RAMBLER’S LICHEN.

BY SIR JAMES H. YOXALL, M.P.

With trunk, limbs, and branches of travel an English country highway lies on the land like the section or vertical slice of a tall felled tree; fringes of hedge its foliage and fields its clouds of air. Never straight-ruled on the map, no Roman cypress nor close, unerring poplar, it is rather some indigenous great beech or elm, that swayed to the winds with a not too ready yielding, and grew up in lines hardly gaunt enough to be angular yet too clean-run to be curves.

Rooted at Sherborne, say, one of these great arboriferous road-systems wends north by east, towards camps of the present and earthworks of the past. At a widening of bole it forks, pushing one arm out easterly and another south-westerly; such is the swayed posture here that you glimpse the dryad in it, as you do the Venus de Milo in some real tree-trunk that ivy swathes to the hip. The eastward limb, if you cleave to that, will become stem itself, and sway out curved arms of its own to woo you; take one of those rustling prongs for a mile or two and it bifurcates, so that soon, like the squirrel, you must choose your branch. From bough to bough you may leap (so to speak) by agile footpaths, but if you keep on along a lean lane that presently thins into a mere rut, you attain to the extremest twig. It is thus that afoot from Sherborne you reach to Sandford Orcas, say, or if your wayfaring tree be rooted at Yeovil, to that extremity of path a foredraught (to use the old Worcestershire name for an approach to a farm), which brings you to Barrington Court.

And all along your way there will have been bivouacs of blossoms, fruit, seed for the next blooming; or in every footprint of Primavera you may have seen the primrose lichening the banks, some morning still covered with dew. Pray do not remark that the primroses are primulaceous—it is the occulter analogies a true loiterer likes to ramble into—nor declare that lichens are parasites which stifle their billets: maybe, maybe. But they are gentle intruders anyhow, no Prussians in Belgium, and the householder lives long, on excellent terms with his guest. Lichens are dowerings; indeed, our own wrinkles might be glad of them—they prank and enrich; even the sad coloured ones do, and the black. ‘These weeds are memories,’ Lear said, and fair lichen of remembrance, musing emotions of pity or relish, and dew of tears, even, may alight upon a rambler as he goes his discursive, his essayist’s way. Though he latterly gad at a slackening pace, and the extreme twig bring him, chief mourner for himself, at the head of a dark procession, to some short, shallow trench and clay cot, I think he will have been the happier and the longer-lived for his lichening; he may also have become wealthy meanwhile, in memorabilia, the thiefless hoard that never lessens; he may even have been hallowed somewhat, not left untouched at heart as the true ungodly, they whom neither the beauty of this world nor the dream of another can impassion, or the ‘sense of tears in mortal things’ soften inside. With a venial, reverent Pharisaism, therefore, that in truth is but gratitude, a rambler may thank his wandering stars that he has been no man unlichenable, upon whom no charm of place, or quip of illusion, nor the lacrymae rerum gat hold.

Lovely are the swayed bodies of dryad and Venus trees in silvery April, before they have hung their leafy mantillas and aprons about them, as if shrinking from gaze. But beautiful as September sunshine is the lichen upon them too, itself a veil; so goodly to look at that county men quarrel across their small frontiers about it—I remember Sir William Harcourt saying at Malwood that whenever Mr. Gladstone and he met in the country they contended whether Hawarden or Malwood trees were lichened the better. Yet I think it is upon stone walls and roofs, in Dorset, say, that the fungi-algae look best of all. Pickthanks and esurient flatterers of trees they may be, perhaps, but like Danaë gold and silver they descend upon masonry, giving, not taking, and finely wrought as coins that were minted at Syracuse. With nothing of Sir Gorgius Midas in their profusion, they do not pretend to be county people, exclusive, and as soon will gild a hamlet gable as a mansion coat-of-arms. Like sunshine spattered through meshes of leaves they descend upon their billets, but to last there after sunset, and to endure through winter, like our men entrenched in Flanders. The lodging they prefer is stone, I say—a brown stone that empurples; they seldom select the wattle-and-daub of a washed, half-timbered wall.

