Ch. 3: Winterbourne Bishop

A favourite village--Isolated situation--Appearance of the
village--Hedge-fruit--The winterbourne--Human interest--The home
feeling--Man in harmony with nature--Human bones thrown out by a
rabbit--A spot unspoiled and unchanged

Of the few widely separated villages, hidden away among the lonely downs
in the large, blank spaces between the rivers, the one I love best is
Winterbourne Bishop. Yet of the entire number--I know them all
intimately--I daresay it would be pronounced by most persons the least
attractive. It has less shade from trees in summer and is more exposed
in winter to the bleak winds of this high country, from whichever
quarter they may blow. Placed high itself on a wide, unwooded valley or
depression, with the low, sloping downs at some distance away, the
village is about as cold a place to pass a winter in as one could find
in this district. And, it may be added, the most inconvenient to live in
at any time, the nearest town, or the easiest to get to, being
Salisbury, twelve miles distant by a hilly road. The only means of
getting to that great centre of life which the inhabitants possess is by
the carrier's cart, which makes the weary four-hours' journey once a
week, on market-day. Naturally, not many of them see that place of
delights oftener than once a year, and some but once in five or more
years.

Then, as to the village itself, when you have got down into its one
long, rather winding street, or road. This has a green bank, five or
six feet high, on either side, on which stand the cottages, mostly
facing the road. Real houses there are none--buildings worthy of
being called houses in these great days--unless the three small
farm-houses are considered better than cottages, and the rather
mean-looking rectory--the rector, poor man, is very poor. Just in
the middle part, where the church stands in its green churchyard,
the shadiest spot in the village, a few of the cottages are close
together, almost touching, then farther apart, twenty yards or so,
then farther still, forty or fifty yards. They are small, old cottages;
a few have seventeenth-century dates cut on stone tablets on their
fronts, but the undated ones look equally old; some thatched,
others tiled, but none particularly attractive. Certainly they are
without the added charm of a green drapery--creeper or ivy rose,
clematis, and honeysuckle; and they are also mostly without the
cottage-garden flowers, unprofitably gay like the blossoming furze,
but dear to the soul: the flowers we find in so many of the villages
along the rivers, especially in those of the Wylye valley to be
described in a later chapter.

The trees, I have said, are few, though the churchyard is shady, where
you can refresh yourself