Well, it is all history, both
the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed it; and we
are the richer, not the poorer, for our losses as well as for our
gains.
The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few
lonely, wind-swept farms. The villages tend to nestle along the roots
of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the
orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle
slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there
was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been
that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route
for the pack-horse of the pilgrim--a chance of seeing if danger
threatened or risk awaited him.
And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and
untrimmed, along the broad back of the down. Here for a space it is
absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the
pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here
with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools
by sheep. In places it passes for a space through patches of old
woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered
planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked.
Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of
some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it
would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from
some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of
instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient
tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a
memory even of forgotten things.
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