A Cotswold Village | Page 4

COTTAGE.
THE HAMLET.
ON THE WOLDS.
OXEN PLOUGHING.
THE OLD CUSTOMER.
THE OLD MILL, ABLINGTON.
THE COLN NEAR BIBURY.
A BRIDGE OVER THE COLN.
A DISH OF FISH.
BURFORD PRIORY.
BURFORD PRIORY.
THE MANOR HOUSE, COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.
BIBURY STREET.
ARLINGTON ROW.
VILLAGE CRICKETERS.
HAWKING.
BIBURY COURT.
THE ABBEY GATEWAY, CIRENCESTER.
MARKET-PLACE, CIRENCESTER.
AN OLD BARN.
THE "PILL" BRIDGE.
IN BIBURY VILLAGE.
SIDE VIEW OF MANOR HOUSE.
BIBURY MILL.
BELOW THE "PILL".
ABLINGTON MANOR.
AN OLD-FASHIONED LABOURING COUPLE.
COLN-ST.-ALDWYNS.
[Illustration: Stoke Poges Church. 019.png]
A COTSWOLD VILLAGE.
CHAPTER I.
FLYING WESTWARDS.
London is becoming miserably hot and dusty; everybody who can get away is rushing off, north, south, east, and west, some to the seaside, others to pleasant country houses. Who will fly with me westwards to the land of golden sunshine and silvery trout streams, the land of breezy uplands and valleys nestling under limestone hills, where the scream of the railway whistle is seldom heard and the smoke of the factory darkens not the long summer days? Away, in the smooth "Flying Dutchman"; past Windsor's glorious towers and Eton's playing-fields; past the little village and churchyard where a century and a half ago the famous "Elegy" was written, and where, hard by "those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade," yet rests the body of the mighty poet, Gray. How those lines run in one's head this bright summer evening, as from our railway carriage we note the great white dome of Stoke House peeping out amid the elms! whilst every field reminds us of him who wrote those lilting stanzas long, long ago.
"Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields, beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood strayed, A stranger yet to pain: I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow; As waving fresh their gladsome wing My weary soul they seem to soothe, And redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring."
But soon we are flashing past Reading, where Sutton's nursery gardens are bright with scarlet and gold, and blue and white; every flower that can be made to grow in our climate grows there, we may be sure. But there is no need of garden flowers now, when the fields and hedges, even the railway banks, are painted with the lovely blue of wild geraniums and harebells, the gold of birdsfoot trefoil and Saint John's wort, and the white and pink of convolvulus or bindweed. We are passing through some of the richest scenery in the Thames valley. There, on the right, is Mapledurham, a grand mediaeval building, surrounded by such a wealth of stately trees as you will see nowhere else. The Thames runs practically through the grounds. What a glorious carpet of gold is spread over these meadows when the buttercups are in full bloom! Now comes Pangbourne, with its lovely weir, where the big Thames trout love to lie. Pangbourne used to be one of the prettiest villages on the river; but its popularity has spoilt it.
As we pass onwards, many other country houses--Purley, Basildon, and Hardwick--with their parks and clustering cottages, add their charm to the view. There are the beautiful woods of Streatley: hanging copses clothe the sides of the hills, and pretty villages nestle amid the trees. But soon the scene changes: the glorious valley Father Thames has scooped out for himself is left behind; we are crossing the chalk uplands. On all sides are vast stretches of unfenced arable land, though here and there a tiny village with its square-towered Norman church peeps out from an oasis of green fields and stately elm trees. On the right the Chiltern Hills are seen in the background, and Wittenham Clump stands forth--a conspicuous object for miles. The country round Didcot reminds one very much of the north of France: between Calais and Paris one notices the same chalk soil, the same flat arable fields, and the same old-fashioned farmhouses and gabled cottages.
But now we have entered the grand old Berkshire vale. "Fields and hedges, hedges and fields; peace and plenty, plenty and peace. I should like to take a foreigner down the vale of Berkshire in the end of May, and ask him what he thought of old England." Thus wrote Charles Kingsley forty years ago, when times were better for Berkshire farmers. But the same old fields and the same old hedges still remain--only we do not appreciate them as much as did the author of "Westward Ho!"
Steventon, that lovely village with its gables and thatched roofs, its white cottage walls set with beams of blackest oak, its Norman church in the midst of spreading chestnuts and leafy elms, appears from the railway to be one of the most old-fashioned spots on earth. This vale is full of fine old trees; but in many places the farmers have spoilt their beauty by lopping off the lower branches because the grass will not grow under their wide-spreading foliage. It is only in the parks and woodlands that the real