Dane Hill is crowned by a fine, large church, not ancient, nor yet quite of recent days, for its stones have grown grey with years, however many or few those years may be. Access is afforded to the churchyard by some steps, and at the side of these stands a modern, tall-pillared, canopied cross; the carving and shaft of this are beautifully neat, a careful copy of old work, yet without even a hint of its spirit or vigour, it being all scraped and smoothed to a meaningless finish, as though any mark of handiwork was a thing to be ashamed of; the old monkish craftsmen knew their art better, for it is the human touch revealed upon it that gives meaning to the meaningless stone. There is no soul behind the modern workman's tool: how can we expect it when for long years we have been making a human machine of him? Look at his lifeless productions, however painstakingly carved, and compare them with the grotesque gargoyles that verily seem to breathe and to struggle of the medieval sculptor, or any other like work of his hands; the latter too was a creator, not a mere copyist. His creatures resemble nothing on earth or in water that has been as far as I know, yet they look like things that could live.
Somehow the large churchyard looked strange to me, and for the moment I could not reason why; then suddenly I realised it was because there was not a gravestone in it, not even a grass-grown mound: did the people of the small hamlet never die? The harvest gathered in God's acre is generally so plentiful. Then I solved the mystery; on the opposite side of the road I discovered a little cemetery hidden by trees and where the gravestones were many, each with its loving tribute to the underlying dead. To judge by the tombstone inscriptions in our churchyards, what paragons of perfection lie sleeping there, what saintly virtues they possessed! Would that I had met them in the flesh! Why always of yesterday and not of to-day? Small wonder that a little girl who had been reading similar eulogies asked her father, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Only once have I come upon an epitaph that might possibly bear an unkind interpretation, and this read, "He was ...," leaving the rest to be filled in by the imagination. Solon, the great Athenian ruler, according to Plutarch, "laid down a justly commended law that no man must speak ill of the dead," and wisely ordered, for the dead cannot defend themselves nor can have any say upon what is inscribed above their dust, excepting in those few instances when the living have written their own epitaphs, not always laudatory by the way, and one cannot but admire their candour. For example, there is the much-quoted one that Dr. Lloyd, a dean of St. Asaph (deceased 1663), wrote for himself, and it will bear quoting again:
This is the epitaph
Of the Dean of St. Asaph,
Who, by keeping a table
Better than he was able,
Ran much into debt
Which is not paid yet.
At Dane Hill we came upon a good main road that led us to a wild, open upland reaching far on either hand, a delightful bit of unsophisticated nature where the land is poor as land well can be, so poor that according to a local expression "it would make a crow cry to fly over it," yet beautiful in colour to look upon. A glorious stretch of wide and wild country bare to the sky and swept by all the winds that blow, and the absence of any bounding hedges or fences left the eye at liberty to rove over it unchecked to the furthermost horizon of distant hills "rolling in the blue," and to the fir-fringed heights ahead of Ashdown Forest darkly outlined against the sky. Glorious in colour with its masses of purple heather and golden gorse, and sweet was the odour of the gorse that came wafted to us on the soft west wind. All England is not tamed or cultivated, and I am thankful, in a scenic sense, that some portions of it, such as the moors and heaths, still resist the dominion of man, as they have done for ages past. Not so Cobbett, for thus he writes apparently of this very spot in his Rural Rides: "You cross Ashdown Forest ... verily the most villainously ugly spot I ever saw in England ... getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till at last you see some rising spots which instead of trees present you with some ragged, hideous rocks." But no land was beautiful in Cobbett's view, I take it, unless it would grow good wheat; he notices the rocks, "hideous" in his eyes, though romantic in others, but has not a word for the glowing gorse or purple heather that I presumed flourished there in his day, as now. What was gorse or heather or their rich colours to him? You cannot eat gorse or heather; mere beauty he considered not, but a well-grown field of turnips sent him into raptures. Ashdown Forest climbing the hillside, though it only grows trees, is to me with its green glades, its groves of pine and their dim pillared recesses, as delightfully shady and as silent a retreat as the heart of man could desire, yet Cobbett deems it a "most villainously ugly spot." Let no one trust Cobbett's Rural Rides as a touring guide. Nor by his own showing does he appear to have been a very gracious traveller, for thus he writes of one inn where he stopped the night and left the next morning early: "By making a great stir in rousing waiters and boots and maids, and leaving behind me the name of a 'noisy troublesome fellow,' I got clear." I read Cobbett's Rural Rides in the hopes of gaining some information about scenery—and the only information I could gain was about the qualities, good or bad, of agricultural land. Now the title Rural Rides suggests pleasant rovings, not lectures upon land and upon politics.
We drove on to a spot right on the top of a hill overlooking Ashdown Forest, and there the road began a long and gradual descent, out of the sunshine into the green gloom of the woods. This descent we should have taken had we not espied a lonely byway to our left that appeared to keep on the high and open ground, so we chose the sunshine, the breezy upland, and the byway: a solitary signpost pointed down this with "West Hoathly" boldly displayed on its extended arm. Now West Hoathly was but a name to us, but to West Hoathly we would go; we might make discoveries there—which we did.
Writing of signposts reminds me that when touring in Somerset some years ago I asked my way of a man by the roadside, and he said to me, "Go straight on to the next parson; he will direct you." "The next parson," I exclaimed in astonishment; "whatever do you mean? I may not meet a parson for miles, or at all." "I see you don't understand," was the reply, "but us calls direction-posts parsons in these parts." "How is that?" I queried. "Well, I don't exactly know why, but us do." As I could glean nothing further I sought information elsewhere, and was fortunate enough to find a man who explained to me that "Some folks hereabouts calls direction-posts parsons, because they point the right way but don't go it. It's quite an old joke in these parts;" and he grinned as he repeated the joke to me. Old though it was I had not heard it before, though a Somerset clergyman to whom I told the story often had.
A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon it remote from town or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me, travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude; then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200, covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom, Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.
Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and, to the vision, brought the distance so near.