Queen Guinevere had fled the court, and sat
There in the holy house at Amesbury.
Rural, village-like, and till lately a long coach-drive out of the world, a great deal, nevertheless, has happened at Amesbury. It was granted at the Dissolution to the Protector Somerset, and his descendant Lord Hertford, on bringing his third wife here as a bride, unwittingly provided the neighbourhood with an unforgettable tragedy; for poor Sir George Rodney, whom this third Lady Hertford, fickle and beautiful, had thrown over for the greater match, went out with the crowd as if to greet the home-coming of the happy pair, and fell on his sword a dead man at the very feet of his fickle sweetheart, the affrighted bride. Later on the Duke and Duchess of Queensbury were in possession, and as the Kennet at Marlborough watered the elaborate grottos and gardens of a great Early Georgian hostess and patroness of poets, and inspired the muse of Thomson, so at Amesbury, too, a duchess maintained a rival Arcadia and another poet, in the person of Gay. In the Jacobean period, too, and later, this then sequestered spot was famous throughout England for its clay pipes. In short, they were the fashion, and a gentleman was not properly equipped unless he had a pipe bearing the magic brand of “Amesbury.”
Amesbury is now, as always, the objective point for Stonehenge, a mile and a half distant. It is 8 miles from here to Salisbury, and the river continues to plough its deep furrow through the plain. But the atmosphere by this time is a less aloof and more populous one, the river-side road more travelled, for British, American, and foreign pilgrims from Salisbury to Stonehenge will in summer time be frequently in evidence upon it. The villages are still thatch-roofed, and flint-walled after the chess-board pattern common to Wiltshire, and the cult of flowers, that generations of low wages have not extinguished in the Wiltshire peasant, add to their charm. The high downs on either hand no longer suggest such a solitary hinterland. A thicker foliage mantles from time to time in the vale. The river skirts the lawns of some country-seat such as Lake House, one of the best Tudor buildings in Wiltshire, and a little below, again, of Heale, where Charles II. on his flight from Worcester lay concealed by its then owner, Mrs. Hyde, for nearly a week.
Often performed twice a season and generally by men wading in with scythes, weed cutting is a regular operation in the life of such streams as this; nowadays, particularly, since trout fishing has become so valuable, these rivers for the most part are kept assiduously clean. Nor is any aspect of a chalk stream perhaps more beautiful than where some swift-gliding current is running a couple of feet over the growing water-weed, all swaying and flickering in green streamers with every motion of the pellucid and wayward current. The Avon, too, is a prolific and notable trout river, where the disciples of the modern cult of the dry-fly leave no half-mile of water going begging for a lessee, and the May-fly here hatches out right up to the river’s source.
But Salisbury is, of course, the place with which the Avon for the best of reasons is chiefly identified; for here the river races clear and buoyant over a gravelly bed through the very heart of the picturesque old town. The big trout can be seen sucking in flies beside its busiest streets, as well as later, where its lively streams wash the ivied walls and woody banks of the Cathedral precincts. Here beneath the shadow of the loftiest spire in England, in a wide sweep of water-meadow lying amid encircling downs, and interlaced with silvery threads of clear bubbling waters, is a famous meeting-place of streams. The “Sink of the Plain” was the designation bestowed by ancient writers on the capital of Wiltshire. From every quarter of Salisbury Plain, using the term in the wider and physical sense, come the limpid chalk waters hurrying to meet the Avon. From the bounds of Dorset, and familiar to all habitual travellers on the south-western main line, comes the Nadder. Born upon the edge of Wiltshire, watering in infancy the glades of Wardour and the ancient House of Arundel, and fed by affluents from the wooded heights of Font Hill of notorious association, it runs, a now lusty trout stream, through mellow lowlands where Penruddocks and Windhams have sat for centuries. Past Dinton, where the great Lord Clarendon and Lawes the musician and friend of Milton were both born, the Nadder completes its existence as a separate river in the gardens of Wilton House.
Its hitherto untrammelled moods now curbed and bent to the needs of some former landscape gardener of the House of Pembroke, it here laves the lawns on which Philip Sidney is confidently said to have written much of his Arcadia, and then almost immediately joins the Wiley, the confluence occurring just below the ancient town of Wilton, once the capital of Wiltshire and of Wessex. Thence a couple of uneventful miles save for their passage by the little Church and Rectory of Bemerton, where George Herbert spent his latter days, brings them to the greater meeting with the Avon beneath Salisbury Spire.
But what of the Wiley, or Wylye? for this by no means insignificant little river has never yet achieved finality in the matter of spelling! Unquestionably it gave the county its name, being quite obviously responsible for Wilton, which lies on its banks, and is most certainly in its turn the god-parent of Wiltshire. If we were to believe Cobbett, who was no native, the Wiley valley is the most beautiful in the world! I am myself inclined to think it is perhaps the most engaging of all the chalk-stream vales. Coming down from Warminster and Heytesbury, it cuts its way, like the Avon, in a deep trough where charming old-world villages nestle, through the wild downland. It divides what is more definitely known as Salisbury Plain from the south-western block of the same vast tract, still spoken of sometimes as the South Plain. The camp-crowned heights stand up on either side of the vale with even more significant distinction than those which guard the Avon. No disturbing element has yet intruded upon the perfect peace which reigns for miles upon the high chalk uplands whose heart the tortuous valley cleaves; nor is there any place the world wots much of between Warminster and Wilton, or, in other words, upon the river’s whole course.
But hoary villages, half muffled in stately elms and rich as any in England in thatched eave and gable and in bright cottage gardens, look over to one another across the rich carpet of meadowland upon which the Wiley lays its shining coils. Grey old churches lift their towers or spires along the vale, and cover many a sculptured tomb and many an effigy of the men and women who ruled long ago in the small Tudor manor-houses that still in many cases survive to fill a lowlier rôle.
Perhaps what greatly helps in giving some especial charm to the Wiley valley are the fine unimpeded vistas all up and down it, which it affords the traveller at each little rise he mounts on one or other of the valley roads that lie along the toes of the down. Nor is any other stream coming out of the Wiltshire chalk quite so translucent, I think, as the Wiley. Most of the river, so far as the fishing is concerned, is held by a famous Angling Club that many years ago migrated here from the Kennet at Hungerford, and whose fortunate members hail from every part of the south of England.