A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs

by W. H. Hudson

A volume might be filled with such strange and romantic happenings in the little villages of the Wylye, and for the natural man they have a lasting fascination; but they invariably relate to great people of their day—warriors and statesmen and landowners of old and noble lineage, the smallest and meanest you will find being clothiers, or merchants, who amassed large fortunes and built mansions for themselves and almshouses for the aged poor, and, when dead, had memorials placed to them in the churches. But of the humble cottagers, the true people of the vale who were rooted in the soil, and nourished and died like trees in the same place—of these no memory exists. We only know that they lived and laboured; that when they died, three or four a year, three or four hundred in a century, they were buried in the little shady churchyard, each with a green mound over him to mark the spot. But in time these "mouldering heaps" subsided, the bodies turned to dust, and another and yet other generations were laid in the same place among the forgotten dead, to be themselves in turn forgotten. Yet I would rather know the histories of these humble, unremembered lives than of the great ones of the vale who have left us a memory.

It may be for this reason that I was little interested in the manor-houses of the vale. They are plentiful enough, some gone to decay or put to various uses; others still the homes of luxury, beauty, culture: stately rooms, rich fabrics; pictures, books, and manuscripts, gold and silver ware, china and glass, expensive curios, suits of armour, ivory and antlers, tiger-skins, stuffed goshawks and peacocks' feathers. Houses, in some cases built centuries ago, standing half-hidden in beautiful wooded grounds, isolated from the village; and even as they thus stand apart, sacred from intrusion, so the life that is in them does not mix with or form part of the true native life. They are to the cottagers of to-day what the Roman villas were to the native population of some eighteen centuries ago. This will seem incredible to some: to me, an untrammelled person, familiar in both hall and cottage, the distance between them appears immense.

A reader well acquainted with the valley will probably laugh to be told that the manor-house which most interested me was that of Knook, a poor little village between Heytesbury and Upton Lovell. Its ancient and towerless little church with rough, grey walls is, if possible, even more desolate-looking than that of Tytherington. In my hunt for the key to open it I disturbed a quaint old man, another octogenarian, picturesque in a vast white beard, who told me he was a thatcher, or had been one before the evil days came when he could work no more and was compelled to seek parish relief. "You must go to the manor-house for the key," he told me. A strange place in which to look for the key, and it was stranger still to see the house, close to the church, and so like it that but for the small cross on the roof of the latter one could not have known which was the sacred building. First a monks' house, it fell at the Reformation to some greedy gentleman who made it his dwelling, and doubtless in later times it was used as a farm-house. Now a house most desolate, dirty, and neglected, with cracks in the walls which threaten ruin, standing in a wilderness of weeds, tenanted by a poor working-man whose wages are twelve shillings a week, and his wife and eight small children. The rent is eighteen-pence a week—probably the lowest-rented manor-house in England, though it is not very rare to find such places tenanted by labourers.

But let us look at the true cottages. There are, I imagine, few places in England where the humble homes of the people have so great a charm. Undoubtedly they are darker inside, and not so convenient to live in as the modern box-shaped, red-brick, slate-roofed cottages, which have spread a wave of ugliness over the country; but they do not offend—they please the eye. They are smaller than the modern-built habitations; they are weathered and coloured by sun and wind and rain and many lowly vegetable forms to a harmony with nature. They appear related to the trees amid which they stand, to the river and meadows, to the sloping downs at the side, and to the sky and clouds over all. And, most delightful feature, they stand among, and are wrapped in, flowers as in a garment—rose and vine and creeper and clematis. They are mostly thatched, but some have tiled roofs, their deep, dark red clouded and stained with lichen and moss; and these roofs, too, have their flowers in summer. They are grown over with yellow stonecrop, that bright cheerful flower that smiles down at you from the lowly roof above the door, with such an inviting expression, so delighted to see you no matter how poor and worthless a person you may be or what mischief you may have been at, that you begin to understand the significance of a strange vernacular name of this plant—Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk.

But its garden flowers, clustering and nestling round it, amid which its feet are set—they are to me the best of all flowers. These are the flowers we know and remember for ever. The old, homely, cottage-garden blooms, so old that they have entered the soul. The big house garden, or gardener's garden, with everything growing in it I hate, but these I love—fragrant gillyflower and pink and clove-smelling carnation; wallflower, abundant periwinkle, sweet-william, larkspur, love-in-a-mist, and love-lies-bleeding, old-woman's-nightcap, and kiss-me-John-at-the-garden-gate, some times called pansy. And best of all and in greatest profusion, that flower of flowers, the marigold.

How the townsman, town born and bred, regards this flower, I do not know. He is, in spite of all the time I have spent in his company, a comparative stranger to me—the one living creature on the earth who does not greatly interest me. Some over-populated planet in our system discovered a way to relieve itself by discharging its superfluous millions on our globe—a pale people with hurrying feet and eager, restless minds, who live apart in monstrous, crowded camps, like wood ants that go not out to forage for themselves—six millions of them crowded together in one camp alone! I have lived in these colonies, years and years, never losing the sense of captivity, of exile, ever conscious of my burden, taking no interest in the doings of that innumerable multitude, its manifold interests, its ideals and philosophy, its arts and pleasures. What, then, does it matter how they regard this common orange-coloured flower with a strong smell? For me it has an atmosphere, a sense or suggestion of something immeasurably remote and very beautiful—an event, a place, a dream perhaps, which has left no distinct image, but only this feeling unlike all others, imperishable, and not to be described except by the one word Marigold.

But when my sight wanders away from the flower to others blooming with it—to all those which I have named and to the taller ones, so tall that they reach half-way up, and some even quite up, to the eaves of the lowly houses they stand against—hollyhocks and peonies and crystalline white lilies with powdery gold inside, and the common sunflower—I begin to perceive that they all possess something of that same magical quality.

These taller blooms remind me that the evening primrose, long naturalized in our hearts, is another common and very delightful cottage-garden flower; also that here, on the Wylye, there is yet another stranger from the same western world which is fast winning our affections. This is the golden-rod, grandly beautiful in its great, yellow, plume-like tufts. But it is not quite right to call the tufts yellow: they are green, thickly powdered with the minute golden florets. There is no flower in England like it, and it is a happiness to know that it promises to establish itself with us as a wild flower.

Where the village lies low in the valley and the cottage is near the water, there are wild blooms, too, which almost rival those of the garden in beauty—water agrimony and comfrey with ivory-white and dim purple blossoms, purple and yellow loosestrife and gem-like, water forget-me-not; all these mixed with reeds and sedges and water-grasses, forming a fringe or border to the potato or cabbage patch, dividing it from the stream.

But now I have exhausted the subject of the flowers, and enumerated and dwelt upon the various other components of the scene, it comes to me that I have not yet said the right thing and given the Wylye its characteristic expression. In considering the flowers we lose sight of the downs, and so in occupying ourselves with the details we miss the general effect. Let me then, once more, before concluding this chapter, try to capture the secret of this little river.