidden sheep tinkling and bleating, shepherds muffled, huge slopes of grass and pearled clover above a coombe where a grey heron sails and clanks alone, a farm desolate among elder and ash at the highest part of the hills, and then miles of pathless pasture and stubble descending past an old camp and a tumulus to the submerged vale, w
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CHAPTER XV AN OUTCAST—WILTSHIRE
CHAPTER XV AN OUTCAST—WILTSHIRE
Not far from “The White Horse” is a little town upon a stream that waves myriads of reeds and tall purple flowers of hemp agrimony. These are the last shops I am likely to pass in Wiltshire, and it occurs to me that I should like to taste lardy cakes—which I last bought in Wroughton fifteen years ago—before I leave the county. Richard Jefferies’ grandfather was “My Lord Lardy Cake” in old Swindon sixty years ago, and his memory is kept alive by those tough, sweet slabs of larded pastry which, in
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HAMPSHIRE.
HAMPSHIRE.
To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly undulating common, grassy and rushy at its lower end where a large pond wets the margin of the high road, and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green or furzy mounds of earth, often surmounted by a few funereal pines. The common is small; it is bounded on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new mean houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in one place a large square has
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