148 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, 

 invasions, upon the parish and of the parish upon them 

 must be shown. Architecture, with many of its local 

 characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out 

 of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and 

 bridge. The birds and beasts cannot be left out. The 

 names of the local families gentle and simple what 

 histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tomb- 

 stones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better 

 a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thou- 

 sand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil 

 of a thrush. If only those poems which are place-names 

 could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the 

 romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and 

 house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, 

 the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winter- 

 bournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons : what 

 goodly names of the South Country Woodmansterne, 

 Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, 

 Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Millicent, Clevancy, 

 Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful 

 name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time 

 had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frens- 

 ham, Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, 

 Fordingb ridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Dray cot, Buscot, 

 Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, 

 Cowfold, Ashe, Liss. . . . Then there are the histories 

 of roads. Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the 

 road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves 

 down from the high land of clay and flint through the 

 chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round the 

 head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech 



