Читать книгу A Leisurely Tour in England - James John Hissey - Страница 5

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Different methods of travel—The old coaching days—Maps versus guide-books—The fortune of the road—The South Downs—Hilly roads—The price of beauty—The sentimental traveller—A lonely farmstead—Oxen at work—A quaint old-world village.

There are many ways of exploring the country: one may walk, cycle, ride horseback, or drive a horse in some conveyance, go by crawling caravan or speedy motor-car—each to his fancy or opportunity. Perhaps there is no best way of travel. I say this after having sampled all the methods mentioned, excepting caravanning, for I have tramped it knapsack on back, and enjoyed the tramping, through Switzerland, Scotland, the Lake District, Wales, Cornwall, and Devon; I have taken long cycling tours; I have driven in a phaeton and dogcart from one end of our land to another; I have ridden about country on horseback with a pack; I have driven my own motor-car for more miles than I can remember, and without mishap—so I know, or ought to know, something about the subject, but I will not venture to lay down any dictum, for "What's one man's meat is another man's poison." The thing is to see the country, but what is worth seeing cannot be seen in a hurry.

Walking enthusiasts declare that walking is the only way, and certainly the pace that binds the pedestrian permits of leisured observation, almost compels it indeed: therein much virtue lies. Still there are other ways, and the convenience of a conveyance is not to be despised, for there are born wanderers, like myself, who have grown old at the game, and have come to that time of life when they prefer to be comfortably carried than to carry a load. Then there is the further comfort of not being unduly stinted in the matter of luggage, for given a conveyance, even sundry luxuries such as a luncheon-basket, camera, rugs, sketching materials, fishing-tackle (should an opportunity for sport occur), a book or two to while away a possibly dull evening, and a plentiful supply of maps may be taken without inconvenience. To foot it does not enhance the scenic charms of the way.

Stevenson, who was a great walker, confesses: "It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good." I am glad to quote Stevenson in this respect, for I have had it so frequently dinned into me that the only way really to see the country is afoot. Now I went not afoot, but travelled in my reliable little motor-car, conveniently little for exploring narrow lanes and crooked byways; and though I went by car I went leisurely.

Truly there is no poetry about a motor-car; it has not existed long enough to have gained the halo of romance, so to write of a motor tour makes any appeal to sentiment impossible. This is a handicap; for sentiment does count, even in this matter-of-fact world, let wiseacres say what they will.

Possibly our ancestors saw little romance in the stage-coach or postchaise; to them they were commonplace affairs; indeed they often complained bitterly about the former, the misery of the outside seats in stormy weather and in winter time; moreover, the inside passengers were generally sadly cramped for want of room; then the coaches sometimes overturned, and were frequently uncomfortably crowded. We view those days through rose-coloured spectacles—Time is the romancer. I wonder whether our descendants in the far future will ever look back longingly and lovingly to "the good old motoring days"? Granted that many motorists rush through the country gathering but "hurrygraphs" on the way—that is the fault of the man, not the car. It is unfortunate that at the very beginning of the chronicle of my tour I should feel a need, perhaps a fanciful one, to make excuse for the mode of taking it. The car was but a means to an end; let us forget all about it and consider only the journey wherein my pleasure lay.

I had no programme, no previously prepared plan of route to follow, so happily escaped the tiresomeness of keeping or endeavouring to keep to one. All roads are good roads to me, provided they lead through a pleasant country, and so to enjoyment begotten of contentment: "I travel not to go anywhere but to go." In a definite itinerary I find no attraction. Freedom is the essence of a real holiday, and I would be as free to veer about as a weather-vane that the wind plays on, free to change my course at the call of any inviting byway or lane, the beckoning of a beautiful distance, or at any other passing prompting, or even at the unaccountable mood of the moment; and this without any feeling of reproach. As to guide-book compulsion to see this or that, I would have none of it. I took a supply of Bartholomew's Reduced Ordnance Survey Maps with me on a scale of four miles to the inch, covering all England and Wales, and these were all the guides I troubled about: unlike some guides they were reliable, I could do my own romancing. Thus provided I wandered careless of direction or destination; these and the distance done each day were but trivial details unworthy of consideration—the joy of the journey was the thing.

I never knew when I started forth in the morning where the evening would find me, nor had I any concern so long as the needful inn for the night materialised; and if the first inn I came to was not to my liking, with a tireless car, being master of my Fate, I was enabled to drive on to another more to my mind. That is certainly one of the advantages of travelling by machine instead of by muscle.

