Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep
Between the legs of the beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
On top, and silvered it between the moss
With the current of their feet, year after year.
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it had led to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.
Edward Thomas wrote The Path at the end of March 1915. It described the path by a road he knew very well, probably better than any other, which he walked up and down countless times between the end of 1909 and mid-1915, latterly often twice a day.
The road was Stoner Hill Road and it was the main road between Petersfield and Alton and Alresford. It was also the main way up to their second house in Hampshire, The Red House at Wick Green, where the Thomases lived between 1909 and 1913. It became his normal route up to his study after they had moved to their third Hampshire house, Yew Tree Cottage in Steep, in July 1913.
When he first arrived in Hampshire he described the road, New Stoner as he usually called it, as a “great roaming spiral of road like a staircase or ascending balcony to view the vale”. The vale was the Rother and beyond were the South Downs and other hills.
In The South Country, also written before he had moved to The Red House, he wrote a much more detailed description of the road:
“Every traveller in Hampshire remembers the road that sways with airy motion and bird-like curves down from the high land of clay and flint through the chalk to the sand and the river. It doubles round the head of a coombe, and the whole descent is through beech woods uninterrupted and all but impenetrable to the eye above or below except where once or twice it looks through an arrow slit to the blue vale and the castled promontory of Chanctonbury, twenty miles south-east. As the road is a mere ledge on the side of a very steep hill the woods below it hurry down to a precipitous pit full of the glimmering, trembling and murmuring of innumerable leaves and no sight or sound of men. It is said to have been made more than a century ago to take the place of the rash straight coach road which now enters it near its base.”
The Victoria County History of Hampshire in 1908 gave more detail of the road’s origins "winding up the steep slopes of Stoner Hill with a skilfully engineered gradient through beautiful hanging beechwoods. It was laid out by private enterprise early in the last century (18th) in the expectation of a grant of the tolls on it, but this being refused by the government the promoters lost heavily by their undertaking." The backers who lived in Ashford House, now Ashford Lodge, had to sell up as a result.
Myfanwy, his youngest daughter, also remembered in her memoirs, her two older siblings going daily to the junior school at Bedales from the Red House, walking and running down the steep "Old Stoner Hill". She seems to have misremembered the name as Old Stoner was the old coach road which ET described as rash and straight in the South Country, which went steeply up the hangers. It was replaced by the new road in the early 19th century. Neither Old Stoner’s contours nor other parts of its topography fit the description in the poem of the level road with its banks. (Myfanwy would have remembered Old Stoner fondly as it was the old road where she walked as a five year old with her father, inspiring the later poem, The Cherry Trees, see post.)
There is mention of the banks besides the road up New Stoner in several notes in Thomas's field note books. Two notes illuminate the landscape of the poem in particular. The first is a note he made on a fine September evening in 1913 when walking up New Stoner. After listing the plants he could see, he wrote: “When roadside bank is steepest & highest…little grows among the constantly sliding chalk fragments & dead leaves except dog’s mercury. Elsewhere there is ivy or long grass with St John’s wort & marjoram. Between the hard road & the ditch at foot of bank is an almost continuous 2 foot strip of fine, very dark green grass 4 inches high, encroaching on roadway.”
In the second note on 4th June 1914, on a high pale early morning, on his way up to his study, with the downs and much of the further vale hidden in mist, he wrote:
“Silverweed by Stoner roadside under the upper bank; daisies on raised path above lower: blackcap & wood wren sing in beeches halfway up Stoner. Buttercups at their best in Waters’ fields.”
The Waters family had originally owned Steep Mill and had farmed some of the fields around. At the time of the note the mill had been demolished and the Waters had been farming for many years at Dunhill Farm between Steep and Petersfield. Its fields are on the other side of Stoner Hill, so not visible from New Stoner. So it seems more likely that the fields below Thomas in Ashford Hangers around Steep Mill were still owned or farmed by the Waters or they were still remembered in the village as Waters’ fields, the last owner of the mill.
The road had banks on either side, probably created at the outset when the road was constructed to dispose of the spoil and also to contain the drainage of water off the hill in a ditch, which would otherwise have caused the road to erode.
