ident parson; its church is not half a century old. Nor are
there here, in the shape of patriarchal fields, or shady lanes, or
venerable homesteads, any of those features that testify to the
immemorial antiquity of real villages as the homes of men; and this for
a very simple reason. In the days when real villages were growing, our
valley could not have supported a quite self-contained community: it
was, in fact, nothing but a part of the wide rolling heath-country--the
"common," or "waste," belonging to the town which lies northwards, in a
more fertile valley of its own. Here, there was no fertility. Deep down
in the hollow a stream, which runs dry every summer, had prepared a
strip of soil just worth reclaiming as coarse meadow or tillage; but the
strip was narrow--a man might throw a stone across it at some
points--and on either side the heath and gorse and fern held their own
on the dry sand. Such a place afforded no room for an English village of
the true manorial kind; and I surmise that it lay all but uninhabited
until perhaps the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time a few
"squatters" from neighbouring parishes had probably settled here, to
make what living they might beside the stream-bed. At no time,
therefore, did the people form a group of genuinely agricultural
rustics. Up to a period within living memory, they were an almost
independent folk, leading a sort of "crofter," or (as I have preferred
to call it) a "peasant" life; while to-day the majority of the men, no
longer independent, go out to work as railway navvies, builders'
labourers, drivers of vans and carts in the town; or are more casually
employed at digging gravel, or road-mending, or harvesting and
hay-making, or attending people's gardens, or laying sewers, or in fact
at any job they can find. At a low estimate nine out of every ten of
them get their living outside the parish boundaries; and this fact by
itself would rob the place of its title to be thought a village, in the
strict sense.

In appearance, too, it is abnormal. As you look down upon the valley
from its high sides, hardly anywhere are there to be seen three
cottages in a row, but all about the steep slopes the little mean
dwelling-places are scattered in disorder. So it extends east and west
for perhaps a mile and a half--a surprisingly populous hollow now,
wanting in restfulness to the eyes and much disfigured by shabby detail,
as it winds away into homelier and softer c