48 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



land. Yet another is at Stone Street, very small, a few 

 oaks up to their knees in blackthorn, gorse and bramble, 

 with dusty edge and the hum of the telegraph wire for 

 a song. 



After the little common and long meadows, oak and ash, 

 an old stone house with seven hundred years of history 

 quiet within its walls and dark tiles its cedar and yew 

 and pine, its daisied grass, its dark water and swans 

 the four oast cones opposite, all taste more exquisitely. 

 How goodly are the names hereabout! Dinas Dene, the 

 coombe in which the old house stands; Balk Shaw, Cream 

 Crox, Dicky May's Field, Ivy Hatch, Lady Lands, 

 Lady's Wood, Upper and Lower Robsacks, Obram 

 Wood, Ruffats, Styant's Mead, the Shode, and, of course, 

 a Starvecrow. Almost due west goes one of the best of 

 footpaths past hop garden, corn, currant plantations, rough 

 copses, with glimpses of the immense Weald to the east, 

 its trees massed like thirty miles of wood, having sky 

 and cloud over its horizon as if over sea, and southward 

 the wild ridge of Ashdown. Then the path enters tall 

 woods of ash and oak, boulder-strewn among their 

 anemone and primrose, bluebell and dog's mercury, and 

 emerges in a steep lane at the top of which are five cowled 

 oast houses among cherry blossom and under black firs. 

 Beyond there is a hollow winding vale of meadow and 

 corn, its sides clothed in oak, hazel and thorn, revealing 

 primroses between. Woods shut it away from the road 

 and from all houses but the farm above one end. A few 

 cattle graze there, and the sun comes through the sloping 

 woods and makes the grass golden or pale. 



Then the North Downs come in sight, above a church 



