TENTH DAY—EAST HENDRED TO WANBOROUGH, BY LOCKINGE PARK, WANTAGE, ASHBURY, AND BISHOPSTONE
On the following morning early I returned to where I had left my conjectured road, which I shall now call Ickleton Street, at the crossing half a mile south of East Hendred Church. The eastern road at the crossing came from the south-east (out of Hungerford Lane) and was only for a few hundred yards in the line of Ickleton Street, falling into it a hundred yards or so west of Aldfield Common, where I had lost the road. The western road was apparently mine, but it was so unimportant for through traffic that though the eastern road forked on entering the northern or Hendred road, neither of the forks ran exactly into Ickleton Street. Between these forks was a triangular waste of yellow parsnip, wild carrot, and dock, uneven from digging, and somewhat above the roads which were sunken by downhill wearing.
Ickleton Street ran for a third of a mile straight westward to a cross-track at the East and West Hendred boundary. It was hedgeless as before, and being on a slight depression the horizon was often[285] a very near one of corn, topped by a distant bright cloud or cloud-shaped dark clump of beech. At this cross-track I had to turn a few yards south and then westward along a track of the same kind. Not being sunk, or raised, or hedged, or banked, or ditched, the road could be ploughed up easily and its course slightly changed, as here, to serve a barn. This was Tames Barn, a thatched quadrangle of new ricks and old barns and sheds built of boards now heavily lichened. Past the barn it went as before, flat and hard-beaten, with broad ruts, and a slight dip on the right side—a wall not half as deep as the corn was high; there were a few blackthorns on this side. On the left sheep were folded in clover. Ahead the Lockinge Woods showed their tops between the rounds of Roundabout Hill, which was newly reaped, and Goldbury Hill, which was part stubble, part aftermath. At the first turning to West Hendred, which made the road crook a little to the south—and in this crook—there were two or three rough sarsens, iron-coloured but blotched with orange and dull silver, lying deep in the grass. A little way back I had noticed another on the left, and there was another, I think, east of Arfield Farm, beside the track.
Past the second turning to West Hendred (from East Ginge) the tiny dip or wall below the right side of the road became a pleasant, high, green wall with blackthorns and elders on it, and the road was a green one, flowery with scabious, and had a bank above it, with barley at the edge. Then the little Ginge brook and its hollow of elms and ash[286] trees interrupted the road. But a few yards beyond it was clear again where the hard road went at right angles away from it to Red Barn. It was now above its green bank, and this was eight or ten feet high with blackthorns on it. It curved slightly round the southern base of Roundabout Hill between the stubble, and being joined by a track from the south it was worn almost grassless. After crossing a track to Ardington, it was slightly raised above the fields on both sides. A hard road joined it, and it was hardened itself and had a line of young beeches and elms on each side. This was to lead up to one of the gates of Lockinge Park, which it entered and disappeared. It must have been bent—probably southward—by the swelling land of the park, but over two centuries of ploughing have left nothing of it visible on the surface.
I turned sharply southward at the edge of this park and presently back to the north-west, past a house of great size with some conservatories, elms, lawns, and water garden—the shadowy and bright grass occupied at that hour by a lap-dog and many swallows. The road, lined on both sides by trees and overhung by valerian and rose-of-Sharon, had an unpleasant sense of privacy meant for others.
The turning eastward out of this road by East Lockinge post office was in line with Ickleton Street, but signs of an exit from the park on the opposite side of the road were obliterated by cottages and gardens. This turning I took, and when it curved decidedly to the right a footpath on the left, between a hedge and some allotment gardens, pre[287]served its original line. This path led westward into a road coming south from Goddard’s Barn. On the right-hand side of the entering of the path into this road lay the good house of West Lockinge Farm, its barn and sheds and lodges gathered about it on one side of the road, and its ricks and elm trees opposite. The road was half farm-yard and half road and littered with straw and husks, where the fowls were stalking and pecking with a laziness that seemed perfectly suited to a Sunday early morning following a blazing harvest Saturday.
Port Way, Wantage.
