The Road by the River
IT is not really a road at all : only a tow-path fringed with honey-scented cowslips—those riverside cups of nectar, with their five "crimson drops .i' the bottom" that the bees love so—drooping their green and golden umbels down to the 'water: a path worn along the meadow-grass by the feet of countrymen and horses, where no wheels can come : or the mere shadow of a foot- way through the dove-haunted river-woods, a sheep-path winding down the hill-country with little amber-coloured moorland waters, that make cool, gurgling music in the heather-roots—a suggestion, nothing more, that here a way will be found, somehow, by green valleys, seaward : the road whose most gracious charm is that it is no road at all : that is the road by the river. It is so much more friendly than the highway now.
There are those who complain about the modern high- ways : dogged pedestrians, gallant fellows with knap- sacks who still refuse to surrender their belief in the charm of the rolling English road—even where the roll has been entirely eliminated or the charm smothered to death in petrol fumes. They fight progress—and it is no good. The highways belong to wheels now, no more to feet. And, indeed, what is there to complain about ? Arc nal the friendliest roads still left to us, the lanes of a guide' age, the cart-tracks leading nowhere save to red-roof6 farms and hamlets, the little twisting roads by the river brim There are so many of these river-roads in Britain. No expanse of country in the world is . so net-worked and sweetened by running waters. The ridges of these island hills have a million water-sheds which, unlike the more spectacular ravines and gorges of tropical lands, are scarcely ever dry. In May, at any rate, they are in full and lively flood. And whether you go up to find one day their secret crystalline sources—and what can kindle the imagination like the source of a river, welling up luminous as a cat's-eye, .
- "With bubble, and bubble, And low sound of bells,"
out of the mosses and sundew plants ?—or down, to where the inland water merges with the salt tides among the rushes, the rivers, and the little companionable roads that go with them, are all along your friends.
The water talks all day, but its conversation 11011 becomes wearisome : for every river, and every reach of every river, has its own individual music, its melodies and harmonics. It sings its own song, at slow-running grassy weir or thunderous waterfall, where rainbows are shattered among the rocks and larches, and the salmon leap : it has its full song in flood, and mellow sub-songlike birds in the bramble bushes, as it goes fluting and chuck.
ling over golden pebbles, where the cold blue trout are: its murmur and plash below the mill, its humming under- tone along the greensward and its quiet laughter as it hurries under orchard trees : its lullaby in the pasture land, where the red cows come lazily down to drink, and the water-rat plops, and the moorhens scuttle in their slinking, nefarious way through willow-quiet backwaters: a new and free song always, yet how old and friendly.
For whether it flutes or laughs, or tinkles, or makes dolorous music like bagpipes skirling in the Highland lands, it is for ever calling to something that answers ill you, for ever asking you to go on with it to source or sea. On this road no other companion is required even—in Hazlitt's well-worn phrase—to mark the shadows as the sun declines. The river supplies all the conversation that is necessary : and it does more, it tells a story. To under- stand the river, its curves and serpentine windings and the talk of it, is to go a long way towards understanding the history of the country which it waters and, harrier- like, divides. Here is your guide as well as your cop panion. What a tale the Findhorn has to tell, or the SpeY running icily over polished gravel and inland sandbanks where the redshanks whistle : or the Teme as it sweeP5 under the blossoming parapets of Ludlow Castle, out of the Welsh Mountains. Follow the Teme, or the Tweed, or any of those border streams, and you walk in the ancient wake of all the border feuds, When the Lord Marcher of Wales rebelled against the English Kiwi with marching and countertharching on the smooth Shropshire turf, or when the Maiden Lilliard fell fightni, for Scotland, at Anertun, in a battle long ago. 11 down the sylvan river-paths of the Wye, where heron fish in the shallows, and lily-of-the-valley carpets all the lofty woods, and once again you travel "iii the print olden wars." Or go with the Avon, through the coon of white plum blossom, or with the slow Medway whe peace lies in autumn, and red apples, weighting doll the boughs, dip almost to the river's brim, and, in eith . . . . - . . case, you go with a merry company, old friends memories crowding out of the past. So with the Is? with its charm of kingfishers : the Shin, with its infini brooding- rest of pine-forests along the Dornoch Rivers, and streams, or brooks, tiny ghylls and burns and trickling watersheds, they are all full of things to tell. And still, unlike the roads, whose course are changed by man and old enchantments shattered, the rivers, little and great, retain their early lure. There are no "beauty spots "—vile phrase—on the river road, thank God ; for here all is as it was before man took to his new game of speed, and there is no need thus to isolate the views.. And the footway by the river has so much more of -surprise in it than is to be found on any metalled road. What is there just round the bend, where the stream vanishes, like a flood of quicksilver, seemingly into the very heart of the hill ? You cannot tell ; there is no pos- sible way of knowing till you go there. For a river creates scenery ; it does not merely pass through it, and it certainly does not destroy it as many of the new arterial roads are doing now: it creates colour as well as music, and all the life on its verges is more vivid, more varied, than that of the fields or unwatered hillsides. The brightest birds are those that nest and fly by the water ; there is nothing in Nature more truly of the rainbow than the wings of a dragon-fly as it flits, and hovers among the yellow iris flags—themselves bright as sunlight. And consider the very water-colours that flow there. Growing used to one's river, travelling with it, looking into its deep pools, one soon begins to realize that its colour, no less than its song, is individual, unmistakable—a colour that one would recognize again—its own : the colour of Ouse, or Thames, or Tay, or Dee, or unnamed waterway among the fens. • In the mountains there are bronze rivers, sun-gold rivers : among low green hills—in Cumberland, for instance—the little rivers are crystal-clear, undimmed, and chilly, with no illusions for you in their rocky deeps : and higher up, in the crags, they are steely blue ; or green-black, the rivers of Argyle, with maiden-hair ferns dripping over dark rocks, and waterfalls ; or light green, the Thames in its upper reaches, with musical willows, and little tributary ditches surfaced over with water- cress and weeds : or tiny silver-reflecting brooks, with piccolo notes and minnows in them. Little or great, like liquid opals, they rise out of upland peat-hags to hurry down through birch-glades and by sluice and trout- hatchery and splashing mill-wheel to the sea. And you follow them, not knowing, till in the end, maybe, you come out upon a lonely estuary at dawn where seals are swimming, or to a dim harbour where the herring-smacks are gathered, or where some small stream of the West t.°1-intry empties its waters into the Bristol Channel by Iray of a green coombe where the ravens build and gulls
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