The Woodcutter

by Mary Russell Mitford

Shakspere. [sic]

The tract of land which joins Hampshire to Berkshire is surprisingly wild and rude, considering that it is situated in what may be called the immediate neighborhood of the metropolis—that is to say, within twenty leagues, in the very midst of the best cultivated and most populous district of the South of England. It consists of a chain of hills, or, perhaps, more accurately speaking, of a belt of high table land, so high that the Romans, those dear lovers of a commanding position in every sense of the word, had erected a series of military posts along the line, embracing the two picturesque and precipitous stations called Cæsar’s Camp and the Beacon, and the city of Silchester, whose deep fosse, now a verdant meadow, whose rock-like wall, crowned with old trees and twined together with ivy, and whose graduated ampitheatre, remain almost entire, while the tesselated pavement of the baths is now and then exposed by the plough, and the course of the streets may still be traced by the stunted growth of the springing or ripening corn, forming altogether one of the most perfect and curious Roman remains in the kingdom.  

In this tract there were few inhabitants of the higher classes. Divided among three or four large and distant landed proprietors, the old manor houses that… Read More