Dragon Hill.
A little past Britchcombe Farm the Dragon Hill came in sight above a slope of oats and yellowed grass. Then the road twisted again, left and right, to cross another coombe, grown with larch trees on its lower half and having a pool in it near Woolstone Lodge; but the upper half bending back under the Dragon Hill, with a few thorns on its steep and furrowed walls. Rising up out of the coombe, as usual the road was between steep banks, and on them thorn bushes, scabious, and meadow crane’s-bill flowers.
At the crossing to Shrivenham and Lambourn I caught sight of the crest and haggard beech clump of Barbury above the nearer hills. This crossing was within a quarter of a mile of Compton Beauchamp, the last of more than half a dozen villages which the road passed by on its right hand without touching. Ashbury was the first village traversed by the road since Upton. As I approached Ashbury through corn that now ran right to the top of the Downs, I had a bank above me on the left and one below me on the right, and I could see now both Liddington and Barbury clumps, and to the left of Liddington one high, bare breast of turf. A lesser road turned down to Odstone Farm, which I was very glad to see again, not a quarter of a mile on my right—its five plain windows in a row, two in the roof, and those below not to be counted because of the garden shrubs. It was a grey, stone house with a steep, grey roof and a chimney stack at either side; there were elms behind it, and tiled and thatched sheds all on its right hand; and the road going straight down to its left side.
Green Terrace, near Ashbury.
The right-hand hedge gave way to show me the elms and thatched barns and ricks of Ashbury, its church tower among trees rather apart and nearer the Downs. The road descended under a steep left-hand bank, with a green course parallel. It turned right and then left round some elm trees and past a hollow on the right containing a broad millpond enclosed in a parallelogram of elms. At Ashbury the road turned to the right away from the church to the “Rose and Crown,” and the two elm trees standing in mid-street, and then back again to the left into its original line. But parallel with the road a footpath ran from the church on a terrace just wide enough for a waggon. It had a green wall above and below, grass on the left, sweet-smelling lucerne on the right. It rose and fell more than the road as it made for Idstone between the barley. The terrace seemed to be continued across the deeply worn road from Swinley Down; but the path turned to the right and into the main road. This terrace road seemed to be a very possible course for an old, though perhaps only an alternative road.
I stopped for a little time at Ashbury, and asking for tea at a cottage and shop combined, I was asked into a silent but formidable Sunday assembly of three incompatible and hostile but respectful generations: a severe but cheerful grandmother in black and spectacles with one finger still marking a place in the Bible; a preoccupied, morose mother, also in black; a depressed but giddy daughter fresh from the counter of a London shop, and already wondering what she was going to do at Ashbury. This girl poured out my tea and told me that there were some very good apples on the tree next door. Neither she nor her relatives, because it was Sunday, could buy these or in any way procure them, so she told me, though she had begun to want them very much after half a day at her native village; if I went—and there seemed no objection to the damnation of a casual wayfarer—I could probably get some. The old lady who lived in the cottage next door said, as if she were stating a well-known fact in the natural history of Ashbury, that she had no apples, that they were very troublesome to knock down, that none had fallen from the trees during the day, and that—she was perfectly certain—there would be none until the morrow. On the morrow I hoped to be many miles from Ashbury, and so I wished her a good afternoon in spite of the rigid sabbatarianism of her trees. I returned to the cottage where I had been drinking tea and told the girl that no apples would fall until Monday morning, and asked her if she knew any other kind of apple trees in Ashbury. Perhaps it was as well that she did not, for I found that Sunday’s tea cost twice as much as Saturday’s or Monday’s—it being apparently the right of the righteous to prey upon the damned, even if in so doing they put themselves into a position apparently as graceless as that of the damned. I thought of asking a clergyman if this was so, and seeing a man whom I took to be a clergyman, because his collar was fastened behind instead of in front, I walked after him. But he suddenly stopped and went into the very cottage of the old lady whose apples would not fall before Monday morning, and this looked so like a conspiracy that I hastened away, glad to have made these discoveries in the natural history of Ashbury.