It is generally thought that the untitled landed gentry represent a longer connection with land than the nobility, whose estates have constantly been added to by purchase or inheritance. It is, however, quite otherwise; for of all the squirearchy there are very few families who can show an unbroken succession since the termination of an event so comparatively recent as the Wars of the Roses. True, there are a certain and a not inconsiderable number of Englishmen with large landed estates who are descended from ancestors who held land sometime before them; but it will generally be found that the ancestors were yeomen. It has been estimated by an eminent authority that an analysis of modern landowners in any English county will prove that not more than a dozen descend from forbears owning 3000 acres (the minimum qualification for a great landowner) in the time of Elizabeth; and that the peers, comparatively modern as the majority of them are, represent a much larger average of old families than the country squires. If possible, the return journey from Bere Regis to Dorchester should be made by way of "Egdon Heath", of which we get so impressive a description in the opening chapters of _The Return of the Native_. If the weather be fine, what could be better than a long tramp over the moor? especially as our most lasting memories of a landscape are those we gain afoot. Blue skies and green fields are things we are all familiar with; but there is assuredly nothing in the wide world that appeals to us so much as our English moorlands, and "Egdon", aglow with yellow gorse, and afire with purple heather, is as fine a sight as can be offered by these southern lands that fringe the Channel seas. It is not pretended, of course, that these combined Dorset heathlands can rival in extent or grandeur the great Devonian moorland that gives birth to the romantic River Dart; but in their own peculiar way they have no rival. In _Domesday_ this tract of country is called a "heathy, furzy, briary wilderness", and the antiquary Leland writes of it as being "overgrown with heth and moss". Mr. Hardy characterizes it finely in eight words as "singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony." His description of it could have been penned only by one who was familiar with all its various moods, and whose mind had become absorbed with its mysterious and subtle influences. "Ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil has worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the peculiar formation.... It is unchanged and unchangeable, with a wild, weird beauty all its own.... It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity.... Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity."