In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

This was a great hare country, as I knew by two tokens. When I had last come to South Newton a band of shooters, retrievers, and beaters was breaking up. A trap weighted with two ordinary men and a polished, crimson-faced god of enormous size drove off. Lord Pembroke’s cart followed, full of dead hares.... Some years before that I was on Crouch’s Down, on the other side of Grovely Wood, enjoying the green road which runs between the ridge and the modern highroad. It was open land, with some arable below, the Grovely oaks and their nightingales above, and the spire of Salisbury far off before me. Out of a warm, soft sky descended a light whisking rain, and on the Down seven hares were playing follow-my-leader at full speed. All seven ran in a bunch round and round, sometimes encircling a grass tussock in rings so very small at times that only they knew which was leader. Suddenly one leaped out of this ring, and all pursued him in a long, open string like hounds. Several times this happened. For twenty, fifty, or a hundred yards they ran straight; then they turned suddenly back almost on their own traces, in the same open order, until their fancy preferred circles or zigzags. Again they set off on a long race towards a hillside beech clump, going down a cleft above Baverstock. They made a dozen sharp turns in the cleft, always at full speed. Maintaining the same long drawn out line, they next made for the woods above. In this long run the line opened out still more, but no one gave up. They entered the woods, to reappear immediately one at a time, and took once more to encircling a tussock. As they were usually two hundred yards away on downland of nearly their own colour, I could not be sure how often they changed their leader, but I think they did at least once in mid-career. They were as swift and happy as birds, and made the earth seem like the air....

South Newton—church, smithy, “Bell” inn, and cottages—is built mostly on the right side of the road, away from the river and its willows, which are but a few yards off. The church, of flint and stone chequer, stands a little back, the tower nearest the road, on a gentle slope of flame-shaped yews and the tombs of many Blakes. Again the road touched the river, and I looked over it to Great Wishford, its cottages and hayricks clustering about the church tower, with flag flying, and to a deep recess in the Down behind. The village has a street full of different, pretty houses, mostly built of chipped flint alternating with stone, in squares, or bands, or anyhow.

From Wishford onward the river has a good road on either side, each with a string of villages, one or two miles apart. The “Swan” and an orange-coloured plain small house with grass and a great cedar stand at the turning which leads over the river to Great Wishford and the right bank. I kept to the left bank, because I was about to leave the Wylye and go north up its tributary Winterbourne. From the “Swan” I began to climb up above the river, and had a steep meadow and the farm-yard and elm trees of Little Wishford between it and me, but on my right a steep bank of elms which had less for the eye than the farther side of the river, its clean wall of down, terraced below, and the trees of Grovely peeping over. Ahead I could see more and more of the long, broad vale of the Wylye and its willows contained within slopes, half of pasture, half arable; and above all, the curves of the Plain flowing into and across one another. The earth was hazy, the sky clouded, and no one who had ridden on that Good Friday and bad Saturday could have expected a fine day with any confidence.

Had I been walking, I should have turned off this road between the “Swan” and Little Wishford, on to the Plain, and so by a green road that goes high across it as far as Shrewton. But I now kept on until the road had risen, so as to touch the edge of the Plain, the arable land, the home of pewits. Here I had below me the meeting of the Wylye and Winterbourne, the thatched roofs of Stapleford scattered round it, and the road going on westward with telegraph posts along the sparse, willowy vale. I turned out of this vale at Stapleford. It is a village of many crossing roads and lanes, of houses of flint and stone chequer, in groups or isolated, under its elms and high grassy banks. The church is kept open, a clean, greenish place with Norman arches on one side, and a window illuminated by a coat of arms—a phœnix on a crown—and the words, “Foy pour devoir.” There are no other inscriptions. Outside I noticed the names of Goodfellow, Pavie, Barnett, Brown, Rowden, Gamlen, Leversuch. The lettering survived on the headstone of John Saph, who died in 1683, and his wife, Alice, who died in 1677.

I dipped to a withy bed, and went upstream along the Winterbourne to Berwick St. James, and as the village lies on the right bank my road took a right-angled turn by a chalk pit to cross the bridge, and another to keep its course. At first sight Berwick St. James offered an excellent dense group of cottages and farm buildings by the river, new and old thatched roofs, and walls of flint or of black boarding. The church tower peered up on the right, with a mill bestriding the stream: on the left a white house and blossoming fruit trees stood somewhat apart in their enclosure of white mud wall. The sky over all was dim, the thin white clouds showing the blue behind them. The street ending in the “Boot” inn was a perfect neat one of flint and stone chequer and thatch. The church is kept locked. It was open at that moment, but occupied. Its broad tower, which is at the road end, is almost as broad as itself. It has a gray, weedy churchyard, far too large for the few big ivy-covered box tombs lying about in it like unclaimed luggage on a railway platform.