Few dwellings of that architecture linger on in stone counties now, however—I mean the prototypal make, the human nest built of mud; masonry has almost everywhere ousted the caked stuff which Shakespeare so often saw ‘stop a hole, to keep the wind away.’ In Warwickshire, Wilts, and other river-bed counties a rambler still happens upon this primal type of cottage sometimes; as he does at Clifden Hampden, in the aged building called the ‘Barley Mow’ near Wallingford Bridge. He recognises the ancient cot, cote, hutch, hut, or whatever its earliest English name was, by the inwardly-slanting timbers of its ends, cloven tree-trunks, which lean up into the gables from the floor corners, in couples that meet as if to embrace, beneath the watershed of the roof. Two pairs of such tree-trunks, starting from right distances at the base, and tied together at the top by a ridge-tree, formed the skeleton of the prototypal house; perhaps in the earliest huts the four supports were living saplings, still growing in pairs at convenient spots, for these could be yoked into service—bent while still green, to be then beheaded; maybe our word ‘roof-tree’ began in that.

We think of the famous half-timbered house at Stratford-on-Avon as ‘Elizabethan,’ but Beowulf may have had some such a habitation as that: this primal type must be inconceivably aged;

is only feebly approximate in date. Even the Bronze Epoch knew the latticed hovel roofed with daub; perhaps the skin-clad builders took lesson by the swallow’s bungalow, or the clay lining of the throstle’s house. Or perhaps the prototypal hut was the tent made permanent, a wigwam expressed in woven withies and caked mud? It must have been general in Europe when Christ was born, for certain first-century tombstones, dug up in Alsace, resemble the primal home in shape, and show markings for timbers at the gables; most likely these were mimic copies of the dead man’s earthly dwelling, meant to house his otherwise vagrant soul; this is lichen of the greyest morning, though Egyptian funerary chambers are older still. But it is lichen that lives on yet, for what is a modern mausoleum but a mansion for the dead? A family vault at Woking is as tribal as a patronymic; we are born thus lichened—the youngest are grey with these spores from the past.

Such surnames as Dabb, Dauber, Dobb, and Dobbin descend from early manipulators of viscous mud, I suppose, special craftsmen developed at the very beginning of ‘division of labour,’ and there is a certain French phrase for sturdiness—bâti à chaux et à sable—which must date as far back as the earliest mixing of lime and sand in with mud. ‘Clay-dabber Dick,’ a resented nickname for a brickmaker now, would begin as a proper cognomen in some loamy county, where clay could be used flat between the timberings, in place of wattle plastered with mud. Tyler would name the artisan who posed ridge-tiles and pantiles, that Potter had moulded, and baked perhaps in Robinson Crusoe’s outdoor way: Defoe, by the bye, was once ‘secretary to a pantile works at Tilbury.’ Such craft names as Mason and Quarrier would begin in stone counties first, very likely; but Thatcher is as proved an ancient as Dobster or Dobbin—his lichen is as old as any, I daresay. For dab and thatch must always have gone together, and still in Wilts and Bucks garden-walls made of dab are thatched lest they dissolve under rain. Ramblers along English road-trees see this straw-weaving go on yet, thank goodness, as it surely always will wherever people own taste as well as land. There are thatched churches extant; one at Markby in Lincolnshire, near loamy cliffs that wall out the sea. What warmth and simplicity of worship, under thatch!

Thatch ennobles—it can suggest the stately peruke; thatch is sporting—a covert-coat for a cottage; thatch shades its serge into such tints of khaki that it weaves the right ‘British warm.’ A thatcher can be an artist, as much as any Dick Tinto who paints; and I will also claim that Hedger and Ditcher are very ancient and skilled artisans. Thatch shapes into such slopes, too, it so canopies and rounds off gables, dormers, and porches, that for fitness and comeliness its motley is your hamlet’s only wear. And as patentees in their advertisements do, I urge ‘Reject all substitutes!’ and against metal roofs in particular, corrugated iron that basely counterfeits pantiles, I launch the curse of the rambler; for upon such hectic, crinkly awnings no lichen of loveliness ever gets hold. Let roof-tree and road-tree grow ‘in beauty side by side,’ as Mrs. Hemans’ family did, say I, and the wig of the cottage be blonde.

