In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

Very different from Old Joe’s are the epitaphs inside the church, the work largely, I believe, of a former vicar, G. H. Templer, who built the big blank vicarage with its square, high-walled fruit garden and double range of stables, and planted cedars and cork trees. The epitaph of Lieut.-Col. Isaac Easton of the East India Company is a fair sample of this practically imperishable prose,—

“Through all the gradations of military duty, his love of Enterprise, his Valour, his Prudence, and Humanity, obtained the admiration and affection of his fellow-soldiers with the confidence and commendation of that government which knew as well to distinguish as to reward real merit. In the more familiar walks of private life, all who knew him were eager to approve and to applaud the brilliant energy of his mind and the polished affability of his manners. His heart glowed with all the sensibility which forms the genuine source of real goodness and greatness, with gratitude to his benefactor, with generosity to his friend, and liberality to mankind. The sudden loss of so many virtues and so many amiable qualities, who that enjoyed his confidence or shared his conviviality can recall without a sigh or a tear? With a constitution impaired by the severities of unremitted service and the rigours of an oppressive climate, he returned, to the fond hope of enjoying on his native soil the well-earned recompense of his honourable labours, when a premature death hurried him to his grave in 1780, at the age of 45.”

Templer’s position in prose is the same as that of Jolliffe’s encomiast in verse at Kilmersdon. The relation of his work to life at Shapwick in the eighteenth century is about as close as that of the “Arcadia” to Sidney’s age. More telling are the inscriptions of two men named Cator and Graham, who were killed during a fight with a French privateer in the Bay of Bengal in October 1800. The Bulls and Strangways have big slabs; the Bulls adding the blue and crimson of their arms to the chancel. Not less silent than the church was the street leading down towards the manor house and railway station, silent except for a transitory twitter of goldfinches. The one shop had its blinds drawn in honour of early closing day. It is a peaceful neighbourhood, where every one brews his own cider and burns the black or the inflammable ruddy peat from the moor. A corner where there are a beautiful chestnut and some waste grass provides a camping ground for gypsies from Salisbury and elsewhere; and it seemed fitting that men and boys should spend their idle hours in the lane at marbles. It is famous, if at all, since the battle of Sedgemoor, for giving a home to F. R. Havergal and an occasional resting-place to Churton Collins.

Very still, silvery, and silent was the by-road by which I rode up through ploughland back again to the ridge. Lest I had missed anything, I turned away from my destination for a mile towards Ashcott. I was for most of the distance in Loxley Wood. Primroses, as far as I could see, clustered thick round the felled oaks, the fagot heaps, and the tufts of last year’s growth on the stoles. A few stones on the right inside the wood are called Swayne’s Jumps, and it is related that a prisoner of the name, whether in Monmouth’s or Cromwell’s time I forget, escaped by means of some tremendous jumps there, taken when he was pretending to show his captors how they ought to jump.

Even without the wood this road was beautiful. For it was bordered for some way on the left by a broad grass strip planted with oaks, and not common oaks, but trees all based on small moss-gilded pedestals of their own roots above the earth, their bark and branches silver, their main limbs velveted with moss and plumed with polypody ferns. Moreover, they have filled the few gaps with young trees. On the right, after coming to the end of Loxley Wood and before the signpost of Greinton, I saw a rough waste strip of uneven breadth, partly overgrown by bushes from the hedge and by pine trees. Here ran the rank of telegraph posts, and in the grass were remains of fires. A hundred yards later, and as far as the turning of Shapwick, the waste was quite a little rushy common fed by horses.

Turning once more westward and again piercing Loxley Wood, the wayside strip there consecrated to the oak avenue ceased, but that it had once been prolonged far along the road was plain, whether it had been swallowed up by wood or meadow, or hedged off and planted with larches or apple trees, or ploughed up, or usurped by cottage and garden. Shorn thus, the road travels four miles of a ridge as straight and sharp as the Hog’s Back. It was delicious easy riding, with no company but that of a linnet muttering sweetly in the new-green larches, and a blackbird or two hurrying and spluttering under the hedge.

All the country on either hand was subject to my eyes. Before me the red disc of the sun was low, its nether half obliterated by a long, misty cloud. The levels on my right, and their dark, moss-like corrugations, were misted over, not so densely that a white river of train smoke could not be seen flowing through it; and Brent Knoll far off towered over it like an islet of crag, dark and distinct; nor was the prostrate mass of Brean Down invisible on the seaward side of Brent Knoll. Not a sound emerged from that side beyond the bleat of a few lambs. On the left was the misty country of Athelney, and a solitary dark tower raised well above the midst of the level. The most delicate scene of all my journey was nearer. The Poldens have on this side several foothills, and at the turning to Righton’s Grave one of these confronted me; I had it in full view for a mile and could hardly look at anything else. This was Ball Hill. It is a smooth island lifted up out of an ever so faintly undulating land of hedged meadows and sparse elm trees. It rose very gradually, parallel to my road and about half a mile from it, so as to make a long, nascent curve, up to a comb of trees; and its flank was divided downwards and lengthwise amongst rosy ploughland and pale green corn in large hedgeless squares and oblongs, beautifully contrasted in size and colour. Next to Ball Hill is another one, as distinct, but steeper and wooded, called Pendon Hill. In the dip between the two lay the church tower and cottages of Stawell, and a dim orchard rose behind them with trees that were like smoke. Though the lines of these hills and their decorated slopes are definitely beautiful, during the dusk on that silver road in the first Spring innocence they were a miraculous birth, to match the Spring innocence and the tranquillity of the dusk as I slid quietly on that road of silver.

Then came two shams. The first was a towered residence close to the road, with Gothic features. The second, black against the sky, three miles ahead, was a tower and many ruinous arches on top of the wooded hill at Knowle. It is hard to show how not very experienced eyes begin to suspect a sham of this sort. But they did, and yet were able to dally a little with the kind of feeling which the real thing would have produced. For, when I saw the ruins most clearly, at the turn to Woolavington, Highbridge, and Burnham, twilight was half spent.

The road was descending. Bridgwater’s tower, spire, and chimneys, and smoke mingling with trees, were visible down on the left, and past them the dim Quantocks fading down to the sea. I was soon at the level of the railway, and Bawdrip behind the embankment showed me a pretty jumble of roofs, chimneys, a church tower, and a green thorn tree over the rim. The high slope of Knowle and its rookery beeches—where the ruin is—hung upon the right very darkly over the small pale “Knowle Inn” and the white scattered blackthorn blossom and myself slipping by. The road went on to Puriton and Pawlett, and down it under the trees two lovers were walking slowly, but opposite Knowle I had to turn sharp to the left. Those green trees in the last of the twilight seemed exceptionally benign. After the turning I immediately crossed the deep-cut King’s Sedgemoor drain—with a flowering orchard betwixt it and the road I had left—and in a few yards the single line of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway. Two miles of flat field and white-painted orchard, and I was in a street of flat, dull, brick cottages and foul smoke, but possessing an extraordinarily haughty white hart chained over an inn porch of that name. Then the river Parrett; and a dark ship drawn up under the line of tall inns and stores with glimmering windows. I crossed the bridge and walked up Corn Hill between the shops to where the roads fork, one for Taunton, one for Minehead, to left and right of Robert Blake’s statue and the pillared dome of the market. I took the Minehead road, the right-hand one, past the banks, the post office, the “Royal Clarence” hotel, and by half-past seven I was eating supper, listening to children outside in the still, dark street, laughing, chattering, teasing, disputing. I read a page or two of the “History of Prince Lee Boo,” and fell asleep.