CHAPTER XIII
VALE OF THE WYLYE
Warminster—Vale of the Wylye—Counting the villages—A lost church—Character of the villages—Tytherington church—Story of the dog—Lord Lovell—Monuments in churches—Manor-houses—Knook—The cottages—Yellow stonecrop—Cottage gardens—Marigolds—Golden-rod—Wild flowers of the water-side—Seeking for the characteristic expression
The prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above twenty miles in length from its rise to Salisbury, where, after mixing with the Nadder at Wilton, it joins the Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a small, unimportant town with a nobler-sounding name than any other in Wiltshire. Trowbridge, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, do not stir the mind in the same degree; and as for Chippenham, Melksham, Mere, Calne, and Corsham, these all are of no more account than so many villages in comparison. Yet Warminster has no associations—no place in our mental geography; at all events one remembers nothing about it. Its name, which after all may mean nothing more than the monastery on the Were—one of the three streamlets which flow into the Wylye at its source—is its only glory. It is not surprising that Caleb Bawcombe invariably speaks of his migration to, and of the time he passed at Warminster, when, as a fact, he was not there at all, but at Doveton, a little village on the Wylye a few miles below the town with the great name.
It is a green valley—the greenness strikes one sharply on account of the pale colour of the smooth, high downs on either side—half a mile to a mile in width, its crystal current showing like a bright serpent for a brief space in the green, flat meadows, then vanishing again among the trees. So many are the great shade trees, beeches and ashes and elms, that from some points the valley has the appearance of a continuous wood—a contiguity of shade. And the wood hides the villages, at some points so effectually that looking down from the hills you may not catch a glimpse of one and imagine it to be a valley where no man dwells. As a rule you do see something of human occupancy—the red or yellow roofs of two or three cottages, a half-hidden grey church tower, or column of blue smoke, but to see the villages you must go down and look closely, and even so you will find it difficult to count them all. I have tried, going up and down the valley several times, walking or cycling, and have never succeeded in getting the same number on two occasions. There are certainly more then twenty, without counting the hamlets, and the right number is probably something between twenty-five and thirty, but I do not want to find out by studying books and maps. I prefer to let the matter remain unsettled so as to have the pleasure of counting or trying to count them again at some future time. But I doubt that I shall ever succeed. On one occasion I caught sight of a quaint, pretty little church standing by itself in the middle of a green meadow, where it looked very solitary with no houses in sight and not even a cow grazing near it. The river was between me and the church, so I went up-stream, a mile and a half, to cross by the bridge, then doubled back to look for the church, and couldn't find it! Yet it was no illusory church; I have seen it again on two occasions, but again from the other side of the river, and I must certainly go back some day in search of that lost church, where there may be effigies, brasses, sad, eloquent inscriptions, and other memorials of ancient tragedies and great families now extinct in the land.
This is perhaps one of the principal charms of the Wylye—the sense of beautiful human things hidden from sight among the masses of foliage. Yet another lies in the character of the villages. Twenty-five or twenty-eight of them in a space of twenty miles; yet the impression, left on the mind is that these small centres of population are really few and far between. For not only are they small, but of the old, quiet, now almost obsolete type of village, so unobtrusive as to affect the mind soothingly, like the sight of trees and flowery banks and grazing cattle. The churches, too, as is fit, are mostly small and ancient and beautiful, half-hidden in their tree-shaded churchyards, rich in associations which go back to a time when history fades into myth and legend. Not all, however, are of this description; a few are naked, dreary little buildings, and of these I will mention one which, albeit ancient, has no monuments and no burial-ground. This is the church of Tytherington, a small, rustic village, which has for neighbours Codford St. Peter one one side and Sutton Veny and Norton Bavant on the other. To get into this church, where there was nothing but naked walls to look at, I had to procure the key from the clerk, a nearly blind old man of eighty. He told me that he was shoemaker but could no longer see to make or mend shoes; that as a boy he was a weak, sickly creature, and his father, a farm bailiff, made him learn shoemaking because he was unfit to work out of doors. "I remember this church," he said, "when there was only one service each quarter," but, strange to say, he forgot to tell me the story of the dog! "What, didn't he tell you about the dog?" exclaimed everybody. There was really nothing else to tell.
It happened about a hundred years ago that once, after the quarterly service had been held, a dog was missed, a small terrier owned by the young wife of a farmer of Tytherington named Case. She was fond of her dog, and lamented its loss for a little while, then forgot all about it. But after three months, when the key was once more put into the rusty lock and the door thrown open, there was the dog, a living "skelington" it was said, dazed by the light of day, but still able to walk! It was supposed that he had kept himself alive by "licking the moisture from the walls." The walls, they said, were dripping with wet and covered with a thick growth of mould. I went back to interrogate the ancient clerk, and he said that the dog died shortly after its deliverance; Mrs. Case herself told him all about it. She was an old woman then, but was always willing to relate the sad story of her pet.
That picture of the starving dog coming out, a living skeleton, from the wet, mouldy church, reminds us sharply of the changed times we live in and of the days when the Church was still sleeping very peacefully, not yet turning uneasily in its bed before opening its eyes; and when a comfortable rector of Codford thought it quite enough that the people of Tytherington, a mile away, should have one service every three months.
As a fact, the Tytherington dog interested me as much as the story of the last Lord Lovell's self-incarceration in his own house in the neighbouring little village of Upton Lovell. He took refuge there from his enemies who were seeking his life, and concealed himself so effectually that he was never seen again. Centuries later, when excavations were made on the site of the ruined mansion, a secret chamber was discovered, containing a human skeleton seated in a chair at a table, on which were books and papers crumbling into dust.