Country Life
BY IAN NIALL TIIAT different people see very different things I 4111 always discovering. I have a friend who Gin never look at a new housing estate with- 'Int getting worked up about the corn be find m on the land, and sometimes I and myself wondering about little, huddled- Itt)gelher cottages in places where the poor :nd round about might have given each cot- room in plent. A friend who comes with me up to the hills once in a while is a geolo- ti,lt. While I look at a pair of carrion crows rest round a crag or a curlew rising from a reat bank, he sees something very different, and words like boulder clay, fissure, fault who glacier tumble from his lips. A gentleman "nn wrote to me about this sort of thing the ?ether day described how an old millworker in h'tendal, who had never been out of his native "Lee, was taken on a mill outing to the lakes iwindermere or Derwentwater. The old ,e1lOw stood for a long time, for he had never iieen such an expanse of water before, and then ke said, 'My, but if we had a Kent like this at k„entlal, wouldn't it make our mill go l' I don't (),"ew What Wordsworth would have thought such a remark. A civil engineer might have patted the old fellow on the back. The beauti- fa41 lake to this old man meant power to drive t ttnll wheel and the poet might have seen the eflection of the clouds.
Previous page
