Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/217

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

born in Lincolnshire, but he was born in the Wolds surrounded by woods and hills. Even so, Tennyson has not done for the Wolds what Scott has done for the Scotch Highlands; the scenery of the Wolds has its special charms, but it is no tourist-haunted land, yet none the less beautiful on that account, and selfishly I am thankful that there are such spacious beauty spots still left to us in England unknown to, and unregarded by, the cheap-tripper. Let us hope that no popular guide-book will be written about certain districts to needlessly call his attention to them.

A NOVEL EXPERIENCE This corner of England that we were traversing has an unfamiliar aspect to the average Englishman; the buildings and people therein truly are English, intensely English, but, these apart, the country looks strange and foreign. It is a novel experience to drive for miles along an embanked road looking down upon all the landscape, just as it is equally curious, on the other hand, to drive along a road below an embanked river! Keen and fresh came the breezes to us from over the mighty fens, for they were unrestrained even by a hedge; pleasantly refreshing and scented were they with the cool odours of marsh flowers, plants, and reeds. The fields being divided by dykes and ditches, in place of hedges, the landscape gained in breadth, for the sweep of the eye was not continually arrested by the bounding hedges that but too often cut up the prospect of the English country-side, chess-board fashion.

At one spot low down to the right of our way