XIX Grey Rock and Thyme 



THE hills of grey, mountain limestone which rise 

 from many of the northern and western vales form 

 a separate kingdom of nature among English 

 landscapes, with distinct and constant features. 

 Only a thin cloak of reddish soil overlies the rough, 

 grey rock, which juts out along the slopes and 

 shoulders of the hill in rain-whitened scars and 

 bosses ; but the turf is sweeter and finer, and 

 cropped more closely by the flocks which range the 

 walks, than that nurtured by any other soil but the 

 chalk of the southern downs. 



The distinctiveness of these hills, wherever they 

 occur, is due above all to this close and thyme- 

 strewn sward, as sweet to man as to the beasts, and 

 to the grey limbs of virgin rock that thrust them- 

 selves so constantly and easily to the sun through 

 the cloak of hanging pasturage. In the summer 

 heats the thyme-flower flushes the hillsides with a 

 pale and delicate purple, of kindred softness with 

 the silver and pale orange of the lichens that stain 

 the rock and the blue of the distant plain. Far 

 into the autumn, on all the warmer days, the scent 

 of the woven thyme-strands hangs, like their native 

 breath, round the slopes and summits of the hills. 

 Even in the mild and brilliant noons that come now 



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