A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs. W. H. Hudson
one of the public-houses, where a considerable party of gipsies in their little carts had drawn up, and were all engaged in a violent, confused altercation. Probably they, or one of them, had just disposed of a couple of stolen ducks, or a sheepskin, or a few rabbits, and they were quarrelling over the division of the spoil. At all events they were violently excited, scowling at each other and one or two in a dancing rage, and had collected a crowd of amused lookers-on; but when the young man came singing by they all turned to stare at him.
As he came on I placed myself directly in his path and stared straight into his eyes—grey eyes and very beautiful; but he refused to see me; he stared through me like an animal when you try to catch its eyes, and went by still trolling out his song, with all the others streaming after him.
CHAPTER III
WINTERBOURNE BISHOP
A favourite village—Isolated situation—Appearance of the village—Hedge-fruit—The winterbourne—Human interest—The home feeling—Man in harmony with nature—Human bones thrown out by a rabbit—A spot unspoiled and unchanged
Of the few widely separated villages, hidden away among the lonely downs in the large, blank spaces between the rivers, the one I love best is Winterbourne Bishop. Yet of the entire number—I know them all intimately—I daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and is more exposed in winter to the bleak winds of this high country, from whichever quarter they may blow. Placed high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or depression, with the low, sloping downs at some distance away, the village is about as cold a place to pass a winter in as one could find in this district. And, it may be added, the most inconvenient to live in at any time, the nearest town, or the easiest to get to, being Salisbury, twelve miles distant by a hilly road. The only means of getting to that great centre of life which the inhabitants possess is by the carrier's cart, which makes the weary four-hours' journey once a week, on market-day. Naturally, not many of them see that place of delights oftener than once a year, and some but once in five or more years.
Then, as to the village itself, when you have got down into its one long, rather winding street, or road. This has a green bank, five or six feet high, on either side, on which stand the cottages, mostly facing the road. Real houses there are none—buildings worthy of being called houses in these great days—unless the three small farm-houses are considered better than cottages, and the rather mean-looking rectory—the rector, poor man, is very poor. Just in the middle part, where the church stands in its green churchyard, the shadiest spot in the village, a few of the cottages are close together, almost touching, then farther apart, twenty yards or so, then farther still, forty or fifty yards. They are small, old cottages; a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on stone tablets on their fronts, but the undated ones look equally old; some thatched, others tiled, but none particularly attractive. Certainly they are without the added charm of a green drapery—creeper or ivy rose, clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossoming furze, but dear to the soul: the flowers we find in so many of the villages along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be described in a later chapter.
The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard is shady, where you can refresh yourself beneath its ancient beeches and its one wide-branching yew, or sit on a tomb in the sun when you wish for warmth and brightness. The trees growing by or near the street are mostly ash or beech, with a pine or two, old but not large; and there are small or dwarf yew-, holly-, and thorn-trees. Very little fruit is grown; two or three to half a dozen apple- and damson-trees are called an orchard, and one is sorry for the children. But in late summer and autumn they get their fruit from the hedges. These run up towards the downs on either side of the village, at right angles with its street; long, unkept hedges, beautiful with scarlet haws and traveller's-joy, rich in bramble and elder berries and purple sloes and nuts—a thousand times more nuts than the little dormice require for their own modest wants.
Finally, to go back to its disadvantages, the village is waterless; at all events in summer, when water is most wanted. Water is such a blessing and joy in a village—a joy for ever when it flows throughout the year, as at Nether Stowey and Winsford and Bourton-on-the-Water, to mention but three of all those happy villages in the land which are known to most of us! What man on coming to such places and watching the rushing, sparkling, foaming torrent by day and listening to its splashing, gurgling sounds by night, does not resolve that he will live in no village that has not a perennial stream in it! This unblessed, high and dry village has nothing but the winter bourne which gives it its name; a sort of surname common to a score or two of villages in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Hants. Here the bed of the stream lies by the bank on one side of the village street, and when the autumn and early winter rains have fallen abundantly, the hidden reservoirs within the chalk hills are filled to overflowing; then the water finds its way out and fills the dry old channel and sometimes turns the whole street into a rushing river, to the immense joy of the village children. They are like ducks, hatched and reared at some upland farm where there was not even a muddy pool to dibble in. For a season (the wet one) the village women have water at their own doors and can go out and dip pails in it as often as they want. When spring comes it is still flowing merrily, trying to make you believe that it is going to flow for ever; beautiful, green water-loving plants and grasses spring up and flourish along the roadside, and you may see comfrey and water forget-me-not in flower. Pools, too, have been formed in some deep, hollow places; they are fringed with tall grasses, whitened over with bloom of water-crowfoot, and poa grass grows up from the bottom to spread its green tresses over the surface. Better still, by and by a couple of stray moorhens make their appearance in the pool—strange birds, coloured glossy olive-brown, slashed with white, with splendid scarlet and yellow beaks! If by some strange chance a shining blue kingfisher were to appear it could not create a greater excitement. So much attention do they receive that the poor strangers have no peace of their lives. It is a happy time for the children, and a good time for the busy housewife, who has all the water she wants for cooking and washing and cleaning—she may now dash as many pailfuls over her brick floors as she likes. Then the clear, swift current begins to diminish, and scarcely have you had time to notice the change than it is altogether gone! The women must go back to the well and let the bucket down, and laboriously turn and turn the handle of the windlass till it mounts to the top again. The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses, quickly wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from the road lie in the dry channel, and by and by it is filled with a summer growth of dock and loveless nettles which no child may touch with impunity.
No, I cannot think that any person for whom it had no association, no secret interest, would, after looking at this village with its dried-up winterbourne, care to make his home in it. And no person, I imagine, wants to see it; for it has no special attraction and is away from any road, at a distance from everywhere. I knew a great many villages in Salisbury Plain, and was always adding to their number, but there was no intention of visiting this one. Perhaps there is not a village on the Plain, or anywhere in Wiltshire for that matter, which sees fewer strangers. Then I fell in with the old shepherd whose life will be related in the succeeding chapters, and who, away from his native place, had no story about his past life and the lives of those he had known—no thought in his mind, I might almost say, which was not connected with the village of Winterbourne Bishop. And many of his anecdotes and reflections proved so interesting that I fell into the habit of putting them down in my notebook; until in the end the place itself, where he had followed his "homely trade" so long, seeing and feeling so much, drew me to it. I knew there was "nothing to see" in it, that it was without the usual attractions; that there was, in fact, nothing but the human interest, but that was enough. So I came to it to satisfy an idle curiosity—just to see how it would accord with the mental picture produced by his description of it. I came, I may say, prepared to like the place for the sole but sufficient reason that it had been his