THE WHITE HORSE, CHERHILL.
XXXV
CALNE
Calne (whose name be pleased to pronounce “Carne”) is not a pleasing place. Once the seat of a cloth-making industry, it has seen its trade utterly decay, and is only now regaining something of its commerce in the very different staple of bacon-curing. One does not contemn Calne on account of its misfortunes, but it must always have been a slipshod place. “Calne,” according to Hartley Coleridge, who described his father’s three years’ residence there, “is not a very pretty place. The soil is clayey and chalky; the streams far from crystal; the hills bare and shapeless; the trees not venerable; the town itself irregular, which is its only beauty. But there were good, comfortable, unintellectual people in it.” With all of which one may agree; save that the “irregularity” of the town is now rather sluttish than beautiful. As for the people, we are but travelling the road, and Calne is only an incident on our way—the people of it something less to ourselves, resembling, in fact, x, an unknown quantity.
The outskirts of Calne are not prepossessing, nor does the long, stony street of mean characterless stone houses that leads to the centre of the little town alter the stranger’s view. Calne, in fact, lying so near Bowood, long the seat of the Marquises of Lansdowne, and being their property, wears an abject, servile look. All that makes life worth living is at lordly Bowood; only that which is mean and commonplace is left to Calne. It seems (although one’s prejudices are Conservative) as though some vampire were seated near, sucking away the life-blood of the place.
There are two hills just out of Calne; Black Dog Hill, and Derry Hill, and they lead the traveller through picturesque scenery, past one of the lodges of Bowood, and so down into the flat alluvial lands where the Avon flows, and now and again floods out all the dwellers in those levels. The road down there is dreadfully dull to the pedestrian. To the cyclist, on the other hand, who has for these miles past been struggling up hills he cannot climb, and walking down others he dare not coast, the change is one from a penitential pilgrimage to Paradise.