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When he had been some months in his new place his brother David followed him to the Wylye, having obtained a place as shepherd on a farm adjoining Mr. Ellerby's. His cottage was a little out of the village and had some ground to it, with a nice lawn or green patch.
James; a lonely and thinly populated string of hamlets seldom visited by the ordinary tourist, but of much charm to those who appreciate the more unsophisticated type of English village that, alas! is becoming more rare every day. Both Berwick and Stoke have interesting old churches. Continuing up the Wylye we reach Steeple Langford, situated in the most beautiful part of the valley.
There are other chalk streams in Wiltshire and Hampshire and Dorset swift crystal currents that play all summer long with the floating poa grass fast held in their pebbly beds, flowing through smooth downs, with small ancient churches in their green villages, and pretty thatched cottages smothered in flowers which yet do not produce the same effect as the Wylye.
These taller blooms remind me that the evening primrose, long naturalized in our hearts, is another common and very delightful cottage-garden flower; also that here, on the Wylye, there is yet another stranger from the same western world which is fast winning our affections. This is the golden-rod, grandly beautiful in its great, yellow, plume-like tufts.
It is not surprising that Caleb Bawcombe invariably speaks of his migration to, and of the time he passed at Warminster, when, as a fact, he was not there at all, but at Doveton, a little village on the Wylye a few miles below the town with the great name.
The prettily-named Wylye is a little river not above twenty miles in length from its rise to Salisbury, where, after mixing with the Nadder at Wilton, it joins the Avon. At or near its source stands Warminster, a small, unimportant town with a nobler-sounding name than any other in Wiltshire.
This was strongly borne in upon me lately while staying in the village of Hindon in the neighbourhood of the Great Ridge Wood, which clothes the summit of the long high down overlooking the vale of the Wylye.
The main road is now taken on the north bank of the stream and in two miles, or twenty-one direct from Salisbury, we arrive at the old town called, no one knows why, Warminster. It may be that the Were, the small stream or brook running into Wylye gives the first syllable, but that St. Deny's Church was ever a minster there is no evidence, though it is occasionally so called by the townspeople.
Warminster Vale of the Wylye Counting the villages A lost church Character of the villages Tytherington church Story of the dog Lord Lovell Monuments in churches Manor-houses Knook The cottages Yellow stonecrop Cottage gardens Marigolds Golden-rod Wild flowers of the water-side Seeking for the characteristic expression
If you want a continuous plain, with no dividing valley cutting through it, you must place it between the Avon and Wylye Rivers, a distance about fifteen miles broad and as many long, with the village of Tilshead in its centure; or, if you don't mind the valleys, you can say it extends from Downton and Tollard Royal south of Salisbury to the Pewsey vale in the north, and from the Hampshire border on the east side to Dorset and Somerset on the west, about twenty-five to thirty miles each way.
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