THE COUNTRY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 9 



ant is the descent among the sarsens that rest on turf blue 

 with sheep's-bit or rosy with rest-harrow. Jefferies knew 

 Avcbury, through love of the Down ways and through 

 his early archfeological curiosity. What they worshipped 

 at Avebury Temple no one knows, but the human mind 

 is still fertile in fantasy and ferocity — if it no longer draws 

 blood — when it worships within walls. To me the syca- 

 mores that gloom at the entrance to the temple are more 

 divine. The village, built partly of roughly-hewn, worn 

 sarsen, is enclosed among the temple's huge upright stones 

 that make some such impression as a Celtic shore. 



Almost parallel with the Ridgeway is the road from 

 Swindon to Avebury and Devizes, joined from Coate by 

 way of Ladder Hill and Wroughton village. Jefferies 

 had friends at Wroughton, and must have known the 

 church above the beeches, with its Sadlers, Codringtons, 

 Benets, and Stubbeses, dead in battle, in child-bed, in 

 peace, lying sententiously with coats of arms, skulls, 

 scrolls, the vine, crowns, cross-bones, and epitaphs, to 

 commemorate them ; the churchyard also (with some 

 gipsy tombs), where gravestones lean this way and that, 

 to suggest a battlefield of fallen and falling and still 

 unwounded men. Jefferies, in an early paper, quoted 

 Aubrey's praise of this country as the ' garden of Wilt- 

 shire,' and tried to show that the Battle of Ellandune 

 was fought near by in 823. Beyond the church, the road 

 goes south-westward between banks of saw-wort, scabious, 

 bedstraw, and yarrow, bounding the corn. Wherever 

 there is a slope, it is trenched deep by a road, used or not. 

 The telegraph-posts go ahead, with something of adventure 

 in their persistency, their silent and lean serviceableness. 

 A crawling cider-press passes on its way to Wootton 

 Bassett, in charge of three young men, a boy, and an old 

 man with peeled staff. Hackpen is in sight ; between the 

 road and the hill corn waves and sheep tinkle at the 

 sainfoin ; three beautiful slender ploughs stand alone in 

 the midst of the long, hedgeless undulations, while the 

 wind blows the smoking rain. Here, as along many of 



