A. G. Bradley

“ It is almost as captivating, I think, to watch the gurgling sweep of a chalk stream as the more boisterous humours of her wilder sister of the mountain. The Itchen, having regard merely to the water between its banks, is singularly beautiful. As pellucid as the Wiley, there is a life and movement and rush over the gravel greater even than in that engaging stream, whose surroundings, however, like those of the Upper Avon, are far more natural and characteristic than the slightly conventional atmosphere of the Itchen. ”

“ It is outside the immediate fringe of such a river that local character and features assert themselves. The South Tyne, from Haltwhistle to Hexham, sweeps bravely down a valley of grass farms, with here and there a village of stern uncompromising stone and slate set on its banks. There is no charm of village architecture in Northumberland, or scarcely any. Nor on the lofty slopes of Tynedale does the rose-embowered, orchard-girdled, thatched-roof cot that Wordsworth saw on the high terraces of the Wye, and sang of, send up its smoke wreaths. ”

“ I have, however, seen myself, from the overlooking vantage-point of a highway traversing the Kennet valley, three partners in an angling syndicate well out of sight of one another, flogging a noted dry-fly water down and across with a wet-fly before a light breeze, and probably not without success. It{92} was delightful to the wayfaring angler to watch these furtive and guilty souls, each thinking no eye but that of some unconscious waggoner could peradventure behold their crooked deeds, and safe at least from one another. Alas, weak human nature! ”

“ There is nothing quite approximating to Wyre Forest remaining in England—this dense mantle of scrub oak, laid over a large tract of uninhabited hilly country. In autumn this uniform sea of russet, splashed about with the dark green of stray yew trees, rolling over hill and dale for many miles, presents a sight common enough in some other countries, but quite unfamiliar in English landscape. Stourport, a little outpost of murky industry, soon follows, with the tributary of the Stour from the Birmingham country, together with the canal that in pre-railroad days virtually killed Bewdley. ”

“ The, in this respect, utterly guileless Cathedral town of Hereford is, indeed, the only place above the scale of a small market-town within touch of its banks. Everywhere, even between the rapids, the river itself is instinct with the sense of buoyancy. After leaving the Black Mountains above Hereford it becomes at intervals for pleasure-boats a navigable stream; but till it leaves Wales it has all the boil and rush and stir of a salmon river. It is easy to pick out those sections of the Wye, charming as they are in a quiet, pastoral, Severn-like fashion, which are the least distinguished. ”

“ It will be enough to say that the mouth of the Dart is worthy of the river’s deserved reputation; a fine deep, winding harbour, channelled between lofty hills and embellished at its narrow mouth with the keep of an ancient castle. Dartmouth town is, in its different way, as picturesque as Totnes, and if it were not, its great memories would hallow the homeliest walls. But in treating of Devonshire villages and country houses one has hardly in mind the abodes of sea-goers and fishermen. They belong to another type altogether, and one regards them with different eyes. ”

“ How rich, too, in colour are the low green banks whose very rims these brimming chalk streams, even in the dryest season, seem ever to press against, whether in early days before the first May-fly heralds the Itchen’s carnival, and the cuckoo-flower and the kingcup star the growing grass; or again, later, when the purple willow-herb blazes behind the waving sedges, and the glorious meadow-sweet, in feathered ivory masses, ladens the fresh moist air that moves above the stir of so many waters. ”

“ But though in the deer park at Stoneleigh its streams really frolic upon gravel and turn corners with a hurried swish almost like a Herefordshire grayling river, it is in later stages drifting idly with a pair of oars on its quiet surface that the Avon commends itself so irresistibly to those—and they are many, nay, almost a multitude—who know it. The wider expanse of water at Guy’s Cliff, the beautiful stretch above which Warwick Castle rises so superbly, are as familiar to almost as large a public as the reaches of the Thames at Windsor. ”