Road-trees sprout hamlets, dwellings grouped in greenery as if they were clusters of acorns or hazel-nuts, and these often are ripe old places, turning brown as nuts and acorns do, and blest with beautiful baptisms, names that a rambler reads upon slanting sign-posts or over rustical post-office doors. Many old place-names relate their own exegesis: I know a road that branches off at Headless Cross—the medieval picture and chiaroscuro of the past in that! One sees the Lollards in the foreground of it, dourly hewing a saint’s head off the top of a stone shaft, the thatched village looking sleepily on.

For six undulant miles or so this road from Headless Cross goes dandling along to Tardebigg, through delightful Foxlydiate, and past the bald summit of Muskott’s Way. ‘Tardebigg,’ more recondite than ‘Headless Cross,’ I guess to have named the site of some manor-house or farmstead built so dawdlingly as never to have been finished—a bachelor or spinster bit of building that never made a home, and childless died into the inane. Or ‘Tardebigg’ may have named some hill of late-harvesting barley—there is always the delight of shies at the local truth for you, one can seldom be quite sure of a hit. Yet who was Muskott, that he should ever have owned a long strip of common-land which could never belong to any particular body? It is fudge; I do not believe there ever was such a Muskott—Onesimus, George, or Ebenezer as the case might be. I’ll warrant that Muskott’s Way was known as Muskets Way in days when Napoleon threatened invasion, for in days when Louis Napoleon’s colonels threatened it, the Rifle Corps had their shooting-range up Muskott’s Way. There magazine rifles are practised with at present, I do not doubt, and there in Wat Tyler’s time bowmen would loose at the butts. The place is a palimpsest, of our successive preparations for war.

As for the christening of Foxlydiate, the road-tree sways gracefully down just there, and was not hlidh Early English for ‘slope’? There are other lyds and lydiates. ‘Foxlydiate’ may have meant the meet of the hunters—there are kennels near it still; but I think the name was anciently ‘Folks-lydiate,’ the hill of the ‘good folk’ or fays, and it is a superstitious little village yet. No stretch of country road used to live without its myth or chimera (of subtle contour often), its fable, its dreaming escape from the actual; a myriad perennial annals, vouched for by the affidavits of the aged, some of them puerile but some grim, lichen our by-ways; there is hardly a great house but when you pass the park-palings of split oak something romantical will come to mind, or be told in your ear. Beginning gay-coloured, as lichens often do, these sometimes darken; thus the legend at Foxlydiate is sombre and nocturnal now. The road there hears an equipage sometimes, after sunset, and this was once a fairy vehicle, I’ll warrant, perhaps a Cinderella’s coach; but it has become a nightmare now—the terror of ‘the Flying Hearse.’ Elms in platoons and companies shadow the road there, and there the bat of superstition flits through the twilight of the spirit; be there in the mood, and you may think you hear wheels rush uphill; smack of whip, snort of nag, clink of swingle-bar are heard, but no correspondent forms are visible; and that is salutary, the tradition says, for whoso sees the Flying Hearse must die within the year. Many a time there I as a lad, driving home in the twilight, listened with the delight of half-sceptical terror, but I doubt if people harken for that fatal omnibus now. Tilth and foison of ghost story, aged jest, and fine old tradition no longer flourish; for towns and townsmen, spreading into the country—lichen of a sort—bring the long age of romantic rural faiths to an end.