I hoped to find a cart track going west from the other side of this road. For about a quarter of a mile I thought I found it raised a little in the stubble.[288] It had been sown and reaped like the rest of the field, but it was a little weedier and grassier. It was making over the swelling arable for Lark Hill and the south edge of Wantage, but I could not find it in the clover nor in the barley beyond that. I therefore turned north into Round Hill, a straight piece of hard road going west into Wantage, with no hedges but grassy borders between it and the arable on either side. This may be the Icknield Way or its successor. It led into the main road at the edge of Wantage, and this I followed into the town. In the first few yards I noticed the sign of the “Lord Nelson” on the left. I recognized it as the work of that venerable artist who designs the faces of guys and turnip-men all over the country. I could tell that the man upon the signboard was Nelson because the uniform corresponded to the name painted below. The face was as much like Nelson as King George III, and it was entirely different from that on the other side of the board. Nevertheless, the effort was to be preferred to a more accurate portrait painted by a builder and decorator’s man from a picture in a history book. It was an effort to represent an image of a hero. The builder and decorator’s man would have aimed simply at reproducing something which impressed him because it was in a printed book: his horses do not represent what he knows or feels about horses, but what he is able to crib from a photographer in a book advertising somebody’s food or embrocation; his “Coach and Horses” is painful to see, because it ought obviously to be in a book.[289] May it be long before he is allowed to molest the shape of the horse or dragon carved into the turf of White Horse Hill. In its present shape it could not be used to advertise horse food or embrocation: but the horse above Alton Priors could be so used and doubtless one day will be.
As I was leaving Wantage I heard a blackbird singing in a garden beyond the church. This was near the middle of August and a full month since I had last heard one. The heat had dried up the birds’ songs all much earlier than usual, and now the rain of the last night seemed to be reviving one. The song was perfect and as strange a thing as last year’s snow.
Crossing the Letcombe brook I was out again between hedges and in the company of telegraph posts on the road to Ashbury, Bishopstone, and Swindon, which is called in the inch Ordnance Map “Roman Way.” It seemed the only continuation of Ickleton Street, and as there was no other road with anything like the same course in the valley I had little doubt that it was the “Icleton-way” of the early eighteenth century going “all under the hills between them and Childrey, Sparsholt and Uffington, so under White Horse Hill, leaving Woolston and Compton on the right, thence to Ashbury and Bishopston.” The foot of the Downs was about a mile on the left, and between them and the road the cornland dipped considerably. Looking over the hedge I saw first a broad land of grass and then a line of telegraph wires making for Letcombe and[290] dividing the grass from a broad band of ripe corn; beyond that was a band of very green roots; then a band of newly ploughed earth; then stubble dappled with dark corn stacks, and above them the hill.
Under White Horse Hill.
My road was a narrow one, and at first borderless and worn to some depth below the neighbouring fields. At the top of its ascent out of Wantage it had a bank on the right, a fence on the left instead of hedges. After passing Ickleton House at a right-hand turning, I reached two cottages on the right at the crossing of a road from Faringdon to Letcombe. This I entered on the south side to look for a road between mine and the hills. A parish boundary follows this road, and also the lane which I turned into on the right almost at once. The lane was green and ran under some beeches and a natural turf wall south-westward. It was deep worn and rutted as it descended through the corn and barley to a cross-track under another turf wall making from Letcombe Regis Church to Childrey. I went on until my track became a hard road to Lambourn, and as I had seen no sign of an alternative to the “Roman Way,” I turned to the right and entered it again at the crossing for Childrey and Letcombe Bassett. Elms clustered at the crossing, and the road was deeply worn between grassy banks. It continued to have hardly any green edge, and as it was usually rising or falling it was sunk more or less below its original level; in one place, for example, the left bank was nearly twenty feet high, and I could see nothing but the clouds all sopped[291] in sunlight. The land was almost entirely arable on either side, with standing corn or stooks or stubble. In one place, past the turning on the right to Westcott, which is between Sparsholt and[292] Kingston Lisle, the road was on a terrace, having a bank on the left and falling on the right to corn and a thatched farm under trees: there were elms and beeches on either side, but no hedge. The trees of Lisle Park gave lines of handsome beeches to either side of the road, trees of less than a hundred years, all well-shaped and, in fact, almost uniform, and planted at reasonable intervals. The ridge of the Downs was not a mile distant, and from it the grass of a yellowish green colour undulated without a break to the road, sprinkled with beeches and barred with fir plantations. Past the Blowingstone Hill and the turning to Kingston Lisle these undulations are bare and carved by a steep-walled natural cutting. At this point the top of the Downs was only half a mile away, and thenceforward it was never more than a mile until beyond Bishopstone. Actually the nearest point to the ridge was perhaps where the road twisted sharp to the left to the bottom of a coombe and then sharp back again to get out of it. As the floor of the coombe sloped upwards into the hill, these twists gave a road which was bound to cross it at the lowest possible gradient. The coombe had steep, smooth sides of yellowish grass and a winding flat floor, and through the big scattered thorns and elders of it a track went down to Fawler. The road wound again to round a high bank on the left and again to circumvent a thorny hollow on the right, and soon the White Horse was coming into view. There were woods steep above on the left; there had been hedges on both sides since Blowingstone Hill, often bushy and thick and [294] overscrambled by climbers, as, for example, near Britchcombe Farm. Here the road had a green, sunken course divided from the hard one by a thicket. This farm-house and its thatched, white-stone dependencies, their trees, their elders and nettles, stood close to the road, but a little back from it and a little above it, under the almost precipitous ash wood of the hill; and away from it on the other side of the road sloped another coombe of thorns, and also of willows and some water.