The Winterbourne guides you through the heart of the Plain. It has, I believe, no very strict boundaries, but the Plain may be said to consist of all that mass of downland in South Wiltshire, which is broken only by the comparatively narrow valleys of five rivers—the Bourn, the Avon, the Wylye, the Nadder, and the Ebble. Three of these valleys, however, those of the Bourn on the east, and of the Wylye and the Nadder on the south, have railways in them as well as rivers. The railways are more serious interruptions to the character of the Plain, and whether or not they must be regarded as the boundaries of a reduced Plain, certainly the core of the Plain excludes them. Even so it has to admit the Amesbury and Military Camp Light Railway, cutting across from the Bourn to the Avon, and there ceasing. Within this reduced space of fifteen by twenty miles the Plain is nothing but the Plain. As for the military camps, nothing may be seen of them for days beyond the white tents gleaming in the sun like sheep or clouds. When they are out of sight the tumuli and ancient earthworks that abound bring to mind more forcibly than anywhere else the fact that, as the poet says, “the dead are more numerous than the living.”

The valleys are rivers not only of waters, but of greenest grass and foliage. The greatest part of the Plain is all treeless pasture, treeless arable land. Some high places, as at meetings of roads, possess beeches or fir trees in line or cluster. Where the ground falls too steeply for cultivation a copse has been formed—a copse in one case, between Shrewton and Tilshead, of beautiful contour, following the steep wall of chalk for a quarter of a mile in a crescent curve, with level green at its foot, the high Down rising bare above it. A space here and there has been left to thorns and gorse bushes. In several places, as at Asserton Farm above Berwick St. James, plantations have been made in mathematical forms. But as you travel across the Plain you come rarely to a spot where the chief thing for the eye is not an immense expanse of the colour of ploughed chalkland, or of corn, or of turf, varying according to season and weather, and always diversified by parallelograms of mustard yellow. Sometimes this expanse rolls but little before it touches the horizon; far more often, it heaves or billows up boldly into several long curving ridges that intersect or flow into one another. The highest of these may be crowned by dark beeches or carved by the ditch and rampart of an ancient camp. Hedges are few, even by the roads. The roads are among the noblest, visiting the rivers and their orchards and thatched villages, but keeping for the main part of their length high and dry and in long curves. They are travelled by an occasional (but not sufficiently occasional) motor car, or by a homeward going farm-roller with children riding the horses.

Next to the dead the most numerous things on the Plain are sheep, rooks, pewits, and larks. To-day they mingle their voices, but the lark is the most constant. Here, more than elsewhere, he rises up above an earth only less free than the heavens. The pewit is equally characteristic. His Winter and twilight cry expresses for most men both the sadness and the wildness of these solitudes. When his Spring cry breaks every now and then, as it does to-day, through the songs of the larks, when the rooks caw in low flight or perched on their elm tops, and the lambs bleat, and the sun shines, and the couch fires burn well, and the wind blows their smoke about, the Plain is genial, and the unkindly breadth and simplicity of the scene in Winter or in the drought of Summer are forgotten. But let the rain fall and the wind whirl it, or let the sun shine too mightily, the Plain assumes the character by which it is best known, that of a sublime, inhospitable wilderness. It makes us feel the age of the earth, the greatness of Time, Space, and Nature; the littleness of man even in an aeroplane, the fact that the earth does not belong to man, but man to the earth. And this feeling, or some variety of it, for most men is accompanied by melancholy, or is held to be the same thing. This is perhaps particularly so with townsmen, and above all with writers, because melancholy is the mood most easily given an appearance of profundity, and, therefore, most easily impressive.

The Plain has not attracted many writers, though in the last few years have appeared Miss Ella Noyes’s careful collection of notes and observations, and Mr. W. H. Hudson’s “Shepherd’s Life,” the best book on the Plain, one of the best of all country books, and one that lacks all trace of writer’s melancholy. John Aubrey wrote one or two of his casual immortal pages on it. Drayton called it the first of Plains, and gave some reasons for it in his great poem on this renowned isle of Great Britain. Hundreds of archæologists have linked themselves to it in libraries. But the most famous book in some way connected with it is Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia.” Perhaps this is one of those famous books which are never buried because the funeral expenses would be too large, though much still remains to be done before we shall know, as we should like to know, why and how “Arcadia” and similar books appealed to the men and women of England from 1590 to 1680, during which ten editions were called for; what kind of truth and beauty they saw in it; what part of their humanity was moved by it; whether they detected the influence of Wilton and Salisbury Plain....

Our own attitude towards it is not so hard to explain. That it is called “Arcadia” and is by Sidney is something, and in these days of docile antiquarian taste it may be enough for the few or many who read it first in the most recent edition, the third issued during the last century and a half. I doubt whether even these will do more than dream and doze and wake, lazily turning over page after page—nearly seven hundred pages of painfully small type—without ever making out the plot, often forgetting who is the speaker, where the scene, only for the sake of the most famous passage of all,—