“ Escaping from this delightful and stupendous entanglement of cliff and wood, the Wye runs down to Monmouth through a most exquisite valley, and between hills of goodly stature verdant to their summits with green pastures, criss-crossed by straggling hedges or belts of woodland. Small farms and cottages, with brightly-tinted walls, perched here and there upon a ledge on the steep face of the hills, are a characteristic feature too of all this lower Wye. ”

“ The lush wandering hedgerows again climb the steeps; the little white houses blink through orchards upon high-pitched terraces. Here still are the rich red patches of tillage, the woodland drapery, the country-seats, conscious no doubt that they have an atmosphere to live up to. All these are grouped with an effect peculiar to the Wye, for the simple reason that no other English river valley combines the luxuriance of a soft and forcing climate with a physical environment so consistently distinguished in scale and altitude as does the Wye for the 30 odd miles between Ross and Chepstow. ”

“ The oak is the staple tree of these Devon valleys, and, as the latest to put forth its leaves, the bloom of spring flowers in which these vales are equalled by few and surpassed by none, shows upon the woodland banks in all the more bewitching brilliancy. Though the oak is the groundwork of woodland colouring in Devon valleys, the ash and the alder, the willow, the birch, the rowan, and the larch all play their part in the riotous foliage of the stream. ”

“ Long days are spent in the closest intimacy with its ever-changing surface and the ever-changing melodies it plays. Miles of water, much of it buried in woody dingles from every eye but the fisherman’s, its only visitor, are traversed by him on the bank edge, or in the stream itself, over and over again, till every eddy and pool, every rock and pendent bough, becomes printed in the mind, and hung, so to speak, in its picture gallery. ”

“ Of its great lonely heart, tuneful only with the noise of waters, the bleat of sheep, and the plovers’ cry, of its romantic girdle of crag and wood, of little white-washed sycamore shaded homesteads and rude hoary shrines of British saints through which these bog-fed torrents break, the outer world knows absolutely nothing at all. Here, however, are about 600 to 800 square miles of more continuously wild upland than anything even in North Wales, all lying in a block, to which the counties of Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, Cardigan, and Caermarthen each contribute a slice. ”

“ Beautiful burns hurry down from the not very distant heart of this narrow but lofty northern point of the range, into the Till, babbling through deep glens, clad like the hills above with bracken, sprinkled in fine confusion with birch and alder, and littered with fragments of grey rock. The stone bridge over which Surrey led the English army as he marched down its valley to Flodden, whose high green ridge confronts you everywhere, still spans the Till. ”

“ For the Severn valley is so intercepted with small hills, so richly wooded, so ornate in places with the park lands and foliage of country seats, so sprinkled with pleasant villages, one is apt to forget that the little streams hurrying down to the river from the north come from a really wild Wales beyond, while lying back to the south the regions of Kerry and Clun speak in their very names to the initiated of the spirit of solitude. ”

“ The wide, square market-place of Hexham was quite recently the most picturesque in the North. Modern innovations have much damaged its reputation; but it still possesses, fronting the Abbey, the Edwardian Moot Hall with its Gothic archway surmounted by towers, warlike of aspect in their corbels and machicolations, and yet another tower behind of equal age and imposing look. Our artist’s admirable and suggestive sketch of Hexham leaves us little to add regarding its felicitous pose and charm of site and outlook. ”

“ For many miles up the enchanting vale to Bickleigh, the fortunate wight who has the right-hand window seat can look down upon the little river churning its way far below through a deep trough between a continuous maze of oak forests, till at length he may see its course break away towards the moor, where it has its birth, and into the wilds of the eternal granite-crested hills. ”

“ The descendants of the men who formed the greynes or clans of Tyne, soldiers, moss-troopers, cattle-lifters, the terror of the low countries, are all here in absolute possession—Charltons, Robsons, Hedleys, Dodds, Halls and Milburnes—great sheep-farmers many, landowners still some of them. But tempting as it is to pursue this wild and beautiful valley to the springs of Tyne on the Scottish watershed, with its still surviving peel-towers, its wealth of tradition and legend, it is necessary to forbear, for I have already somewhat exceeded the limits of my space. ”

