148 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



reached, the action of great events, battles, laws, roads, 

 invasions, upon the parish — and of the parish upon them 

 — must be shovv^n. Architecture, with many of its local 

 characteristics still to be traced, will speak as a voice out 

 of the stones of castle, church, manor, farm, barn and 

 bridge. The birds and beasts cannot be left out. The 

 names of the local families — gentle and simple — what 

 histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tomb- 

 stones, in the names of fields and houses and woods. Better 

 a thousand errors so long as they are human than a thou- 

 sand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil 

 of a thrush. If only those poems which are place-names 

 could be translated at last, the pretty, the odd, the 

 romantic, the racy names of copse and field and lane and 

 house. What a flavour there is about the Bassetts, 

 the Boughtons, the Worthys, the Tarrants, Winter- 

 bournes, Deverills, Manningfords, the Suttons : what 

 goodly names of the South Country — Woodmansterne, 

 Hollingbourne, Horsmonden, Wolstanbury, Brockenhurst, 

 Caburn, Lydiard Tregoze, Lydiard Miliicent, Clevancy, 

 Amesbury, Amberley (I once tried to make a beautiful 

 name and in the end it was Amberley, in which Time 

 had forestalled me); what sweet names Penshurst, Frens- 

 ham, Firle, Nutley, Appleshaw, Hambledon, Cranbrook, 

 Fordingbridge, Melksham, Lambourn, Draycot, Buscot, 

 Kelmscot, Yatton, Yalding, Downe, Cowden, Iping, 

 Cowfold, Ashe, Liss. . . . Then there are the histories 

 of roads. Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the 

 road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves 

 down from the high land of clay and flint through the 

 chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round the 

 head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech 



