Crichel Down is a Place
BY ANDREW WORDSWORTH GREAT many people hate seen Crichel Down who don't think they have. Eighteen miles out of Salisbury on the Roman Road to Dorchester and the West it is on he left just after you pass a signpost to Long Crichel. It is eautiful country but rather.bare, you may think, if you weren't red to chalk. It used to be called by a fine name that has dropped out of English—` champaign country,' meaning open and free from woodland.
Thirty years ago if you stopped your car there and walked on the excellent turf you would have heard sheep-bells. An unlikely sound today, not because sheep no longer wear bells but because there are not two dozen flocks in Dorset. But Mere is still the singing of larks, still the same parties of yellow and brown hares that like to amaze you by their springing and dancing (or are they still March hares this cold July ?). And the same lines of the hills so exquisitely curved and formal that if you have ever lived in chalk you can never be quite happy again with anything but the good sense of that definite and reasonable horizon.
In the fields there has been a revolution. You must have Seen something of it as you drove from Salisbury. At the gate of every farm there is a little platform and on it milkchums. These you would have seen thirty years ago in the valleys; Uow you see them on the chalk uplands. The fields themselves are new, bounded by wire fences. If you care to walk up on to Crichel Down you'll see the change for yourself. It's not SO easy to get there as it was. Mr. Tozer may not mind your walking through 'the cow-pasture, but you'll have to go round an enormous field of barley, and the top of the down is a mighty acreage of clover. You reach it by paths that skirt the fields. That is, unless you are a botanist. If you are, you'll stop on the track, where the, chalk flowers grow now that they have been driven from the arable land. But if you can leave the yellow and blue and red of horseshoe vetch and scabious and sainfoin without looking more carefully for the gentians and orchids which are there too, you'll come to the crest of Crichel Down, not much out of breath for it's only 347 feet and you started at two hundred above sea level.
First, the ordinary loveliness of this view. To the north is all Cranborne Chase, much more wooded than the rest and bounded by the great downs that run from Shaftesbury to Salisbury; to the north-east the line of Pentridge hills standing over Rockbourne and Marten; to the south Purbeck and the seaward downs, Flowers Barrow, Arishmell Gap, Bindon, Hambury Tout, High Chaldon; to the west Hambledon and Hod Hills with Bulbarrow behind them.
The revolution is really a restoration. Things have moved back a thousand years. You are near the centre of what used to be the most populous part of England. The marks of the value prehistoric man placed on this land are to be seen every- where. This clover field has two barrows in it, there are two more in the barley, another clearly in the plough and signs of others now flattened but still showing different colours in the corn and fallow. They belong to the bronze age, but long before that Neolithic men, the first farmers, had made their cattle pound on Hambledon Hill and dropped their neat little flints in every field. After the bronze age the men of iron, Celts from Gaul, came to build those magnificent hill-forts that stand in a ring before you—Badbury Rings, Crawford Castle. Buzbury, Rawlsbury. Hambledon and Hod. All these invaders from Europe came to the chalk and fought for it. It was fertile, easy to clear, and light soil easy to work, at first with antlers and wooden spades, then with their light ploughs drawn by ponies or small oxen.
How far the Celts began to colonise the valleys I don't know. Their local town was above the 700-foot contour on Shilling- ritone Hill. I think it was the land-hungry Saxons who first cleared the low ground and prepared those rich meadows our fathers called good land—' good for the bider, bad for the rider.' It was certainly the Saxons who named every village round here, all of which are in valleys, and who built the first square towers on the sites of the ten churches whose bells you could hear on a still Sunday evening from the top of Crichel Down. After the Saxons until our own time these hills were considered poorish land—good for sheep if you had the acreage, but only good enough for corn if the price rose because of some national crisis. Yet sheep were valuable and the uplands cost little. The downs existed for nearly a thousand years in their pleasantest form, an unfenced lawn. close-cropped and scented -with thyme: ' the delicate fine downes at the backside of the towne ' where Sir John Suckling walked at Marlborough, the lawn where Henry Hudson heard the best of all conversations about the chalk when he composed A Shepherd's Life.
Then came the time when it was cheaper (as it still is) to raise sheep in New Zealand, and the downs began to grow lank with untidy grass, badly cropped by heifers or beeves; with the encroachment of thorn and furze and bramble they began to have that untidy look of unused country. The conditions for restoration were well-known, but it took war to bring them into general practice. First we wanted more corn, then more milk. The chalk hills can provide both if the land is properly fed. They need potash and, oddly enough. lime; they need machinery to plough them where they are steep, and newly-developed strains of grass for a proper ley- farming. All these were and are available (the fertilisers not without subsidy). Together they explain why Crichel Down, like so much of the rest of the chalk country, is arable again, and why it is a good deal more warth fighting for than it was flirty years ago when some of it was let for half a crown an acre.
You won't be able to leave the down without wanting to visit the Tarrant Valley which lies a few hundred yards down to the south—in an enchanting curve of darker green. There are seven villages, all called Tarrant—Gunville, Hinton, Launceston, Monkton, Rawston, Rushton and Crawford. It's hard to know what you will enjoy Most—the splendid fragment of Vanbrugh at Eastbury House, the flint and brick villages, or the seven churches. My own favourite is the twelfth-century church of St. Mary at Tarrant Crawford. It stands alone in a field by a chalk stream. To go there is to understand why Bishop Poore, the builder of Salisbury Cathedral, was brought back there from his see at Durharn to be buried, why Queen Joan of Scotland returned there to die. You can see their coffin-lids on either side, of the chancel. For if there is any- where better in England than a chalk down it is a chalk valley, and this is perhaps the best of them all. Bishop Poore composed for the nunnery that stood in the field here one of the first books to be written in English, the Ancrene Rim* or Rule of Nuns. He wrote it to settle their controversies.
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