SOME WILTSHIRE MEMORIES 



at enlightenment. In such frame of mind I left him 

 at Codford station, and having apparently thrown 

 away precious truths I was very sorry there was no 

 time to tell him the Littlecote story. The biggest 

 Kennet trout recorded weighed nineteen pounds. 

 Just before this chapter went to press I curiously 

 enough encountered on the banks of a Welsh lake a 

 keeper who for several quite recent years had charge 

 of the Ramsbury fishing. He had the record of his 

 catches by net and rod at his fingers' ends. They even 

 more than justify what I had already set down here. 



The Wylie is, I think, the most pellucid, and at 

 the same time adorns the prettiest vale, of all the 

 Wiltshire streams. As with the Avon, a chain of de- 

 lightful thatch-roofed villages clustering round, in 

 almost every case, an ancient and interesting church, 

 stretches from Wilton to Heytesbury. There are 

 more than a dozen of such hamlets with fine, old, 

 sonorous names, and indeed, for abounding and 

 genuine thatch commend me to the chalk regions of 

 Wiltshire. People don't go there much, and when 

 they light upon half a dozen thatched cottages in a 

 village in the home counties they sit down at once and 

 write an idyllic essay for a halfpenny paper or a maga- 

 zine article upon the fact that there are bits of old 

 rural England even yet. It is amazing the number of 

 people possessed of the writing habit to whom the 

 fifty-mile London radius apparently stands for Eng- 

 land ! Fishermen of course know better. 



The water of the Wylie is of astonishing clarity. 

 In some of the deep, narrowish pools in the Wilton 

 Club reaches, for example, you can see the big trout 

 G 97 