I trusted, as I travelled on, wholly to the fortune of the road, letting, so to say, the good things come to me, I did not go in search of them—a delightfully simple method of touring, but it served my purpose well and saved much map-consulting and asking of the way, and the vexation of sometimes losing it. My only care was, as far as possible, to find fresh roads to explore and taverns new wherein to take my ease.

Certain motorists there be to whom speed and long distances accomplished alone appeal; these need a whole continent to travel over, whilst a modest portion of old England, with a bit of wild Wales thrown in for the sake of varying the scenery, sufficed me. Humboldt once remarked of a great wanderer that he had "travelled further and seen less than any one he knew." Now I trust to make clear that though I did not travel far, I saw a great deal.

I was prepared for any adventures should Fortune so favour me, but adventures are hardly to be expected in settled lands, beyond, perhaps, the remote possibility of the motor breaking down at nightfall on some lonely moor far from human habitation; but nothing of the kind happened, for my car gave no sort of trouble—not even tyre trouble—from the start to the finish of the journey. But then it was driven at a moderate pace, and carefully. The journey was void of excitement: happily so, for though I have suffered sundry adventures in my life, I realise they are more enjoyable in the telling than in the experiencing.

Says Hazlitt, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey." There I am wholly with him, but not when he adds, "I like to go by myself." I am afraid Hazlitt was a selfish man. Then he continues: "I can enjoy society in a room, but out of doors Nature is company enough for me. … Instead of a friend in a postchaise, or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence." As to going alone, surely a sympathetic companion by your side, even though not a word be said at times, only a presence felt, can in no way lessen the joys of a journey? A companion does away with any sense of loneliness that is apt at times to come over the solitary wanderer like a cloud over the bright sunshine; for after all, in spite of certain philosophers, man is a communicative being. A beautiful scene, or an interesting place, doubly appeals to me when I have some one near by to express and share my delight in it. But, in truth, a sympathetic companion is not always to be had. Now it happened that my wife was prevented from taking her place in the car—"Excepto quod non simul esses, caetera laetus," I could only say. No one else was at the moment available; so perforce I had to take my journey companionless or forgo it to an indefinite future. The latter alternative was unthinkable; a lost opportunity is not always recoverable; I trust no future. "Elapsum semel non ipse possit Jupiter reprehendere," said Phaedrus a long while ago, to quote the ancients again, and a truth is a truth for all time.

After all I did not go alone, for I took my faithful fox-terrier with me. A dog is the best substitute for a human companion; indeed, I would prefer to travel with a dog of the right sort to venturing with an untried human companion any day—at least you cannot fall out with a dog by the way. A dog never worries you with senseless prattle; he need never be entertained; he never complains of waiting; his patience is inexhaustible. On the other hand, he is ever ready and only too delighted to accompany you at any moment on a ramble afoot, or he will keep faithful guard over your car should you leave it alone by the wayside; and he will not grumble about his food or his quarters. I took dog-biscuits with me for my terrier in case of need, but generally the crumbs that fell from his master's table sufficed him. A dog is a most unselfish creature; a kind word or a pat perhaps now and then he craves, and how easily and gladly these are bestowed. One cannot ever be dull with a dog as companion; so with my dog I started on my journey. Now, to avoid the too frequent use of the personal and irritating "I," I crave permission at times to employ the less personal "we," even if I have to include the dog and the car to justify that term, or to do so forgetfully without.

It was early one sunshiny morning towards the end of May, with the pleasant month of June to follow and the promise of it, that I mounted my car and was off without more ado. I had carefully packed it overnight to avoid any possible delay, and that nothing needful should be forgotten in the haste of departure. With my holiday only just begun, with the little world of all England before me, free to wander wherever I would, my mind full of anticipated pleasures, I fared forth in the most enviable of moods. From my home at the foot of the South Downs I climbed to their breezy summit, taking the old road that leads westwards over them, having the rolling green downs on one side, and the glittering sea visible, but a little way off, on the other. Here one breathes a lighter, purer air, so that the mere fact of breathing becomes a pleasure.

My journey had a good beginning! By climbing the downs I had raised my horizon and looked down upon the world, not with a sensation of superiority, but with a sensation of relief, being lifted for a time above all its tiresome trivialities and commonplace conventions. I found myself alone with earth, and sky, and sea, rejoicing in my loneliness, and I felt the sense of spaciousness of the wide, bright, overarching sky, of the boundless waters, and of the vast panorama of rounded hills reaching far away into the dim and dreamy distance, where the solid land looked as unsubstantial as a cloud.

Broad and bare to the skies

The great Down-country lies,

Green in the glance of the sun,

Fresh with the clean salt air.

