Streatley Hill, or rather the view from it, like the village itself, is famed alike by poet and painter. The following quatrain should be eulogy enough to warrant one's taking a rather stiff climb in the hope of experiencing, to a greater or a lesser degree, the same emotions:
"When you're here, I'm told that you
Should mount the Hill and see the view;
And gaze and wonder, if you'd do
Its merits most completely."
The poetry is bad, but the sentiment is sound.
Goring is more of a metropolis than Streatley, but we did not visit the former town because of the atrocious toll-bridge charge. We were willing enough to make martyrs of ourselves in the good cause of the suppression of all such excessive charges to automobilists.
On through Abingdon, and still following the valley of the Thames, we kept to Faringdon and Lechlade, where, at the latter place, at the subtly named "Trout Inn," we proposed passing the night.
We did pass the night at the "Trout Inn," which has no accommodation for automobiles, except a populated hen-house, the general sleeping-place of most of the live stock of the landlord, dogs, cats, ducks, and geese; to say nothing of the original occupants—the hens. How much better they do things in France!
At any rate there is no pretence about the "Trout Inn" at Lechlade. We slept in a stuffy, diamond-paned little room with chintz curtains to windows, bed, and mantelpiece. We dined off of trout, beefsteak, and cauliflower, and drank bitter beer until midnight in the bar-parlour with a half-dozen old residents who told strange tales of fish and fishing. Here at least was the real thing, though the appointments of the inn were in no sense picturesque, and the landlord, instead of being a rotund, red-faced person, was a tall, thin reed of a man with a white beard who, in spite of his eighty odd years, is about as lively a proposition as one will find in the business in England.
Mine host of "The Trout," silvered as the aspen, but straight as the pine, bears his eighty-two years lightly, and will tell you that he is still able to protect his fishing rights, which he owns in absolute fee on four miles of river-bank, against trespassers—and they are many. He sleeps, he says, with one eye open, and his gun by his side, and thinks nothing of a sally forth in the dark hours of night and exploding a charge in the direction of a marauder. He and his cronies of the tap-room, of an evening, before a glowing fire of logs, above which is the significant gun-rack (quite in old picture-book fashion), will give a deal of copy to an able writer who seeks atmosphere and local colour.
Kelmscott, so identified with William Morris, is even less of the world of to-day than is its neighbour, Lechlade, and was one of the reasons for our coming here at all.