The Pilgrims' Way

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Title:     The Pilgrims' Way
Author: Edward Thomas [More Titles by Thomas]

In the morning a storm comes up on bellying blue clouds above the pale levels of young corn and round-topped trees black as night but gold at their crests. The solid rain does away with all the hills, and shows only the solitary thorns at the edge of an oak wood, or a row of beeches above a hazel hedgerow and, beneath that, stars of stitchwort in the drenched grass. But a little while and the sky is emptied and in its infant blue there are white clouds with silver gloom in their folds; and the light falls upon round hills, yew and beech thick upon their humps, the coombes scalloped in their sides tenanted by oaks beneath. By a grassy chalk pit and clustering black yew, white beam and rampant clematis, is the Pilgrims' Way. Once more the sky empties heavy and dark rain upon the bright trees so that they pant and quiver while they take it joyfully into their deep hearts. Before the eye has done with watching the dance and glitter of rain and the sway of branches, the blue is again clear and like a meadow sprinkled over with blossoming cherry trees.

The decent vale consists of square green fields and park-like slopes, dark pine and light beech: but beyond that the trees gather together in low ridge after ridge so that the South Country seems a dense forest from east to west. On one side of the hill road is a common of level ash and oak woods, holly and thorn at their edges, and between them and the dust a grassy tract, sometimes furzy; on the other, oaks and beeches sacred to the pheasant but exposing countless cuckoo flowers among the hazels of their underwood. Please trespass. The English game preserve is a citadel of woodland charm, and however precious, it has only one or two defenders easily eluded and, when met, most courteous to all but children and not very well dressed women. The burglar's must be a bewitching trade if we may judge by the pleasures of the trespasser's unskilled labour.

In the middle of the road is a four-went way, and the grassy or white roads lead where you please among tall beeches or broad, crisp-leaved shining thorns and brief open spaces given over to the mounds of ant and mole, to gravel pits and heather. Is this the Pilgrims' Way, in the valley now, a frail path chiefly through oak and hazel, sometimes over whin and whinberry and heather and sand, but looking up at the yews and beeches of the chalk hills? It passes a village pierced by straight clear waters--a woodland church--woods of the willow wren--and then, upon a promontory, alone, within the greenest mead rippled up to its walls by but few graves, another church, dark, squat, small-windowed, old, and from its position above the world having the characters of church and beacon and fortress, calling for all men's reverence. Up here in the rain it utters the pathos of the old roads behind, wiped out as if writ in water, or worn deep and then deserted and surviving only as tunnels under the hazels. I wish they could always be as accessible as churches are, and not handed over to land-owners--like Sandsbury Lane near Petersfield--because straight new roads have taken their places for the purposes of tradesmen and carriage people, or boarded up like that discarded fragment, deep-sunken and overgrown, below Colman's Hatch in Surrey. For centuries these roads seemed to hundreds so necessary, and men set out upon them at dawn with hope and followed after joy and were fain of their whiteness at evening: few turned this way or that out of them except into others as well worn (those who have turned aside for wantonness have left no trace at all), and most have been well content to see the same things as those who went before and as they themselves have seen a hundred times. And now they, as the sound of their feet and the echoes, are dead, and the roads are but pleasant folds in the grassy chalk. Stay, traveller, says the dark tower on the hill, and tread softly because your way is over men's dreams; but not too long; and now descend to the west as fast as feet can carry you, and follow your own dream, and that also shall in course of time lie under men's feet; for there is no going so sweet as upon the old dreams of men.

[The end]
Edward Thomas's essay: Pilgrims' Way

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