Townsmen in Arcady are rarer of late, however. War-time depopulates the country roads. The motor-car (itself a flying hearse sometimes) is scarce there now. Solitary the rambler jogs along, alone with himself, except for the flight of the mated thrush or other father bird on service of commissariat; but in what ease of silence you may now pursue your errantry, and into what delight of the unexpected! There are folk who think they ramble, yet go nose in map, by rule and rote of road; but as well employ a guide and an alpenstock—to ramble is not to ken whither, and yet to home. There are plausible short-cuts that deceive you, I know, and branches of road-trees bring you to sudden corners, hedged-in dichotomies, curves and exfoliations that the Development Commissioners, most leisurely of Government Trustees, had not even so much as begun to think of improving away, some day, before the War. These may perplex you, or even be perilous with storming petrels; but there are natural dug-outs, trenches with high green banks.

Often from such elbows as these a lane goes trooping off, like a truant from school. Dusky ways you come to, and bright ones, russet or green tunnels over-arched that make noontide a twilight, or jolly and titupping lanes that caper away from corner alehouses with merry, drunken staggers. Or you pass between roofless colonnades, stately cloisters with tree-trunks for mullions; these are lanes that once were avenues, leading long ago to the gates and curtilage of some manor-house now razed. It is by ways such as these that you pass the minuter Auburns, deserted cottages which by the something maniac there is now about their thatch make you think of Barnaby Rudge. And sometimes the raven croaks above those ruined little atriums; oftener the curlew calls across lesser lanes still, that were ancient pack-horse tracks, or were foot-worn in the lang syne of some local trade now dead—the Salt-way, the Rush-way, or the Keg-way leading up from some cove of contraband. The ring-dove coos to narrower paths still—O Lubin and Chloe!—the recognised sweethearting footways where every generation has loitered and whispered with the erratic ache of love.

These divers cuts and tacks shorten apparent distance and cheat the tiring foot, for the way itself seems to wander with you, and each new corner to beckon you on. And this is a portion of that English form of great art which lets things develop as if they were vegetal, into a perfect beauty of anarchy, various and infinite; no Ordnance surveyor nor planner of garden cities would invent such foot-beguiling roads as these. Some of them can astound even the most experienced rambler, he almost can hear them chuckle at his surprise when he rounds into a new vista, and some of them seem to go about with the zeal of an antiquary, discovering and reconnecting the tracks of some Titan who trapesed through the quag there, before it had hardened after Noah’s flood. There are leafy labyrinths, too, mazy suburbs, faubourgs of silent green cities, peopled by plants and shapes of leaves and scents so various, that in June, the schoolboy month, a man may rest there bewitched, ‘Tarrying and talked to by tongues aromatic,’ thinking himself a bodily translation, resolved into a forested world.

I suppose the skin-clad explorer of spaces we now name counties found no paths but the spoor of what a Boy Scout called ‘growly beasts.’ Between dens and water-breaks these tracks would go, and I never came to a ford without seeming to see some skin-clad explorer there before me, his tongue lapping water and his furtive eyes swivelling left and right for danger, since it was then always war-time for a man. In September, when great fleets of swallows gather in ports of departure, I have noticed them, myriad and midge-like in the air above and around—I cannot guess why—a ford. Water brings back some of the old feeling of mystery and danger into any journey, you spy the peril under the beauty as you come to a ferry, or to a string of white posts and chains that fence off a roadside burn.

How Shakespeare delighted in fords! He played with the word’s meaning again and again. Many a Warwickshire place he knew where ‘the shore was shelvy and shallow,’ and he—perhaps he most of all as most human of all—would be glad to get home to his shire. There was, and I hope is yet, a ford at the ‘beggarly Broome’ which he knew of, where the road pushed into the Avon abruptly, turned at a right angle midstream, splashed axle-deep thirty yards, and emerged uphill. And this used to be a place of delicious risk for a young palmer whose staff was a whip; for at any moment the gig might become a cockleshell, floating. It was a sacred water of danger to me; may Development Commissioners destroy it never, and least of all with some iron bridge, kept painted against the mollifying lichen of rust.

