Travel
An English Holiday
BY CLINTON FFYNS.
To the man who is in the superb position of being able to plan_ his holiday long ahead, secure in the know- ledge that -what he decides to do now he will be able to do when. the time comes, comfortable in the certainty that when that time comes he will be able to change everything,— go elsewhere and do something entirely different, there is fio place like England for his plans and their fulfilment, no book for preliminary reading up of the subject like the Map of-England. Book is the word in this case, rather than the more familiar picture-book. Mr. Kipling tells us, and we hear a thousand times a year that -there is no ,.picture-book in the world like an atlas. But a -proper map of England, or a series of them, on a scale of not less than half an inch to the mile, contoured in colours and plainly _equipped with what rash and in- experienced travellers might call guide-book information, is a book which is certainly full of pi'c'tures to those who know their England, and. has, besides,- a- thousand' tales to tell.
This matter of maps obtrudes itself wheneyer it is time to make holiday in England, -And :there_ is _no holiday to be made in all the Seven Seas like the holiday you plan in England, because every mile--hisa story of its own and every story is Finked -to- anOthe'r -Until-the -whole incom- parable land lies out before you like the perfect illustration of the history. that will never be written; WhereVer you travel, in whatever manner you do it,_you Must -forever be consulting that map.
How else can you picture to yourself such old affairs as, say, the Battle of Edge Hill, unless, from the exact spot on the lip of that tremendous scarp, you can see where the attacking forces deployed at the critical instant, or failed to see what lay before their noses ; what sort of England it. was Henry.11 crossed when the Empress was in flight and Stephen lorded it in undeniable dignity at Westminster ; how the Channel and the beach below the cliffs looked when the Duke of Normandy landed before Santlache,• or the beacons burned to warn White- hall of another rumour that Napoleon's " flotilla of bum- boats " had left Boulogne ? Whether you are walking or driving you must know exactly where you are, lest the picture you have painted for yourself, from story and hearsay, of plain and river, wood and hill, seascape or gaunt moorland, village or town, be reduced to the lifeless stuff of a photograph. You must be able to say : " In a few minutes or miles I shall see Oxford for the first time," and find that because instinct has led you to the right place on the map for that experience, the best that can be said of the photograph is that it is a good, photograph, the worst of the hearsay picture that it has told you only the half.
There is indeed no place like England for a holiday, nor was she ever in more exquisite beauty than this day. It has been my very fortunate fate to be compelled—if such a word can be used of a joyous service—to explore her roads and by-roads in spring, summer, autumn and whiter. In good years and in bad, in long spells of sun- shine, in rain that drove day after day in grey spears against my windscreen, in full-blown gales down West, when 'the hedges miles inland were white with Atlantic foam, in heat and frost, in fog and snow and in the murk of January days, I have never found an English road, whether a highway or a lane that twisted up among hills and woods to an untimely end in the middle of a farm- yard, that was not a proper place for a man in holiday mood.
Would you see the place where the of very ancient England lives and will live until the end ? Co to the CotswOld and find among those thick-built grey stone houses the peace and beauty that only age and custom can give. Spend some time in Chipping Campden, where they-count a house built after Elizabeth's time as modern, and the wide street would be called. a Musenin piece_if it were not as alive today as it was when the greatest of the English wool-dealers died sometime about 1400. It is not a centre of wool-selling today, but it could not omit to you that it is any the less vigorous for that. That or another English industry may spring up and restore it to its 500-year-old prestige. There is no hurry. There is no hurry anywhere in ancient England, which has seen so much and knows so much more, least of all in the Cots. wold villages.
Go also to Broadway, still perhaps the loveliest village in England. At the wrong time of year it is beset by sightseers, but ruffled by charabanes and soiled by sham restorations, it stays captain of its soul, which is the soul of England. Climb the great hill that lies east of it to the Fish Inn, and look out over the Vale of Worcester and the valley of the Avon. In spring you are dazzled by the plum and apple blossom, in summer you look across a land where it is always afternoon to red Here. fordshire and the dark hills of Wales. And before you go, climb to the top of Birdlip Hill and go southward by Painswick to the edge of the Severn Sea, where the Cots- wold hills droop down to the levels beyond Tetbury, That is a road you will not forget.
And after that ? The western bank of the Severn lies just across the water and Chepstow and the Wye, most beautiful of all English rivers, and the noble city of Monmouth. When you leave it you must be sure to take the road up over the hill to Staunton and the Forest of Dean, so that you will miss nothing of the majesty of that stronghold, standing at the meeting of the Wye and the Monnow. Look down on it from the hill-top on a misty morning and you would swear the spires and towers were the masts and fighting-tops of sunken ships.
I do not believe the popular superstition that the average Englishman likes to make his holiday in a crowd —and this despite- the annual outrages committed on the public peace at half a hundred places, chiefly by the sea. I believe that every time he sets out, even if it is to the South Coast, he dreams to himself that there will be no crowd, pictures the perfect holiday with nobody there. Let him go North to the immense solitudes of the Durham and Yorkshire moors and he will find his dream come true. Let him walk or, better still, drive from Brough to Richmond, the longest stretch in England I can find without human habitation. The little road runs by Keld, which is mostly railway station and the only one between Barras and Reeth, and from every-step_of the way he will look out over the long rollers of the moors that dwarf everything to nothing, submit to nothing but fog. I invite his attention to the Dales, and I would see him start on his journey to them from the Cheviots at Carter Bar, so that he may learn to look for things thirty miles away, and end it somewhere south of Wensleydale—say on Simon Seat or Kettleivell. On 'a Bank Holidayhe can, with that map, be as lonely as he chooses.
Take that map of England or those two or three dozen maps of English counties, and look at her roads, her most ancient roads, from the by-ways of Suffolk that carry you through the Constable country, a land of utter quiet by- the brink of streams that just flow and 'no more ; the straight ruler-drawn roads that run -North to the Border and North-east to the Wash, roads. of space and air and open sky ; the little lanes that take you through Surrey and Sussex out to the salt smell of Roinney Marsh or to the New Forest ; the roads that wind about the English Lakes, whose silver faces are stained in June with the gleam of the crimson rhododendrons ; the dyke-kept roads of Lincolnshire where man is making another Reiland ,and painting the land with tulips ; the roads of Imperial Rome, :brushing the hills aside in their stride; and the older ways, older beyond count, like the Ridge Way by the White Horse, where the wind-cropped grass of a hundreci centuries - is still no more than 8 perpetual, Unchanging softness n features that V' never die.
When your holiday-time- corneae buy a map and see - -
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