“ No one shall say that there is no poetry in the corner-seat of a railway carriage! Such a man would be a dull, unimaginative soul indeed. Rhapsodies are being daily written on motoring, as a revelation of the glories of England by persons who have apparently lacked the enterprise or inclination to discover them before, accessible as they have been for all time to the cyclist, the horse keeper, or the pedestrian. The cyclist with an eye to the landscape can go easily along as slowly as he chooses with scarcely a glance at the road ”

“ Leaving Worcester for its twenty-mile run to Tewkesbury, the Severn almost immediately receives the Teme, that famous trout and grayling{30} river which from here to its source in the Radnor moors has scarcely a dull mile. Whether brawling in the woody limestone gorges of Downton, gliding under the storied walls of Ludlow, slipping from pool to rapid through the pleasant meads of Herefordshire, or running its Worcestershire course through the deep romantic vale between Tenbury and Powick, the Teme is always beautiful. ”

“ Wordsworth lived in the open, was possessed of a stout pair of legs as well as an unrivalled imagination, and looked like a country farmer, little enough as he resembled one. His outward man fitted his environment as a grey mossy rock blends with a mountain stream; and one likes to have it so, for the Nature poet is sometimes in habit and person rather painfully at odds with the scenes of which he sings.
One is now among beauteous short-lived rivers and becks innumerable that almost everybody—for who has not been in Lakeland?—is more or less familiar with. ”

“ From Greystone bridge downwards the great height of the country on both banks gives a distinction of environment to the Tamar above most of its fellows. On looking over the landscape through which it flows, from any high point, it gives the impression of a mighty gorge wriggling tortuously through an upheaved country. Not that you can actually see the Tamar till you get to quite close quarters with it. It is a most difficult river for the casual stranger to acquire an intimacy with, from the fact that it flows in so deep a trench. ”

“ Running under the picturesque church and bridge of Atcham the river soon passes Uriconium or Wroxeter, the partly excavated Roman British city some six miles below Shrewsbury. The wall of the Basilica (as supposed) at Uriconium is, I think, the only ruin south of the Roman wall country that has weathered the storms of centuries and the hand of man above ground—the only one, at any rate, like this one springing out of a lonely rural landscape,—and thus sitting against the skyline with a turnip-field as a foreground, it seems to move one even beyond a Norman or a Saxon church—and no wonder. ”

“ Fortunate is the wight who is privileged to enjoy the Wyndcliff on some still, sunny morning when that stupendous curtain of foliage is fully lit by the fires of autumn, into a blaze of gold and russet, broken here and there by columnar limestone crags, and those sombre patches of yew that upon all{62} the cliffs of the Wye seem purposely introduced to set off the contrasting brilliance of the autumnal foliage. ”

“ Battlefield Church, beyond the town, was raised over the burial pits of the many thousand dead who fell at that great encounter, to say masses for ever for their souls and for those of Henry the Fourth and the pious founders. With its fine tower planted amid the quiet fields upon the site of the very shock of battle it seems to tell a strange story, and to have long outlived the prodigiously important function it was destined for, if numbers counted for responsibility in the repetition of masses. ”

“ And still the Bray as it burrows for miles along the skirts of the moor through hanging woods of oak, and under ivy-covered bridges hugging the{197} base of rounded hills on whose summits pony-riding farmers dwell in slate-roofed, windy homesteads, with one eye on the Exmoor slopes where their sheep graze, and the other on the narrow ribbon-like meadows where they cut their hay: men knowing in the ways of stag or fox or hare, and ready to mount their little shaggy cobs at the first note of the horn which sounded so often, and still, no doubt, sounds upon the banks of the Bray. ”