The South Country

The name is given to the south of England as distinguished from the Midlands, “North England”, and “West England” by the Severn. The poet is thinking particularly of Sussex and of the South Downs. In using the term I am thinking of all that country which is dominated by the Downs or by the English Channel, or by both; Cornwall and East Anglia have been admitted only for the sake of contrast. Roughly speaking, it is the country south of the Thames and Severn and east of Exmoor, and it includes, therefore, the counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, and part of Somerset. East and west across it go ranges of chalk hills, their sides smoothly hollowed by Nature and the marl-burner, or sharply scored by old roads. On their lower slopes they carry the chief woods of the south country, their coombes are often fully fledged with trees, and sometimes their high places are crowned with beech or fir; but they are most admirably themselves when they are bare of all but grass and a few bushes of gorse and juniper and some yew, and their ridges make flowing but infinitely variable clear lines against the sky. Sometimes they support a plateau of flint and clay, which slopes gradually to the level of the streams. Sometimes they fall away to the vales in well-defined ledges—first a long curving slope, then a plain of cornland, and below that a steep but lesser slope covered with wood, and then again grassland or sandy heaths and rivers. Except on the plateau, the summits have few houses and very small hamlets; the first terrace has larger villages and even a town or two; but most of the towns are beneath on the banks of the rivers, and chiefly where they are broadest near the sea, or on the coast itself. The rivers flow mainly north and south, and can have but a short course before they enter the sea on the south or the Thames on the north. Those I remember best are the Stours, the two Rothers, but especially the one which joins the Arun, the Medway, the Len, the Eden, the Holling, the Teise, the Ouse, the Itchen, the Meon, the Wey, the Mole, the Kennet, the Ray, the Winterbournes, the Wiltshire Avon, the Wylye, the Ebble, and many little waters running gold over New Forest gravel or crystal over the chalk of Hampshire, and not least of all that unlucky rivulet, the Wandle, once a nymph that walked among her sisters—

So amiable, fair, so pure, so delicate,

So plump, so full, so fresh, her eyes so wondrous clear:

And first unto her lord, at Wandsworth doth appear,

That in the goodly court, of their great sovereign Tames,

There might no other speech be had amongst the streams,

But only of this Nymph, sweet Wandel, what she wore;

Of her complexion, grace, and how herself she bore.