Since Thomas’s day, New Stoner has changed significantly with road widening, modernisation and improved drainage over the last century. The original banks have disappeared, drainage is under the road and the side of the road, while still embanked slightly, is even close to the edge of the precipitous slope down. No path on this lesser bank exists and the side of the road is now cluttered by underwood and, at one point, a stretch of low fencing. But the views remain and are as striking as in Thomas’s day, when glimpsed through the trees.
At the end of the note from September 1913 above, he had described looking out “on the right you see with nothing but near beech boughs intervening the fields by Ashford Farm & tiny trees & cattle in soft sun, the road being shady & moist.”
The following March when he was walking up to his study in the afternoon after a fair morning he wrote “Heavy shower 3-4 which ended when I reached top of New Stoner & there the sun shone as in morning, showing dark green moss & ivy & pale silver green lichen on beeches, a few spots of snow left, blue sky with low drift going over & the missel thrush in beech & the line of the Downs clear & soft against a neutral sky which gradually changes to pearly bubbled mountains - & mist peeling off Hangers & pale gables of houses in vale showing bright as far as E(ast) Harting.”
In a much earlier note on a February afternoon in 1909 he described the view looking down rather than outward, noting “a curved upward beech bough…green gold with lighted mildew all over; others are grey green dappled & each leaf in pit below (from New Stoner) is bright & hard against the dark air and earth.”
The pit is Ludcombe Bottom, a strange otherworldly valley bottom, that curves like a crescent, inclining gently up into Stoner Hill. It is full of beech and yew, juniper and ash, hart’s tongue fern, dogs mercury and lower down, nettles with ransom increasingly encroaching. Ludcombe Bottom would have felt even more of a remote wilderness then without the cars on the road above.
In those days the road was not much used except by the odd wayfarer and marketers taking their stock to market, and Thomas himself walking up and down twice a day to work in his study. Sometimes going down at dusk or in moonlight, the silver of the path on top of the chalk bank would have shone bright.
Thomas knew the road extremely well, and this deep knowledge and affection comes through in his notebook where he jotted down observations of birds, trees, flowers and their remnants he saw by its side and on the road, throughout the seasons at different times of the year and in different weathers. On that September day when he wrote his detailed description of the bank, he had started by noting the plants he had spotted around the roadside. Besides the “long lank grass…never dry” they included marjoram, hemp agrimony, travellers joy - all with pale leaves - and bramble with pink flowers, dark leaves and many red blackberries, yellow cat’s ears, white dewberry, enchanters nightshade, woodruff, Canterbury Bells, pink willow herb, Herb Robert and knapweed. Suddenly he heard 50 jackdaws clacking “almost together in a loose volley which tails off like crackers until (in a minute) there are but one or two challengers.” He concluded his note “But always a robin”. He was to note its presence regularly up at the top of New Stoner, even at dusk when he could barely see it.
The profusion of flowers on New Stoner described here and elsewhere by Thomas shows that it was a much more favourable environment for flowers then than now, probably as a result of the increase of beech and other tree cover. (Some of Thomas's descriptions of New Stoner flora and fauna through the seasons appears at the end of this post.)
In contrast to the profusion of plants on either side of the road and the remnants he could see on it, the path on top of the bank was bare. The children’s footsteps had worn it and flattened it. Yet when he was writing the poem his children had not used the path to get to school for nearly two years since they had moved to Steep, at the bottom of the hill. This absence is noted in the poem. No other children seem to have been using the path regularly since. Yet the path remained as worn as when his children were running up and down it “year after year”.
Why had the path remained so worn? Was he suggesting that there was continued traffic on the path to the fancied or legendary places where it might have led, traffic that was invisible to him? Or was this just a sign that wild animals were using the path?
The path’s continuing bareness also links it to the absence of vegetation on the slopes below and above under yew and beech. As well as being a possible way to the legendary and fancied places, it skirted the top of Ludcombe bottom, marking the boundary between the road and the wilderness, everyday life and the imaginary places beyond.
In the poem the path provided a possible way for children to enter other worlds, but excluded adults, even of an imaginative bent such as Thomas. Children’s facility to enter other worlds, while he was excluded, was something he had written about occasionally in his notebooks.
