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Edward Thomas

The South Country

Published by Good Press, 2021

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4066338069108

Table of Contents

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CHAPTER I

THE SOUTH COUNTRY

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The name of “South Country” is taken from a poem by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, beginning—

“When I am living in the Midlands,

They are sodden and unkind,

I light my lamp in the evening,

My work is left behind;

And the great hills of the South Country

Come back into my mind.”

The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking, it is the country south of the Thames and Severn and east of Exmoor, and it includes, therefore, the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and west across it go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed by Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old roads. On their lower slopes they carry the chief woods of the south country, their coombes are often fully fledged with trees, and sometimes their high places are crowned with beech or fir; but they are most admirably themselves when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make flowing but infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. Sometimes they support a plateau of flint and clay, which slopes gradually to the level of the streams. Sometimes they fall away to the vales in well-defined ledges—first a long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and below that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then again grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the plateau, the summits have few houses and very small hamlets; the first terrace has larger villages and even a town or two; but most of the towns are beneath on the banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are broadest near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly north and south, and can have but a short course before they enter the sea on the south or the Thames on the north. Those I remember best are the Stours, the two Rothers, but especially the one which joins the Arun, the Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the Kennet, the Ray, the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, the Wylye, the Ebble, and many little waters running gold over New Forest gravel or crystal over the chalk of Hampshire, and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the Wandle, once a nymph that walked among her sisters—

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