the home land

the region in which i live is a land of ridge and vale, as though it had been ploughed with a gigantic plough. the high-roads lie as a rule along the backs of the uplands, and the villages stand on the windy heights. the lines of railway which run along the valley tend to create a new species of valley village, but the old hamlets, with their grey-stone high-backed churches, with slender shingled spires, stand aloft, the pure air racing over them. the ancient manors and granges are as a rule built in the more sheltered and sequestered valleys, approached from the high-road by winding wood-lanes of exquisite beauty. the soil is sandy, and a soft stone is quarried in many places by the road-side, leaving quaint miniature cliffs and bluffs of weathered yellow, sometimes so evenly stratified as to look like a rock-temple or a buried ruin with mouldering buttresses; about these pits grow little knots of hazels and ash-suckers, and the whole[10] is hung in summer with luxuriant creepers and climbing plants, out of which the crumbling rock-surfaces emerge. the roads go down very steeply to the valleys, which are thick-set with copse and woodland, and at the bottom runs a full-fed stream, with cascades and pebbly shingles, running dark under scarps of sandstone, or hidden deep under thick coverts of hazel, the water in the light a pure grey-green. some chalk is mingled with these ridges, so that in rainy weather the hoof-prints in the roads ooze as with milk. the view from these uplands is of exquisite beauty, ridge after ridge rolling its soft outlines, thinly wooded. far away are glimpses of high heathery tracts black with pines, or a solitary clump upon some naked down. but the views in the valleys are even more beautiful. the steep wood rises from the stream, or the grave lines of some tilted fallow; in summer the water-plants grow with rich luxuriance by the rivulet, tall willow-herb and velvety loosestrife, tufted meadowsweet, and luxuriant comfrey. the homesteads are of singular stateliness, with their great brick chimney-stacks, the upper storeys weather-tiled and the roof of flat tiles of sandstone; the whole mellowed[11] by orange and grey lichens till the houses seem to have sprung from the very soil.