THE COUNTRY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 19 



Fisher in ' Greene Feme Farm.' The old man and some 

 pretty visitors from Wales made a stir that is still remem- 

 bered. He may have been the miller Tibbald oi ' Round 

 about a Great Estate,' that name being a common local 

 form of Theobald. The gabled house has a new-looking 

 garden, tennis-court, and swans on the pond ; but under 

 the sheep-terraced hill behind, the dovecot and mossy, 

 thatched farm-buildings are as they were. 



Going west and north from Chisledon, instead of to 

 Badbury, the road finds the hamlet of Hodson, the woods 

 and great house of Burderop, and below them Coate 

 Reservoir. These compose the chief scene of ' The 

 Amateur Poacher ' and * The Gamekeeper at Home.' 

 The keeper lived in the cottage with the thrice-scalloped 

 thatch in Hodson Bottom, sweet chestnut behind it, and 

 birch and spruce at each side ; date, 1741. The other 

 houses in the Bottom are all thatched but one ; they have 

 a little window in the middle of the thatch slope, like the 

 dark eye of a hedgehog among his spines, and they stand 

 irregularly among fruit, bean rows, and box-edging. 

 * Spring guns set here !' is the landowner's jocose invita- 

 tion to the wayfarer. But Jefferies knew the woods 

 through and through. Here were the fir-trees and prim- 

 roses that his mind would not separate. Here was the 

 fray with the poachers when the squire (J. J. Calley, I 

 think) was knocked on the head ; of which, and many 

 more things, Jefferies heard much from Mrs. Rawlings, 

 widow of an old Burderop keeper. Here, on Ladder Hill, 

 the wind is full of the scent of yellow bed-straw, and the 

 meadow crane's-bill grows by the dogwood and hazel, 

 beneath the oaks. Here were the rooks and wood-pigeons 

 of ' Wood Magic' Burderop Park — its beech and oak 

 and ash and fir ; its clouds (like a small, earthly dawn) of 

 purple loosestrife ; its avenues of limes and wych-elms ; 

 its grassy spaces, strewn with sarsens, stately and undis- 

 turbed ; its large, dull, sufficient-looking, homely house — 

 suggested the Okebourne Chace of ' Round about a Great 

 Estate.' 