Dragon Hill.
A little past Britchcombe Farm the Dragon Hill came in sight above a slope of oats and yellowed grass. Then the road twisted again, left and right, to cross another coombe, grown with larch trees on its lower half and having a pool in it near Woolstone Lodge; but the upper half bending back under the Dragon Hill, with a few thorns on its steep and furrowed walls. Rising up out of the coombe, as usual the road was between steep banks, and on them thorn bushes, scabious, and meadow crane’s-bill flowers.
At the crossing to Shrivenham and Lambourn I caught sight of the crest and haggard beech clump of Barbury above the nearer hills. This crossing was within a quarter of a mile of Compton Beauchamp, the last of more than half a dozen villages which the road passed by on its right hand without touching. Ashbury was the first village traversed by the road since Upton. As I approached Ashbury through corn that now ran right to the top of the Downs, I had a bank above me on the left and one below me on the right, and I could see now both Liddington [296] and Barbury clumps, and to the left of Liddington one high, bare breast of turf. A lesser road turned down to Odstone Farm, which I was very glad to see again, not a quarter of a mile on my right—its five plain windows in a row, two in the roof, and those below not to be counted because of the garden shrubs. It was a grey, stone house with a steep, grey roof and a chimney stack at either side; there were elms behind it, and tiled and thatched sheds all on its right hand; and the road going straight down to its left side.
Green Terrace, near Ashbury.
The right-hand hedge gave way to show me the elms and thatched barns and ricks of Ashbury, its church tower among trees rather apart and nearer the Downs. The road descended under a steep left-hand bank, with a green course parallel. It turned right and then left round some elm trees and past a hollow on the right containing a broad millpond enclosed in a parallelogram of elms. At Ashbury the road turned to the right away from the church to the “Rose and Crown,” and the two elm trees standing in mid-street, and then back again to the left into its original line. But parallel with the road a footpath ran from the church on a terrace just wide enough for a waggon. It had a green wall above and below, grass on the left, sweet-smelling lucerne on the right. It rose and fell more than the road as it made for Idstone between the barley. The terrace seemed to be continued across the deeply worn road from Swinley Down; but the path turned to the right and into the main road. This terrace road seemed to be a very possible[297] course for an old, though perhaps only an alternative road.
I stopped for a little time at Ashbury, and asking for tea at a cottage and shop combined, I was asked into a silent but formidable Sunday assembly of three incompatible and hostile but respectful generations: a severe but cheerful grandmother in black and spectacles with one finger still marking a place in the Bible; a preoccupied, morose mother, also in black; a depressed but giddy daughter fresh from the counter of a London shop, and already wondering what she was going to do at Ashbury. This girl poured out my tea and told me that there were some very good apples on the tree next door. Neither she nor her relatives, because it was Sunday, could buy these or in any way procure them, so she told me, though she had begun to want them very much after half a day at her native village; if I went—and there seemed no objection to the damnation of a casual wayfarer—I could probably get some. The old lady who lived in the cottage next door said, as if she were stating a well-known fact in the natural history of Ashbury, that she had no apples, that they were very troublesome to knock down, that none had fallen from the trees during the day, and that—she was perfectly certain—there would be none until the morrow. On the morrow I hoped to be many miles from Ashbury, and so I wished her a good afternoon in spite of the rigid sabbatarianism of her trees. I returned to the cottage where I had been drinking tea and told the girl that no apples would fall until Monday morning,[298] and asked her if she knew any other kind of apple trees in Ashbury. Perhaps it was as well that she did not, for I found that Sunday’s tea cost twice as much as Saturday’s or Monday’s—it being apparently the right of the righteous to prey upon the damned, even if in so doing they put themselves into a position apparently as graceless as that of the damned. I thought of asking a clergyman if this was so, and seeing a man whom I took to be a clergyman, because his collar was fastened behind instead of in front, I walked after him. But he suddenly stopped and went into the very cottage of the old lady whose apples would not fall before Monday morning, and this looked so like a conspiracy that I hastened away, glad to have made these discoveries in the natural history of Ashbury.
Coombe at Bishopstone.
The deeply worn road from Swinley Down cut across my road, south of the green terrace road, at Idstone, and sent it northwards twenty yards or so, just as Akeman Street cutting across the Upper and Lower Icknield Ways near Tring sent each nearly a mile northwards. After this I could see no trace of the little terrace road, though it was possibly marked by a bank dividing the next fields to the road from those beyond, and then by a mere division between crops to a point above or beyond Bishopstone. Half-way between Idstone and Bishopstone the road entered Wiltshire with............