Salisbury Plain

“ So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. ”

“ It is a place that might be held sacred to stillness and solitary musing!—The adjoining mansion of Stourhead commands an extensive view of Salisbury Plain, whose undulating swells shew the earth in its primeval simplicity, bare, with naked breasts, and varied in its appearance only by the shadows of the clouds that pass across it. The view without is pleasing and singular: there is little within-doors to beguile attention. ”

“ I know of nothing more wild than that gray waste of boulders; it is a natural Salisbury Plain, of which icebergs and ocean-currents were the Druidic builders; in that multitude of couchant monsters there seems a sense of suspended life; you feel as if they must speak and answer to each other in the silent nights, but by day only the wandering sea-birds seek them, on their way across the Cape, and the sweet-bay and green fern embed them in a softer and deeper setting as the years go by. ”

“ MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE, EASTER 1899.
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landmark in one’s existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is sheer gammon. I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie—go to Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive; and Salisbury Plain is decidedly more so.’
Salisbury Plain is the very core and concentrated essence of the wild bleak scenery so characteristic of Wiltshire. ”

“ Hartford Bridge Flats are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather. ”

“ It is coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be believed.
Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age. ”

“ There are romantic incidents in the exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys, abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’ in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads. ”

“ The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne—the Stour, sliding out of fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christ church. The valley of the Avon—invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the glorious downs of Central England. ”

“ None too common an attribute that, where all the wide prospect is grey or green, varying according to ever-changing lights, and the downlands so gently graded as occasionally to deceive the very elect. Much of the bustard-country appears all but flat, so slight are its folds and undulations; while even the more favouring regions are rarely so boldly contoured as Salisbury Plain. The leader must combine some of the qualities of a field-marshal with the skill of a deer-stalker, and a bit of red-Indian sleuth thrown in. ”

“ Without shelter of our own provision we are comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies. Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded, dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in the air above us. The rooms were black with them, and their humming filled them up with noise.
Here lived the shepherd, too heavily taxed as he thought for his hermitage ”

“ The widely-famed Far West is not to be compared with even the tamest portions of Scotland or Wales. You stand upon the prairie, and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing Salisbury Plain. ”

“ Shaftesbury is also on the edge of this county, adjoining to Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, being fourteen miles from Salisbury, over that fine down or carpet ground which they call particularly or properly Salisbury Plain. It has neither house nor town in view all the way; and the road, which often lies very broad and branches off insensibly, might easily cause a traveller to lose his way. ”

“ Salisbury Plain is a great rolling field without [29] town or village and the places chosen were the nearest and in fact the only places, that could be found reasonably close to the camp suitable for hospital purposes.
We had been reviewed by Lord Roberts and the King early after our arrival, and now it was rumoured that the King would review us again. Inspections of various sorts became a daily occurrence; inspectors from the War Office came down and condemned nearly everything we had including motor and horse transport, harness and other equipment. ”

“ Much of the upper course of the Avon lies across Salisbury Plain, where it cleaves that table-land of the chalk by a valley full of sudden but not ungraceful bends and secluded nooks, each bright and rich with vegetation, and in almost every bend a village and its church, there being twenty of the latter in the same number of miles between the entrance of the Avon into the chalk at Beaching-Stoke and the expansion of its ravine at Salisbury. ”

“ One of its earlier months had been signalised by an adventure in which Leech, Lemon, and myself took part with him, when, obtaining horses from Salisbury, we passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "hut" at Winterslow, birthplace of some of his finest essays; altogether with so brilliant a success that now (13th of November) he proposed to "repeat the Salisbury Plain idea in a new direction in mid-winter, to wit, Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight, with dark winter cliffs and roaring oceans." ”

“ Unproductive, exposed, and lonely, Salisbury Plain opposes even to this day a very effectual barrier against intercourse between north and south or east and west Wiltshire, and was the lurking-place, until even so late as 1839, of highwaymen and footpads, who shared the solitudes with the bustards, and attacked and robbed those travellers whose business called them across the dreary wastes. Many a malefactor has tried his prentice hand and learned his business in these wilds, and has, after robbing elsewhere, retired here from pursuit. ”

“ Of course, it may be urged that for glorious open country, it is hard to rival Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire Downs. That is true. It is fine country for a short tramping expedition. It widens the mind. A great thing to have a mind as wide and tolerant as the Great Plain, as healthy as the Downs. ”

