England -- Description and travel; Wales -- Description and travel
A glance at our map showed that the byway would probably take us
into a remote corner of the land, far from travelled ways and into
a country of woods and wildness, for beyond West Hoathly, marked on
the map, were Worth, Tilgate, and St. Leonard's forests, close upon
each other and altogether of considerable extent, with narrow lanes
winding through and round about them. There surely we should be well
out of the beaten track. That is one profitable use and pleasure of a
map, to trace, now and then, a rough course upon it remote from town
or rail. Many a delightful hour have I spent with a map before me,
travelling in imagination by its aid when the winter storms and snow
forbade road wandering for pleasure: so I would go up hill and down
dale, now following the course of a river for miles, now coming to a
ferry across it, now to a ford, now to a mill, now to a bridge by which
I reached the other side and climbed up to a wild moorland solitude;
then I would descend to the lowlands and make my way by somnolent
villages, by shady woods and pleasant parks; then I would come to a
ruined abbey, anon to an ancient castle, then to an old battlefield, a
prehistoric camp, and occasionally to a Druids' circle, and all this
whilst seated comfortably in my arm-chair before a blazing log fire. I
think it was Sir Thomas Browne who said, though I am not quite sure of
my authority, that to travel with a book was "the pleasantest way of
all of travelling"; but I prefer a map, then in fancy I can go where
I like, not where others take me. To show how useful a map may be to
the discovering of interesting places that have not, generally, found
their way into a guide-book, and to specialise in moated houses, I have
now before me the Ordnance Survey Sheet of Stratford-on-Avon, No. 200,
covering no great breadth of country, and I have just counted nine
moated houses marked upon it, or "moats" at any rate; and these are
they, being at, or close to, Inkberrow, Rose Lench, Wickhamford, Broom,
Broad Marston, Clifford Chambers, and three around Throgmorton.
Proceeding along the byway, at first we crossed a wild heath, a perfect
sea of heather, gorse, brambles, and bracken, islanded here and there
by dark clumps of pines, their tops being tossed about by the brisk
breeze, a breeze that bent the bracken below and harassed and hurried
along the white clouds above. There was movement everywhere; great
gleams of golden sunshine and patches of grey shadow chased one another
over the land and raked the distant hills, then, as our eyes followed
them, lost themselves in space. We rejoiced in the open-air confusion
and in the clearness of the wind-swept atmosphere that caused all
objects in the view to be free from any obstructing haze or mist, and,
to the vision, brought the distance so near.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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