My road led me a little inland, for I avoided the tourist-haunted one that winds over Beachy Head, that grand headland that rises so sheer, white, and commandingly above the sounding sea. Would one could behold it in its ancient seclusion! Such spots demand solitude, or they cease to be impressive. "The fatal gift of fame" has been the headland's undoing, aided by its proximity to a fashionable watering-place, and the crowd it attracts from early morning till the sun is setting. They even sell picture post-cards there and bottled ginger-beer! Need more be said? Yet I recently read an article in a London paper upon "The Pleasant Solitude of Beachy Head." Was it written in Fleet Street, I wonder?

All the roads over the downs are hilly ones; they are for ever either ascending or descending; their gradients are generally fairly severe, and their surfaces none of the best. Now and then you come upon a comparatively level stretch, but not for long. So we soon began a long descent, only to climb steeply again and to find ourselves on a wind-swept height with a tiny flint-built church crowning the topmost ridge of it. Friston church it was marked on our map—an unpretending building, yet not wanting in dignity, and simple dignity is a rare quality, as delightful as it is rare. Even some city-surrounded cathedrals do not attain it. Doubtless its elevated and lonely position gave the humble little fane a certain poetic charm, for it is not only the building but its place in the prospect that affects the observer. Stonehenge in a farm field, away from the wild and open plain that surrounds it, would lose much of its impressiveness; it has lost some of it already by being railed in. A castle in a hollow, as many were built to secure the services of a moat, is not the same to the eye as a castle boldly dominating the landscape from some overhanging crag. Bodiam's ruined Castle, set in a wooded valley, is beautiful but not impressive; on the other hand, Carreg Cennin Castle in South Wales, though inferior in size and much poorer a ruin, is singularly impressive, standing as it does isolated on the top of a perpendicular precipice of rock. That is the sort of castle I pictured to myself and used to draw in fancy when I was a boy.

Facing the primitive church, with our road and a pond between, we noticed, what is fast becoming a thing of the past, an old wooden windmill, its sails hurtling round apace in the brisk breeze. The miller, white with flour dust, gazed lazily at us from out a window of his aged and picturesque mill: the wind was his willing slave doing his work for him and working hard that day, why therefore should he not laze and rejoice? The hum of his mill wheels grinding their best must have been as music to his ears. All winds that blow are good for the miller; the sailor is not so fortunate, but to the miller it matters not from what quarter the breezes come, so long as they come. I have been told by a meteorological authority that the wind average for England is eight hours out of the twenty-four. I should imagine that the winds upon the open downs greatly exceed that, and a good, refreshing, salt savour they bring with them, and so a sentiment of the sea and its mystery.

The wide and restful greenery of the downs appeals to and gratifies the eye. In a less moist climate than ours the downs would be but parched and barren ground: blame our climate as we may, and the frequent rains that the prevailing west winds bring, it is these frequent rains that give our homeland its rich verdure and charming mellowness which so attracts the foreigner from sunnier climes. Beauty demands its price, and considering the wealth of beauty granted us I hardly think we ought greatly to begrudge the price of it.

On the downs the eye is free to rove unchecked over miles and miles of this greenery even to the most distant horizon; that is another delight of them. Their rolling masses, no height being much greater than another, might be likened to some gigantic ocean suddenly arrested in a mighty storm and converted, by some magic, into good dry land, and here and there the white chalk showing might serve for the foam of crested waves arrested also: at least such a fancy came to me as I looked over their sloping sides, their gentle rises and falls, billowy down beyond billowy down in an apparently endless succession. The very green of them, though not translucent, distantly reminded me of the green of the mid-Atlantic rollers raised by a gale that for some time had ceased to blow so that their surface is comparatively smooth and not fretted by wind-driven lines. There is an indescribable vacancy about the downs that suggests the impressive vacancy of the sea, the boundlessness of it. But each man sees things with his own eyes, and to some my fancies may seem far-fetched; they were, but still they pleased me, for I am a sentimental traveller.

From our elevated road, some distance on, the curious little village of West Dean was revealed to us, a huddle of roofs and a tiny fane hidden in a hollow of the hills—"a cup full of beauty." We looked right down upon it and over its grey church tower and over the lichen-laden uneven roofs of its few dwellings—roofs all covered with golden lichen, gloriously golden in the bright sunshine; I have never seen roofs so completely thus covered before, and then I realised what a beautifier, even on a large scale, the lowly lichen can be. The village had the rare look of remoteness, so detached was it from the outer world by the wide and folding downs, so far from rail and frequented road. We determined to visit it when we reached the valley by the long descent which followed and idle there a time.