“ SHEPHERD OF SALISBURY PLAIN.
Mr. Johnson, a very worthy charitable gentleman, was traveling some time ago across one of those vast plains which are well known in Wiltshire. It was a fine summer's evening, and he rode slowly that he might have leisure to admire God in the works of his creation. ”

“ Between the Somme and Arras a British soldier often feels that he has not quite left the place of his training on Salisbury Plain. The main roads may be different, with their endless rows of sentinel trees, and the farms are mostly clustered into villages, where they turn their backs to the streets. More of the land, too, is tilled. But the ground has the same large and gentle undulation; and these great rollers are made, as in Wiltshire, of pure chalk coated with only a little brown clay. ”

“ Salisbury Plain, at the Crystal Palace, the White City, Harwich and Felixstowe, Hindhead, Milford, Southport, Alnwick and along the Tyne, and scores of other camps, are to be found university professors and students, men from all the theological colleges, retired city merchants, ministers with leave of absence from their churches, business men moved to leave their shops and offices in the care of wives and clerks and managers, and almost every type of Christian man and profession and occupation. ”

“ It is a thing which has always been a puzzle to every one, inasmuch as their size and weight are enormous, and there is no stone of the same description to be found within hundreds of miles of Salisbury Plain, where they now stand. ”

“ The Marlborough Downs which adjoined Salisbury Plain are very extensive, occupying together three-fifths of the county of Wilts, being accurately described as "ranges of undulating chalk cliffs almost devoid of trees, and devoted almost exclusively to the pasturage of sheep from remote ages." These animals, our only companions for miles, can live almost without water, which is naturally very scarce on chalk formations, since the rain when it falls is absorbed almost immediately. ”

“ Amesbury, not touched happily by the new camps, which as yet all lie away to the eastward, is an ancient spot, something better than a village, and always, as now, the little metropolis of Salisbury Plain. ”

“ His abundance on the cultivated downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to scare the birds from the crops. ”

“ South-east of the Cotswold Hills is Salisbury Plain, but it is only in name that it can be classed with the other plains and level lands of England, being a large elevated plateau, of an oval shape, with a thin chalky soil only suitable for pasture. In the south-west the only vales deserving of notice are those of Taunton in Somerset and Exeter in Devon. A large portion of the south-east may be regarded as a continuous plain, consisting of what are called the Wealds of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, between the North and South Downs, and containing an area of about 1000 sq. ”

“ We saw a noble champaign country, the plains all smooth, and covered with grass like Salisbury Plain; very little wood to be seen anywhere, insomuch that we could not get any thing but grass to make a smoke with, which was another of our signals. ”

“ The winter of 1777 and the spring of 1778 were employed by Boulter and Caldwell in scouring Salisbury Plain and the neighbouring country. A{225} reward had long been offered for the apprehension of the robber who infested the district, and the appearance of a confederate now alarmed Salisbury so greatly that private persons began to advertise in the local papers their readiness to supplement this sum. A public subscription, amounting to twenty guineas, was also raised at Devizes, so that there was every inducement to the peasantry to make a capture. ”

“ A farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:—
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see ”

“ And so with every one in that vast assemblage—vast to the dweller in the Plain. Each one is present as it were in two places, since each has in his or her heart the constant image of home—the little, peaceful village in the remote valley; of father and mother and neighbours and children, in school just now, or at play, or home to dinner—home cares and concerns and the business in Salisbury. The selling and buying; friends and relations to visit or to meet in the market-place, and—how often!—the sick one to be seen at the Infirmary. ”

“ Bowles who, though tedious and teasing, has ‘damnable iteration in him,’ and has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert alone ‘conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of solitude;’ and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath, chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, ‘carts, caravans, raree-show-men, butchers’ boys, coaches with coronets, and livery servants behind them,’ even though Stone-Henge did not lift its pale head above its barren bosom. ”

“ Here the South Downs, so called, may be said to end. The chalk hills are continued right across Hampshire, slowly diminishing in height until they are lost in the great plateau of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.
Between a fold of the hills lies picturesque Harting in a most delightful situation; an ideal spot for a restful time away from twentieth-century conditions. The tourist, if amenable to the simple life, might well make a stay of a few days to explore the lovely country of which this village forms the centre. ”