In a note on 5th February 1909, he wrote of what he could see and hear probably from close to Berryfield Cottage, their first house in Hampshire, at 5.30pm in the evening.
“Now the moon rises glorious & enormous behind hazel at foot of Wheatham with a sky that is suddenly very remote, cold blue & with here & there white cloud roving over it while in the West is an ashen pile - just a little pale star or two beyond the white smoke - the trees very clear in N & W against the sky - the air still & silent except for a thrush & on New Stoner a rumbling traction engine outside the wick of silence - I glance from hill to hill & cloud to cloud & look for stars & turn away & sigh for I know not what. (It is the mildest most springlike day of the year - windy but too warm & (therefore) sad).”
The note continued “the children’s voices as they run dying away as into another world to which I can’t reach & all is very still & quiet & unearthly fair.”
This image of the children entering another world which he couldn’t reach resurfaced in his poem over six years later. The children of the poem were also running away along a path to another world, where the person who used the road most regularly (himself) would not or could not enter the portal to this other dimension.
Later in May 1909, on another beautiful evening, he created a second similarly striking image of children - this time prompted by birds singing at sunset “with a distracted eagerness in the stillness as if a crowd of children being led clamorously to some strange & beautiful place. Then one by one they (the birds) pass away - only a distant thrush or sedgewarble & the scent of lilacs is blown in gusts thru falling apple bloom at 8.45 in twilight warm & blue, with a thin crescent low above Ludcombe.”
So here again is the backdrop of a beautiful day, and children being drawn to another world, being led, possibly by some pied-piper, rather than the attractions of a path - but both as compelling. By the time he came to write the poem, six years later, his elder children were growing up and no longer engaged with their imaginary worlds of childhood. But going up and down each day along the road, with the path by its side, Thomas would have been constantly reminded of their imaginary quests.
His continuing association of the road with children recurred in a much later note of September 1914. At the top of New Stoner, at Cold Corner, he saw a swarm of meadow brown butterflies about the brambles. They were “havering, alighting on bramble flowers among bees, very disturbed by bees, changing perches, settling on road, on dry grit, & behaving like family of children newly come to a house they like in a strange village which they don’t yet know the ways of & disregard as yet”!
Here was a moment to savour. He went on: “So sunny & warm here & the air astir with the drabbish butterflies. Why don’t I pause longer; because I should realise beauty is all, in going on, in life, & can only be touched as it passes - & is beginning to pass when you know it is joy & beauty.”
This is a familiar theme for ET - his inability to appreciate the here and now, not being able to bite the day to its core (as in The Glory). His habit of writing down such observations in his notebook was an attempt to capture such moments but in fact, like a photographer taking a picture of a view, actually took him away from the pause, and the appreciation of the moment.
Although The Path is rich in his observations of the natural world around him, it is also pointing to an alternative way, an escape into another world in which layers of his own past were now interleaved - his elder children’s imaginary worlds when they were younger, the imaginary world of his own childhood and the legendary places of the more ancient past that he had studied and written about. Although Thomas might now feel excluded from these “legendary/Or fancied places”, the contemplation of the path and where it might lead, provided him with an alternative to his constant observation of the ever changing but deeply familiar here and now (and any mundane concerns about work, domestic life, friends), as he solitarily climbed and descended the hill, day to day, year to year.
On a journey to Savernake Forest in December 1907 he summed up the attraction when he wrote at the sight of the Wiltshire Downs in the distance:
“Downs - beautiful afar, to be on their turf is to be afoot upon the endless long delightsome road at end of which fancy paints the desired certain, or uncertain, good & beautiful.”
He conjured up the same added dimension, when he described walking down a lane in his book “Beautiful Wales”:
“I knew that I took up eternity with both hands, and though I laid it down again, the lane was a most potent, magic thing, when I could thus make time as nothing while I meandered over many centuries.”
Such moments were transient, however, and end, like all daydreams in an awakening, a coming down to earth, in anticlimax - as the poem does.
A walk
The Path no longer exists and the side of the road up Stoner Hill is not conducive to a good walk with the quantity and speed of traffic. Occasionally the road has been closed in recent years - because of landslip or car accident - and then one can experience more fully the peace, the natural world and the extensive views that ET would have been so familiar with. There are two parking areas where you can get out and enjoy the views east towards Black Down, Older Hill and Woolbeding Common and the South Downs beyond.
