London to John O 1 Groat's. 275 



It lay in a half-moon shape, the base line measuring 

 apparently about twenty miles in length. As I sat 

 upon the high wall of this valley, that overlooks it 

 on the south, I felt that I was looking upon the most 

 highly-finished piece of pre-Eaphaelite artistry that 

 could be found in the world, the artistry of the 

 plough, glorious and beautiful with the unconscious 

 and involuntary pictures which patient human labor 

 paints upon the canvas of Nature. Never did I see 

 the like before. If Turner had the shaping of the 

 ground entirely for an artistic purpose, it could not 

 have been more happily formed for a display of agricul- 

 tural pictures. What might be called the physical 

 vista made the most perfect hemiorama I ever looked 

 upon. The long, high, wooded ridge, including 

 Broughton Hill, eclipsed, as it were, just half the 

 disk of a circle twenty miles in diameter, leaving the 

 other half in all the glow and glory that Nature 

 and that great blind painter, Agricultural Industry, 

 could give to it. The valley with its foot against this 

 mountainous ridge, put out its right arm and enfolded 

 to its bosom a little, beautiful world of its own of about 

 fifty miles girth. In this embrace were included hun- 

 dreds of softly-rounded hills, with their intervening 

 valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers, 

 plantations, groves, copses and hedgerow trees, grouped 

 T -2 



