In fact, it is by this time rather venerably pretty. They call the far-seen clump of beeches on Liddington Hill the “Folly”; the clump a quarter-mile north-west of Wayland’s Smithy is Odstone Folly; Ashbury Folly is the clump at the crossing over the Ridgeway down to Ashbury Church. They call a house a “Folly” with less benevolence. They see--or they feel--in the strange, high, or solitary situation part of an attempt to mould the course and conditions of life, or to escape from them. They see--or they dimly imagine--a being who is trying to make his, or some woman’s, like a poem, or like a work of art-- Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver’s brain.... It is not that they see the blasphemy of it like that of Babel or of the Titans. But they know that the builders of Babel and the Titans will fail, and if they cannot beat them themselves they will be on the side of the one who can. I should myself be sorry to see a house--such a one as is likely to be built--on that island between Gramp’s and Hackpen hills. But if it were such a house as Morgan’s Folly! I warmed with the thought of transporting that hill-top tower to this peninsulated table of turf, by the expenditure of a sum sufficient to have given a free library to Letcombe Bassett. I do not know if it was called a Folly, but there was a plantation at the cross-road from Sparsholt to Lambourn which I liked--a long, narrow plantation of beeches close together alongside the cross-road and touching the Ridgeway on one side; on the other was a tumulus. Here it was a broad road with no hedges, there being corn on the right, and sheep, enclosed by a wire fencing, on the left. It was now near its highest point, nearly eight hundred feet, at the Hill Barn that stands with its company of stacks amidst a group of ash trees above Sparsholt. The purple meadow crane’s-bill was growing beside the road near Hill Barn. I left the Ridgeway that morning by the Blowingstone Hill and its woods, and went to Sparsholt, which has a quarter-mile of chestnut and lime, and then beech and elm shadow on the road to its church. One bee was buzzing inside as I walked over the stones and brasses of the floor and looked at the Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the royal arms, on the wall, but chiefly at three recumbent stone effigies lying asleep and private within a chapel, guarded by stone lions, railings, and a locked gate. CHAPTER X EIGHTH DAY--SPARSHOLT TO TOTTERDOWN, ON THE RIDGEWAY, BY WHITE HORSE HILL AND WAYLAND’S SMITHY