You can also look down into Lutcombe Bottom which are as ET describes “looking down the long smooth steep,/ between the legs of beech and yew, to where/a fallen tree check the sight....” Many more trees now seem to have fallen, so the view is more cluttered, though the slopes are largely clear of vegetation. There is one point at the corner as the road curves round where one can see the Red House up on the ridge on the other side of the Combe. One can imagine Thomas or his children shouting their trademark "Cooee" at that point to let those up above know they would be arriving in a few minutes.
Contouring round the top steep slopes of Ludcombe Bottom is difficult, so a better walk can now be found from the parking place in Ashford Lane, opposite Ashford Manor. Walking up past Ludcombe Pond, following the stream up the Combe, you reach a place where the track crosses the stream. Go left up a path and then right up the valley as the path goes back left, parallel with the track. You are now in Ludcombe Bottom. The path continues on the left hand slope and on your right is the source of Ludcombe or Ashford stream. You walk up the gently shelving valley, which still has an otherworldly atmosphere as if you are entering a space where people have no place and only impinge with the noise of their cars above.
Returning you follow the path that runs parallel with but well above the main track, with the stream even further below. There are a few fallen trees across the path, a common hazard around the hangers nowadays. You can then follow the path down to where it meets the main track back past Ludcombe Pond to the car pack, or you can go right up a path, steep at first which then contours round the hangers under yew and beech - again with many fallen trees. The path ends eventually towards the bottom of New Stoner Road, close to where the path of the poem must have ended. An alternative end point to the path is into the field, the other side of the lane from Island Farm. You retrace your steps to the car following the path when it splits right down to Lutcombe Pond.
New Stoner through the seasons in Edward Thomas's Field Note Books
March: having snowed through the night at 9.30 “the upper part of New Stoner was lovely with white landscape & roads, & angles of trees, green ivy & moss on grey beeches, & overhead a blue sky with high white clouds veiled by rapid low white smoky drift from SW; & incessant drip of melting snow from tree & roof.”
May: the shadows of new leaves on the horse chestnut and other trees “left some spaces of the dry road a purply brown…The margin of the road is ruddy brown beech chaff & then green grass thin but 6 inches high. The (white)beam is unfolding its silver.”
Later in May he noted “Roadside banks up here have nettles & buttercups variously mixed & overtopped by flowering tall parsley: but under trees on Stoner roadside it is (Herb) Robert, woodruff, speedwell, sanicle. Still some may bushes.”
July: "Beech leaf sheaths once like red oats are now like sodden tea leaves in road corners & sides by New Stoner…..
"The travellers joy at top of Stoner just coming out with its soft-green bristles among bramble. Sweet basil & self-heal & St John’s Wort flowering by brambles at Cold Corner in sun (with the tiny willowherb)."
October: "beech leaves stamped into the wet hard smooth road which is almost emerald with reflections of overhanging green (also green of cows going to market)." There was also “beautiful gingery aromatic crumbling & crumpling yellows of horse chestnut fingers, often herringboned or streaked clear green.” On the banks above the road there was “Ivy, dogs mercury & paler enchanters nightshade mixed with autumn leaves. Some hazels almost stripped. Some whitebeams retain green leaves & also rolled up cinerous (ashy grey).”
November: "Robin is colour of twilight at 4.30 as soon as he leaves the ground & is seen in grey air among bare boughs over dead leaves & is invisible - you only know something moves, till he alights & is leaf coloured."
Thomas was to use this last note to conclude his poem Man and Dog, the subjects of which he had encountered on their way up New Stoner, the day before he wrote of the robin (see separate post on Man and Dog).
Acknowledgements
Field note books copyright Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York.
Transcriptions of the Edward Thomas Field Note Books quoted in the blog are available at the Edward Thomas Study Centre at the Petersfield Museum.
I have also drawn on Edward Thomas's The South Country and the Victoria County History of Hampshire.
My thanks to Fran Box of the Steep History Group for her research and thoughts on the Waters family; and as ever my thanks to Benedict Mackay for editorial support.
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