Within a mile of Chapel Green the character of the country changed. Before that only a hint of mountainous severity had been visible in the stone buildings of the village with their narrow windows and their cruel roofs of slate. At Chapel Green the pastures that lay beside the river were not greatly different from the water-meadows of Teme, which is an English river, but the fields through which the road to Wolfpits passed were poor and of a paler green. Their hedges were scanty, writhen and knotted with hard life. The generous elms grew fewer, standing stunted, forsaken and sparing of leaf. They seemed to shiver with poverty in this alien soil. In their place the hardier mountain trees appeared: birches that quivered even in this tranquil air: oak and holly and yew crouching in the hedgerow sombrely but crowned with waxen honeysuckle. These poor fields seemed to feel the pressure of the hills on either side from the slopes of which blown spores of bracken and seeds of gorse had settled and thriven like hill-men in a rich plain. In the midst of the fields smooth water-worn boulders were scattered, and through the pit of the valley a noisy tributary of the Barbel, that Abner came to know as the Folly Brook, set up an unceasing murmur like that of a thunder-shower on summer leaves behind a dense curtain of green.
Still the road climbed. It rose in bold curves, like a kestrel soaring, into colder air. Sometimes the brook flowed near it, and Abner could see through gaps in the arras of alders roaring stickles of bright water. Sometimes it swept away from them, hugging the foot of the hills, sounding no more than the evening breeze in a poplar tree. Gullies that fed it scored the road with tracks of winter torrents. At that season of the year no moving water could be seen, but once or twice in shadier places slow moisture oozed and dripped from beds of mosses on the banks.
‘The cloggers is coming up the Folly when they’ve finished down Lesswardine way,’ said George. ‘I reckon they’ll liven things up a bit.’
The road grew rougher; it seemed to falter in its purpose.
‘Where do you get to this way?’ Abner asked.
‘Right up into the Forest and on to Clun, but not many uses it,’ said George. ‘The Clun men don’t come much over our way. ’Tis a stiffish bit of collar-work. This here’s Wolfpits.’
The road swept up obliquely to a crest and then sank to the level of the stream. Abner had a vision of the whole valley expanding into a kind of amphitheatre through the middle of which the little river pursued a more leisurely course, winding gently through the fields as though it rejoiced to linger under the open sky. On either side the mountains rose to their full height, no longer concealed by foothills: from lip to lip the cup was roofed with dazzling blue. In the open space beneath, an avenue of chestnuts led upwards from the river to a great red house fronted with three pointed gables and crowned by clusters of fantastic chimney-stacks.
‘You don’t mean that one?’ said Abner.
‘Ay, that’s Wolfpits,’ George replied. ‘Looks all right, don’t it?’
As they descended the house was lost from sight and George began to explain that Wolfpits had once been a great house, the most westerly possession of the family whom Condover, his father-in-law, had served, but that the pastures which surrounded it, for all their greenness were poor and the mansion itself too remote and gloomy for gentlefolks to inhabit in this age of comfort.