Splash went the fetlocks; or if you were afoot, under the lee of an old mill a lichened old boat swayed hooked, and across the echoing flow your cry went, ‘Ferry-oh!’ or ‘O-ver, miller!’—the very music of life. A ferry-boat is but a moving span, stepping-stones are a kind of ford, and bridges developed out of these, I think, for what were the piers at first but stepping-stones for a giant’s stride? Bridges—but pages and pages would not tell the rambler’s delight in those circumflex accents, those brooding brows bent over grey eyes of water wherein reflections lie deep, like thoughts that dream.

Such, Jean-Paul might have cried, in one of the conceits with which he rejoiced a dead old Germany, are the flowers and honey of a road-tree, with cottages like strawy hives, under linden-tresses murmurous of clustered delight; these be the joys that wing the rambler, so that away he goes bumbling tirelessly, as I do here, to the next blossoms, and the next. Life itself climbs and descends a road-tree, I suppose—the tree of Ygdrasil; but there can be continual breaking forth into new boughs of living if one carries Spring on into Autumn, keeping pretty young in spite of the impertinences of time. Has there not been grafting of road-trees, budding of fertile young stems into lichened old branches of ways?

But road-trees are deciduous, too, boughs and twigs of them withering for lack of the sap of daily use; with some sense of pathos a rambler obtrudes upon the hush of lanes long left unmetalled, where the latest wheel-marks are wan. He thus comes into places of pastoral indolence that once hummed with cultivation, where not even yet, in war-time, have farmers wakened their Sleepy Hollows up. Some of the elderliest by-roads are the loneliest, and seem to lie musing of their past; even a summer breeze can blow bleakly there, and in the lulls of it the silence waits, forlorn. There are very aged, lonesome ways which seem to shiver, Lear-like, and then the rambler thinks how all the hurriers and loiterers upon them in the past lie low. We too are in the tradition: ‘This great world itself shall so wear out to naught.’

Lear wandered the Roman roads of Britain; they set one thinking of strategic railways just now. In essence an old Latin militant broadway and a German route to the extravasation of blood are the same, I suppose. Both were pushed out like spears of offence, immense and excessive, and neither was a pleasant causeway for neighbourliness. Therefore a curse shall come upon the Prussian strategic paths, such as fell upon the Roman thoroughfares here long ago. Even yet these seem to march in arms among us, between the remains of sullen native forests—they are aliens still; listen along one of them yet, and you shall think you hear the clink of greaves or the centurion’s harsh command. These ancient roads can never be homely, they have never been naturalised, the little townships hold apart from them yet.

Follow Watling Street or the Fosse Way in rustic regions and you come upon few villages: our old horror of the Latin power seems to persist. British and Early-English field-folk huddled together in hamlets that developed like social islands, at the centre of cultivable common lands, connubial, away from forests of ferae and thoroughfares of war. Even in York and Lancaster days villagers would use the great old roads as seldom as might be—they were marches for soldiery, stretches of savagery that husbandman and maid had better avoid. They thus became bristling frontiers, limits of peaceable excursion, confines of wapentakes or counties; in days when people were

it would be risky to quit your township, and almost armed invasion to cross the great road. We English no more became Latin then than Teutonic later; always we have gone our own ways. Between Newark and Nottingham the Fosse marches straight, a noble Roman superb and haughty, but the other road, the true Englishman, wends devious and unsystematic: it developed as the British Empire did, out of paths and lanes of trade and gossip: they never set out to be a main road or an empire at all.

Somewhere and sometime all roads end, as must this wandering gossip of road-trees. It is good to jog on the footpath way and hent the stile even in war-time; when skylarks are mounted, why not out and listen, though from the same Sussex hill you faintly hear the great guns? The lyric blaze above persists, in spite of war. Is it unfeeling to forget the drumming streets, the drilling camps, and go listen how underwoods ring with wild hyacinths? That Death is Life’s fierce, Prussian neighbour we know more than ever, just now—but Life has to be Death’s comrade in the whirling dream. The war will pass, though thick the lichen of it gather upon us meanwhile, sad-coloured and black. It is not heartless to look round the corner and over the hill meantime, and it is wisdom to lift up the heart in spite of all, as one plods towards the evening tent.