’Tis a glorious morning. The sky is brightly blue, flecked with white wee clouds, a haze on the horizon, with rock-and-tower clouds rising like snowbanks above it.
The road to Arundel is a winding one, but there are plenty of finger-posts in various stages of dilapidation. A well-treed country, too, and highly cultivated. Every three or four minutes we pass a farm-steading or a cottage near the road, the gardens of the latter being all ablaze with bright geraniums, hydrangeas, dahlias, and sunflowers, and all kinds of berried, creeping, and climbing plants.
How different, though, the hedgerows look now from what they did when I started on my rambles in early summer, for now sombre browns, blues, and yellows have taken the place of spring’s tender greens, and red berries hang in clusters where erst was the hawthorn’s bloom.
The blossom has left the bramble-bushes, except here and there the pink of a solitary flower, but berries black and crimson cluster on them; only here and there among the ferns and brackens, now changing to brown, is the flush of nodding thistle, or some solitary orange flowers, and even as the wind sweeps through the trees a shower of leaves of every hue falls around us.
A steep hill leads us down to the valley in which Arundel is situated, and the peep from this braeland is very pretty and romantic.
The town sweeps up the opposite hill among delightful woodlands, the Duke of Norfolk’s castle, with its flagstaff over the ruined keep, being quite a feature of the landscape.
We turn to the left in the town, glad we have not to climb that terrible hill; and, after getting clear of the town, bear away through a fine beech wood. The trees are already assuming their autumnal garb of dusky brown and yellow, and sombre shades of every hue, only the general sadness is relieved by the appearance here and there of a still verdant wide-spreading ash.
On and on. Up hill and down dell. Hardly a field is to be seen, such a wildery of woodlands is there on every side. The brackens here are very tall, and, with the exception of a few dwarf oak, elm, or elder-bushes, constitute the only undergrowth.
We are out in the open again, on a breezy upland; on each side the road is bounded by a great bank of gorse. When in bloom in May, how lovely it must look! We can see fields now, pale yellow or ploughed, suggestive of coming winter. And farm-steadings too, and far to the left a well-wooded fertile country, stretching for miles and miles.
Near to Bell’s Hut Inn we stop to water, and put the nosebags on. There is a brush-cart at the door, and waggons laden with wood, and the tap-room is crowded with rough but honest-looking country folks, enjoying their midday repast of bread and beer.