10 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



the Down roads, grows the meadow crane's-bill, which 

 Jefferies loved — a flowerwhose purple haswedded passion's 

 opulence and thought's tranquillity. Broad Hinton, the 

 next village on this road, fiJls a considerable space in 

 Jefferies' earliest descriptions; he mentions the small white 

 horse on the downside near, the church, the mansion 

 which its owner burned to save from the Parliament in 

 the Civil War, and the legendary treasure in a well close by. 

 The church was described again in an early anonymous 

 paper in the Graphic. (At ' The Bull ' here a labourer 

 says that a farmer at Braden still bakes lardy cakes once 

 a fortnight, and loaves of which four would cover the 

 inn table.) Broad Hinton Church is off the main road, 

 but is on a track which runs from BincknoU Camp south- 

 ward until the white road takes its place just before 

 Avebury Temple. For a large part of its way it runs 

 alongside of a winterbourne that rises in Uffcott Down 

 and feeds the Kennet. This track should be followed 

 from Broad Hinton churchyard, whereby it enters the 

 fields near beeches and a moated farm, and then straight 

 over pink and white yarrow flowers, through the wheat 

 to Winterbourne Bassett church tower, that stands 

 among elms and beeches, thatched long barns and stacks 

 and the marks of rased buildings ; a stone circle lies within 

 a mile. Just beyond the church a farmhouse has a pea- 

 cock as a weathercock. Berwick Bassett Church, on the 

 same path, is but a mile beyond, small and low, with 

 mellow tiles and a little spire upon its tower — the whole 

 dwarfed by great barns and ash-trees. Winterbourne 

 Monkton, where the track joins the road, is nearly all 

 thatched, and the walls are made largely of rude pieces of 

 sarsen. Avebury Down and the ' grey wethers ' rise 

 close on the east, domed Windmill Hill and its tumuli on 

 the west. Wansdyke is not far south, reached past 

 Silbury Hill and Beckhampton, and a rookery that is 

 perched a mile from any house in a wood of elm, ash, oak, 

 and fir. 



A good and a long way back to Coate is to go north- 



