The South Country

by Edward Thomas

The road now divides to go round the base of the Downs, but a farm track sets out to climb them. There, at the corner, is a church, on the very edge of the flat vale and its elms and ashes in the midst of meadows; a plain towered church, but with a rough churchyard, half graveyard and half orchard, its grass and parsley and nettle uncut under the knotty apple trees, splashed with silver and dull gold-green, dotted by silver buds among yellow-lichened branches that are matted densely as a magpie’s nest. The dust from the high road powders the nettles and perfects the arresting melancholy of the desolation, so quiet, so austere, and withal as airy as a dream remembered. But above are the Downs, green and sweet with uplifting grass, and beyond them the sea, darkly gleaming under lustrous white cliffs and abrupt ledges of turf, in the south; in the south-east a procession of tufted trees going uphill in single file; in the south-west the dazzling slate roofs of a distant town, two straight sea walls and two steamers and their white wakes; northward the most beautiful minor range in all the downland, isolated by a river valley at the edge of which it ends in a gulf of white quarry, while on the other side it heaves and flows down almost to the plain, but rises again into a lesser hill with woods, and then slowly subsides. Within a few square miles it collects every beauty of the chalk hill; its central height is a dome of flawless grass only too tender to be majestic; and that is supported by lesser rounds and wavering lines of approach in concavity and convexity, playgrounds for the godlike shadows and lights, that prolong the descent of the spent wave of earth into the plain.

An uncertain path keeps to the highest ridge. The sides of the Downs are invaded by long stream-like gorse-sided coombes, of which the narrow floor is palest green grass. The highest points command much of earth, all of heaven. They are treeless, but occasionally the turf is over-arched by the hoops of a brier thicket, the new foliage pierced by upright dead grey grass. They are the haunt of the swift, the home of wheatear and lark and of whatsoever in the mind survives or is born in this pure kingdom of grass and sky. Ahead, they dip to a river and rise again, their sweep notched by a white road.

At the inland end of this river valley is an antique red-tiled large village or small town, a perfect group of human dwellings, as inevitable as the Downs, dominated by a mound and on it a windmill in ruin; mothered by a church at the river’s edge. Under the sign of “Ye Olde ——” is a room newly wainscoted in shining matchboard. Its altar—its little red sideboard—is symmetrically decorated by tiers and rows of lemonade, cherry cider and ginger ale bottles, many-coloured, and in the midst of these two syphons of soda-water. The doorways and windows are draped in white muslin, the hearth filled by a crinkled blue paper fan; the mantelpiece supports a dozen small vases. The oilcloth is new and odorous and bright. There are pink geraniums in salmon-coloured bowls on the table; a canary in a suspended cage; and on the walls a picture of a girl teasing a dog with a toy mouse.

At the cross-roads is a group of old slated white farm buildings and a tiled farmhouse of brick and flint; and above, at the top of a slope of down, is a grey spire and two orange roofs of cottages amidst a round cluster of trees; the sheep graze and their bells tittle-tattle. The seaward-going road alongside but above the river dips then under steep banks of blackthorn and parsley to a village of flint where another spire rises out of the old roofs of a farmhouse and its family of barns and lodges; a nightingale sings at hand, a wheeling pewit cries and gleams over the blue ripples of the river. Across the water a shallow scoop has been carved by Nature out of the side of the down; it is traversed by two diverging paths which alone are green, for the rest of the surface is of gorse and, full in the face of the sun, forms a mossy cirrus over the mist of its own warm shade. The down beside the road is now all cowslips among its scattered bramble and thorn, until it is cloven by a tributary bay, a quarter of a mile in length, marshy at first and half-filled by elms and willows, but at its higher end occupied, behind ash trees and an orchard, by a farmhouse, a circular domed building and a barn, all having roofs of ochre tile, except the thatched barn, and grey stained walls; a straight road goes to the house along the edge of the marsh and elms. Grey plover whistle singly on the wet borders of the stream or make a concerted whimper of two or three.

A little beyond is a larger bay of the same kind, bordered by a long curving road entirely lined by elms dividing it from the broad meadow that has an elm rookery in a corner under the steep clean slope of down; at the end is a church singing to itself with all its bells in the solitude. And the hedges are full of strong young thrushes which there is no one to frighten—is there any prettier dress than the speckled feathers of their breasts and the cape of brown over their shoulders and backs, as they stir the dew in May?

Then the valley opens wide and the river doubles in gleaming azure about a narrow spit of grass, in sight of a sharp white fall of chalk, into the lucid quiet sea. At this bend a company of sycamores girds and is one with a group of tiled and thatched and gabled buildings, of ochre, brown and rose. The road crosses the river and a path leads near the sea, between mustard flower, lucerne, beans, corn and grass, in flint-walled fields, to a church and farm of flint, overtopped by embowering chestnuts, ilex and the elms of rooks; and below there is another valley and river, a green pathless marsh, at whose edge five noisy belching chimneys stand out of a white pit. The path, over turf, rises to the Downs, passing a lonely flint barn with rich dark roof and a few sycamores for mates. This is the cornland, and the corn bunting sings solitary and monotonous, and the linnets twitter still in flocks. Above and around, the furzy coombes are the home of blackbirds that have a wilder song in this world of infinite corn below and grass above, and but one house. Violets and purple orchis (and its white buds) cloud the turf. On the other side the Downs sink to gently clustered and mounded woods and yet more corn surrounding a thatched flint barn, a granary and cart-lodge, and, again, a farm under sycamores.

The soft-ribbed grey sky of after-sunset is slowly moving, kindly and promising rain. The air is still, the road dusty, but the hedges tender green, and the grasshopper lark sings under the wild parsley of the roadside and the sedge-warbler in the sallows.

Just beyond is the town by the beautiful domed hill, a town of steep lanes and wallflowers on old walls and such a date as 1577 modestly inscribed on a doorway; its long old street, sternly adapted to the needs of shopkeepers and gentry, looks only old-fashioned, its age being as much repressed as if it were a kind of sin or originality. This is that spirit which would quarrel with the stars for not being in straight lines like print, the spirit of one who, having been disturbed while shaving by the sight of a favourite cat in the midst of her lovers and behaving after the manner of her kind, gives orders during the long mid-day meal that she shall be drowned forthwith, or—no—to-morrow, which is Monday. This is that spirit which says—

Nature is never stiff, and none recognizes this fact better than —— & Son, and their now well-known and natural-looking rockeries have reclaimed many a dreary bit of landscape. At —— they showed me photographs of various country seats where the natural-looking scenery has been evolved by their artistic taste and ingenuity out of the most ordinary efforts of Nature. Thus a dull old mill-stream has, with the aid of rockeries and appropriate vegetation, been converted into a wonderfully picturesque spot, an ordinary brook was transformed into a lovely woodland scene, with ferns, mosses, and lichens growing among the rockeries, and the shores of an uninteresting lake became undulating banks of beauty by the same means; while the beautiful rockeries in —— Park were also the work of this firm. —— & Son have other ways, too, of beautifying gardens and grounds by the judicious use of balustrades, fountains, quaint figures, etc., made of “—— terra-cotta,” or artificial stone, which is far more durable than real stone or marble, not so costly, and impervious to frost and all weathers, although it takes the vegetation in the same way, and after a year’s exposure it can scarcely be distinguished from antique stone. In it the great spécialité here just now is “sundials,” the latest craze; for without a sundial no ancient or up-to-date garden is considered complete.