‘Old shepherd in your wattle cote,
I think a thousand years are done
Since first you took your pipe of oat.’
is only feebly approximate in date. Even the Bronze Epoch knew the latticed hovel roofed with daub; perhaps the skin-clad builders took lesson by the swallow’s bungalow, or the clay lining of the throstle’s house. Or perhaps the prototypal hut was the tent made permanent, a wigwam expressed in woven withies and caked mud? It must have been general in Europe when Christ was born, for certain first-century tombstones, dug up in Alsace, resemble the primal home in shape, and show markings for timbers at the gables; most likely these were mimic copies of the dead man’s earthly dwelling, meant to house his otherwise vagrant soul; this is lichen of the greyest morning, though Egyptian funerary chambers are older still. But it is lichen that lives on yet, for what is a modern mausoleum but a mansion for the dead? A family vault at Woking is as tribal as a patronymic; we are born thus lichened—the youngest are grey with these spores from the past.
Such surnames as Dabb, Dauber, Dobb, and Dobbin descend from early manipulators of viscous mud, I suppose, special craftsmen developed at the very beginning of ‘division of labour,’ and there is a certain French phrase for sturdiness—bâti à chaux et à sable—which must date as far back as the earliest mixing of lime and sand in with mud. ‘Clay-dabber Dick,’ a resented nickname for a brickmaker now, would begin as a proper cognomen in some loamy county, where clay could be used flat between the timberings, in place of wattle plastered with mud. Tyler would name the artisan who posed ridge-tiles and pantiles, that Potter had moulded, and baked perhaps in Robinson Crusoe’s outdoor way: Defoe, by the bye, was once ‘secretary to a pantile works at Tilbury.’ Such craft names as Mason and Quarrier would begin in stone counties first, very likely; but Thatcher is as proved an ancient as Dobster or Dobbin—his lichen is as old as any, I daresay. For dab and thatch must always have gone together, and still in Wilts and Bucks garden-walls made of dab are thatched lest they dissolve under rain. Ramblers along English road-trees see this straw-weaving go on yet, thank goodness, as it surely always will wherever people own taste as well as land. There are thatched churches extant; one at Markby in Lincolnshire, near loamy cliffs that wall out the sea. What warmth and simplicity of worship, under thatch!
Thatch ennobles—it can suggest the stately peruke; thatch is sporting—a covert-coat for a cottage; thatch shades its serge into such tints of khaki that it weaves the right ‘British warm.’ A thatcher can be an artist, as much as any Dick Tinto who paints; and I will also claim that Hedger and Ditcher are very ancient and skilled artisans. Thatch shapes into such slopes, too, it so canopies and rounds off gables, dormers, and porches, that for fitness and comeliness its motley is your hamlet’s only wear. And as patentees in their advertisements do, I urge ‘Reject all substitutes!’ and against metal roofs in particular, corrugated iron that basely counterfeits pantiles, I launch the curse of the rambler; for upon such hectic, crinkly awnings no lichen of loveliness ever gets hold. Let roof-tree and road-tree grow ‘in beauty side by side,’ as Mrs. Hemans’ family did, say I, and the wig of the cottage be blonde.
Road-trees sprout hamlets, dwellings grouped in greenery as if they were clusters of acorns or hazel-nuts, and these often are ripe old places, turning brown as nuts and acorns do, and blest with beautiful baptisms, names that a rambler reads upon slanting sign-posts or over rustical post-office doors. Many old place-names relate their own exegesis: I know a road that branches off at Headless Cross—the medieval picture and chiaroscuro of the past in that! One sees the Lollards in the foreground of it, dourly hewing a saint’s head off the top of a stone shaft, the thatched village looking sleepily on.
For six undulant miles or so this road from Headless Cross goes dandling along to Tardebigg, through delightful Foxlydiate, and past the bald summit of Muskott’s Way. ‘Tardebigg,’ more recondite than ‘Headless Cross,’ I guess to have named the site of some manor-house or farmstead built so dawdlingly as never to have been finished—a bachelor or spinster bit of building that never made a home, and childless died into the inane. Or ‘Tardebigg’ may have named some hill of late-harvesting barley—there is always the delight of shies at the local truth for you, one can seldom be quite sure of a hit. Yet who was Muskott, that he should ever have owned a long strip of common-land which could never belong to any particular body? It is fudge; I do not believe there ever was such a Muskott—Onesimus, George, or Ebenezer as the case might be. I’ll warrant that Muskott’s Way was known as Muskets Way in days when Napoleon threatened invasion, for in days when Louis Napoleon’s colonels threatened it, the Rifle Corps had their shooting-range up Muskott’s Way. There magazine rifles are practised with at present, I do not doubt, and there in Wat Tyler’s time bowmen would loose at the butts. The place is a palimpsest, of our successive preparations for war.
As for the christening of Foxlydiate, the road-tree sways gracefully down just there, and was not hlidh Early English for ‘slope’? There are other lyds and lydiates. ‘Foxlydiate’ may have meant the meet of the hunters—there are kennels near it still; but I think the name was anciently ‘Folks-lydiate,’ the hill of the ‘good folk’ or fays, and it is a superstitious little village yet. No stretch of country road used to live without its myth or chimera (of subtle contour often), its fable, its dreaming escape from the actual; a myriad perennial annals, vouched for by the affidavits of the aged, some of them puerile but some grim, lichen our by-ways; there is hardly a great house but when you pass the park-palings of split oak something romantical will come to mind, or be told in your ear. Beginning gay-coloured, as lichens often do, these sometimes darken; thus the legend at Foxlydiate is sombre and nocturnal now. The road there hears an equipage sometimes, after sunset, and this was once a fairy vehicle, I’ll warrant, perhaps a Cinderella’s coach; but it has become a nightmare now—the terror of ‘the Flying Hearse.’ Elms in platoons and companies shadow the road there, and there the bat of superstition flits through the twilight of the spirit; be there in the mood, and you may think you hear wheels rush uphill; smack of whip, snort of nag, clink of swingle-bar are heard, but no correspondent forms are visible; and that is salutary, the tradition says, for whoso sees the Flying Hearse must die within the year. Many a time there I as a lad, driving home in the twilight, listened with the delight of half-sceptical terror, but I doubt if people harken for that fatal omnibus now. Tilth and foison of ghost story, aged jest, and fine old tradition no longer flourish; for towns and townsmen, spreading into the country—lichen of a sort—bring the long age of romantic rural faiths to an end.
Townsmen in Arcady are rarer of late, however. War-time depopulates the country roads. The motor-car (itself a flying hearse sometimes) is scarce there now. Solitary the rambler jogs along, alone with himself, except for the flight of the mated thrush or other father bird on service of commissariat; but in what ease of silence you may now pursue your errantry, and into what delight of the unexpected! There are folk who think they ramble, yet go nose in map, by rule and rote of road; but as well employ a guide and an alpenstock—to ramble is not to ken whither, and yet to home. There are plausible short-cuts that deceive you, I know, and branches of road-trees bring you to sudden corners, hedged-in dichotomies, curves and exfoliations that the Development Commissioners, most leisurely of Government Trustees, had not even so much as begun to think of improving away, some day, before the War. These may perplex you, or even be perilous with storming petrels; but there are natural dug-outs, trenches with high green banks.