WYCHANGER: A FAR RETREAT.
On the northern edge of Exmoor, parted from the outer world by a long ridge of wooded hills that die away into a bold headland by the grey sea, there lies a spacious valley—fair even for the West Country, a valley that for its beauty of broad fields and noble trees and old-world villages, may rank among the fairest in all England. The traveller by the well-kept coach road that passes along the foot of the hills, almost from end to end of it, looking across its green meadows and its red corn-lands to the deer-haunted heights of Dunkerry, sees something of its beauty, of its picturesque cottages, its wooded slopes, its rich pasture lands; may even catch a glimpse in passing of that old mill that, with its pointed gables, its rambling outbuildings, its rude bridges, and its
"Dark wheel that toils amid the hurry
And rushing of the flume,"
is like an artist's dream.
He who fares through on foot will know more of its charm, but even he is hardly likely to discover the best of its lovely lanes, deep set under over-arching hedgerows, the oldest and most magnificent of its trees, the most picturesque and retiring of its cottages. While hidden behind a rampart of low hills on the very skirts of Dunkery, the most beautiful village of all, an ideal West Country hamlet, will escape him altogether:—a village in a nest of hills, with brown gables all embowered in green. By the church, whose grey tower rises in the midst, two poplars stand, their young leaves trembling in the sunshine, their tall forms just swaying in the wind.
The old manor house, whose traditions go back beyond the days of the Armada, seems to stand at the very limit of the world. So near the wilderness is it that the creatures of the wild, the birds, the beasts, share with man the possession of its barns and outbuildings. Its lawns, its thick-growing bays and laurels, its broad eaves, the masonry of its old walls are haunted by innumerable birds.
In the early morning, an hour or more before the sunrise, the whole air about the house is filled with sweet sounds, with the sunny ripple of the goldfinch's song, with the mingled chorus of thrush and blackbird, of wrens and robins and warblers, with the call of the cuckoo, the pipe of the wryneck, the croon of doves among the larches on the hill. At times, from far up the moorland comes down even the strange cry of a buzzard, or the croak of a wandering raven. All day the garden is full of pleasant sounds and sweet suggestions of the woodland, of the hushed whispers of swift moorland streams, of the stir of winds among the restless pines.