185 
OCTOBER JOTTINGS, 1899 
Keble, the author of the “ Christian Year,” one of the leaders 
of the Oxford movement, and one who, amid all the storm and 
tumult of the great secessions, remained faithful to the English 
Church. Who would know of this little village were it not for 
the name of this saintly vicar, who has made Hursley famous 
to thousands who will never see it, but who know it simply as 
Keble’s parish ? 
All these names have made their way out of the storehouse 
of memory on these autumn afternoons. But there is so much 
of the actual living present to appeal to the sense of sight and 
sound that the past soon flies away. This seat upon the gate 
is by the side of a green grass-grown path that leads from the 
open down between tall thick hedges to Silkstead Farm. Hour 
after hour may be passed here in solitude ; it is only when some 
party of sportsmen has come up from the big town down the 
valley, or a stray shepherd or gamekeeper passes by, that the 
solitude is broken. But if human beings are lacking, there are 
many of nature’s wonders, for the bright mild autumn has kept 
the country from putting on the aspect of winter, and the coverts 
are thick as yet, and the pheasants and partridges have a better 
chance of life than in some seasons at this time. We are on the 
chalk here, and everything is characteristic of the vegetation on 
that formation. But only a little way off, the chalk ends, and 
the hills to the south are where the gravels and sands begin. On 
Compton Down, therefore, one style of vegetation is to be seen, 
but on Otterbourne Hill and in Cranbury Park, only a couple of 
miles away, it is all quite different. 
From this seat upon the gate, then, we look upon the thick 
hedgerows of the chalk downs, and can note what is to be seen 
growing in them. It is no trim-cut hedge of uniform height and 
prosaic primness, but as varied as can be. Here a tree and 
there a bush, and everywhere a mass of creeping, climbing 
plants ; sometimes narrow, sometimes widening almost into a 
copse ; such is our chalk-down hedge. Tallest of its component 
parts within view of the gate is the ash, looking even in mid- 
October almost as fresh and green as when its leaves were first 
out in early summer, but soon to be stripped by the advent of 
the frosts. It is a tall and graceful tree, and in sharp contrast 
to the neighbouring yew, dark and sombre, and spreading widely, 
although even then overtopping the usual height of our hedge. 
There is always something funereal about the appearance of the 
yew tree ; perhaps this had something to do with its constant 
appearance in churchyards — our forefathers thought of it as 
harmonising with the mourners’ grief, and so planted it amongst 
the graves. (There is a famous big yew in Twyford churchyard 
hard by.) Its small red berries make no great show, and 
perhaps that is as well, for the yew is to be avoided as an article 
of food for man and beast. But sombre as the tree undoubtedly 
is, it serves well now to show off by contrast the lovely autumn 
tints of the deciduous trees around it. 
