England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
I did not make certain how the Icknield Way went through Weston
Turville, though a possible course seemed to turn left on entering
the village and go by Brook Farm and Malthouse Row, and a little west
of the old manor-house and by the “Vine.” Unless it took some such
course, it could hardly have got to Terrick and Little Kimble, but must
rather have gone straight on through Stoke Mandeville, Kimblewick, and
Owlswick and into the road now marked “Lower Icknield Way” at Pitch
Green. I went past the Weston reservoir to World’s End, and then over
the Wendover and Aylesbury road only a mile north of Wendover, having
clearly in view the obelisk on Coombe Hill, and a little later the
towered Ellesborough Church looking ghostly in the sunlight under
Beacon Hill. The hay was cut on both sides, and the road wound between
broad borders of thistles and nettles. Near Terrick I saw the first
meadow crane’s-bill of that season and that country--the purple flower
whose purple is the emblem of a rich inward burning passion. At the
very edges of the roadside turf the white clover grew. In the hawthorns
a blackbird sang.
Soon I came to Kimble station on the Aylesbury branch of the Great
Western and Great Central Junction Railway, and some new houses, one
of them named “Beware of the Dogs.” Under the railway I turned left
to Risborough and Longwick, not right to Hartwell. And now the road
settled down to a fairly straight course for about ten miles, with
meadow-sweet and rose in its low hedges and a view over the wheat to
the Chilterns. It was usually about a hundred feet lower than the
Upper way, and from one to two miles north of it. It was crossed by
hardly any road more important than itself, except that from Thame to
Princes Risborough. At this crossing, outside “The Duke of Wellington”
or “Sportsman’s Arms,” a street organ played “Beside the Seaside”
and other national anthems. Little more than a mile beyond I entered
Oxfordshire. I left the road to see Chinnor Church, half a mile south,
which looks southward on the juniper-dotted hills skirted by the Upper
way. The most notable thing in the church was an oval tablet near the
screen inscribed with the words:--
Beneath
lie
the remains of
William Turner
Esq^{re}
who died 23^{rd} March
1797 aged 61
“Here the wicked cease
from troubling and
the weary are
at rest.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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