At the foot of the descent we found a large and lone old-fashioned farmstead surrounded by a colony of flint-built barns and out-houses; the little slothful river Cuckmere seeking its way to the sea, with many windings, ran close by. The grey old farmstead with its weather-stained walls, the tranquil, reedy river below, the bare and silent downs beyond, struck a note of intense quietness. A peacefulness profound brooded over this out-of-the-world spot: it might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. A picture, too, it made, effective in its breadth and simplicity. There we rested for an hour or more, just because it pleased us so to do. We travelled in search of peace and found it in a land

Where little lost Down churches praise

The God who made the hills.

Near to the old farm we noticed a yoke of black, long-horned, but meek-eyed oxen slowly drawing a waggon up the steep slope of the hillside.

The slow, black oxen toiling through the day

Tireless, impassive still,

From dawning dusk and chill

To twilight grey.

You seldom see such a sight nowadays, and only rarely on the South Downs or the lonely Cotswolds. Presently the oxen stopped for the waggon to be loaded, and we took the opportunity of having a chat with their driver, a sunburnt man clad in a faded grey suit, and having the soft speech and courteous manner that so often marks the Sussex folk. "Oxen," said he, "beat horses at work any day on these hills. I would not care to drive horses if I could drive oxen; they are a bit slow perhaps, but not lazy; they don't want so much urging as horses; I never has any trouble with them, I have just to give them a reminder with my stick now and then and that is all; you don't need a whip with oxen." I noticed that the stick he held was a long one of hazel, just a thin stick and nothing more, and I noticed that the yokes were fashioned of wood with a heavy cross-bar at the top, and these joined each pair of oxen together, being kept in position by a slight rounded wooden collar below.[1]

Oxen, the driver explained to me, pull from the top of their necks and not by the collar as horses do; yet on lifting a yoke I saw no signs of worn hair, only a smoothness where the yoke touched. Oxen, I learnt, were broken in to draught work at two years old and kept at it from five to six years, after which they were fattened for the market. Their beef was somewhat tough, as might be expected, and chiefly bought by certain institutions. Oxen, I further learnt, were cheaper to keep than horses, as they were fed mainly on hay, chaff, and roots; whilst horses needed oats. So I travelled and picked up odd bits of information.

Then we sought out West Dean, prepared to tramp there if no road were available, for West Dean we were determined to see. Unexpectedly we discovered a narrow lane that led to it, the downs rising sheer above on either hand, leaving just room for the lane and a little clear-running stream which we followed up to the village.

A quaint village it proved to be, to use a term too often misapplied, one that surely has no counterpart in all the land. Picturesque it could hardly be called; but though I prize both the picturesque and quaint, the quaint pleases me the

better because it is so much the rarer. Its tiny church has an uncommon tower—a strong structure, well suited to its purpose, but devoid of disturbing decoration that too often fails to decorate and serves but to vex the eye; otherwise, though ancient enough, the church is not noteworthy; still the simple shapely tower gives it a certain charm and character; and character, whether in man or building, is a thing to be desired.

Facing the churchyard we discovered a most interesting relic of past times when religion was more to the fore than it is to-day. This was a pre-Reformation priest-house of the fourteenth century or thereabouts, an austere building of thick rough masonry, deep and narrow arched windows, and a great chimney-stack at one end, a building probably erected in this remote spot by the travelling monks who had not to live in it. I have, here and there, come upon an ancient fourteenth or fifteenth-century priest-house, for they have not all been improved away. There is one at Alfriston, another at West Hoathly—both in Sussex—and another at Muchelney in Somerset, but these are all half-timbered buildings fairly lighted, and have not the solid, gloomy look of the prison-like structure at West Dean, the windows of which were originally probably of horn, or even possibly mere open spaces with shutters.

One would imagine, being so close to the sea with the river conveniently at hand, that West Dean must have its smuggling traditions: those free traders of old would hardly have overlooked so handy a spot; but if such traditions there be, we could glean nothing about them, for we saw not a soul in the place to speak to; the only living thing we observed was a chicken that apparently had lost itself. Never before have I been in a village with such a forgotten look; there the changeful centuries bring no change. Our car stood unnoticed by the side of a tall and broken flint wall that enclosed a weed-grown garden, wherein stood a great, round, and roofless pigeon-cote; not a face at a window did we see. West Dean took no note of our coming or our going. We drove into, and drove out of, a village asleep, and not even the hum of our engines or the sound of our horn awoke it. There brooded over all a sense of silence and solitude like that of the central sea.