If you love the quiet of the country—the real quiet which is not silence at all, but the blending of a myriad scarce-perceptible sounds—you will get it in Windlecombe, heaped measure, pressed down, and running over, year in and year out.

The village lies just where Arun river breaks the green rampart of the Sussex Downs. To the west, the lowest cottages dwindle almost to the water’s brink. Northward and eastward, the highest buildings stand afar off, clear cut against the blue wall of the sky; while in between, filling the deep, steep combe, church and inn and every kind of dwelling-house, little or big, huddle together under their thatch and old red tiles, with the village green in their midst, and a thread of white road rippling through them all and up the steep combe-side till it is lost in the sunny waste of the hills.

But there is no way through Windlecombe. From the market town four miles off, the road is good enough; and good it remains until it reaches the highest human outpost of the village. But there it suddenly changes to a mere cart-track, soon to vanish altogether in the green sward of the Down. And therein lies Windlecombe’s chiefest blessing. Far away on the great main road, when the wind is southerly, we can hear the motor-bugles calling, and see pale comet-beams careering through the night. But these things come no nearer. At rare intervals, perhaps, a stray juggernaut will descend upon us, and demand of some placid rustic the nearest way to Land’s End or Aberdeen, returning disgusted on its tracks when it learns that there is only one road from here to anywhere, and that the road it came. But these ear-splitting, malodorous happenings are few and far between. At all other times, Windlecombe wears the quiet of the hills about it like a garment. The dust of the highway has no soaring ambition to whiten the hedgerows, or fill the cottagers’ cabbages with grit. It still keeps to its ancient, lowly work of smoothing the path for man and beast; and our children can play in it unterrorised, our old dogs lie in it at their slumberous ease.

How wild and quiet the place is, you can only realise by living in it from year’s end to year’s end, as has been my own privilege for longer than I care to compute. For how many ages a human settlement has existed in this wooded, sun-flooded cleft of the Downs, it is impossible to hazard a guess. Windlecombe is mentioned in Domesday, but the stones of the old church proclaim it as belonging to times more distant still. Be that as it may, its clustered roofs and grey church tower have long been reckoned in the traditions of wild life as part and parcel of the eternal hills. Birds frequent Windlecombe as they haunt the beech-woods that hang upon the sides of the combe. They use the rick-yards and gardens, the very streets even, as they use the glades in the woodlands or the verges of the brooks. You may come out of a winter’s morning and see a heron flapping slowly out of your paddock, or listen to a pheasant’s trumpeting on the other side of the hedge. And in early summer you can sit on the garden bench, and, looking up into the dim elm labyrinth overhead, watch a green woodpecker at work, cutting the hole for his nest straight and true into the heart of the wood. That the thrushes sing all day long from Michaelmas to Midsummer Day, that in June you cannot sleep for the nightingales, that there is never an hour of daylight all the year round when a lark is not carolling against the blue or stormy grey above the village—these things you take as part of your rightful daily fare, and are content.

But life in an English village derives its charm only in part from its intimacy with wild Nature and all her wonders and beauties, indispensable as these are to the daily lives of most thinking, working men. There is no error so disastrous, humanly speaking, as that which leads a man to seek happiness or sublimity out of the beaten track of his fellows. Neighbourhood, the daily interchange of thought and word and kindly deed, is a necessity for all healthy human life, and the natural medium of all true advancement. And nowhere will you find it of such sturdy growth, rooted in such nourishing, yet temperate soil, than in the villages of modern England.

Yet here it is necessary to discriminate, to mark conditions. If one’s duty towards one’s neighbour assumes a real and prime world’s importance in village life, it is equally true that all men are not alike fit to be villagers, nor all villages to be accounted neighbourly. It is an essential part of the life I would describe in these pages that both the people and the place should depend for existence on the day’s work; work done, as far as may be, on the soil from which all sprang, and to which all some day must return. The show villages, the little lodging-letting communities that are to be found here and there, must be excluded from the argument. Nor can men of private means, however modest, find a natural place in the true villager ranks. Where to all men life is a series of laborious days, tired evenings, dreamless nights, you, lolling in the sunshine, or playing at work, or more fatal still, working at play, will be for ever a public anomaly. You will get civility, a patient, dignified tolerance from all. But you will not have a neighbour: though you live until your feet have graven their mark into every stone of the place, you will be a stranger in a strange land.

For my part, such as my work is, I have done it, every stroke, in Windlecombe for half a lifetime back, and may claim to have fairly won my villagership. And what it is worth to me—how it is sweetened by daily touch of kind hearts and grip of clean hands; what the country sunshine means, filtering through the vine-leaves of my workroom window; and what the song of the robin that sits on the ivied gate-post without, or, in winter-time, comes fluttering and tapping at the old bull’s-eye panes for crumbs; how the daily walk, in wood or meadow or by riverside, brings ever its new marvel or revelation of unimagined beauty; and how, above all, the lives of the quaint, courageous, clever folk, in whose midst Destiny has thrown me, overbrim with all traits human, delectably mortal, divinely out-of-place—these, and many other aspects of villagership, I have here tried to set down in plain words and meaning, believing that what has proved of interest and profit to one very human, always erring, often doubting soul, may do the like for others, though journeying by widely sundered tracks.

T. E.