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The ridges of these North Dorset highlands are traversed to a large extent by good roads from which most delightful views may be had, delightful not only for their great extent but for the exquisite near peeps at the remote and lost villages and hamlets that sleep in their deep combes.
To walk through Combes Alley and Elfret Alley is to sense what once was and to realize the trend of the times, but there is much material for study in these rapidly decaying old sections that repay a visit by the architect and student. Happily, however, one of these typical little streets is to be perpetuated in something like its pristine condition.
High in one of the combes at this end of the valley is the small village of All Cannings, said to have been of much importance in the dark ages as a Saxon centre. All it has to show the visitor now is a cruciform church with Norman and Early English fragments and a good Perpendicular tower. The villages of Pewsey Vale are many and charming.
The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into the Weald.
Violens is a poor hamlet situated at the bottom of a deep glen, or rocky abyss, called La Combe; the narrow valleys of Dauphiny, like those of Devon, being usually called combes, doubtless from the same original Celtic word cwm, signifying a hollow or dingle.
Old Stow House stands, or rather stood, some four miles beyond the Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of those combes of which I spoke in the last chapter.
The other way must lie across these combes, high up. Which way shall I choose, I wonder?" If I went by that road my pursuers would soon hear of me, even if I managed to get past the watchers on the road. On the other hand, Aurelia would probably know that I should choose the combe road.
And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, with their green copses, ridges of rock, golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red longhorns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads; and under us, seen in bird's-eye view, the ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads of the Damnonii, 'dwellers in the valley, as we West-countrymen were called of old.
Here till late and dark, then up and down, to buy combes for my wife to give her mayds, and then by coach home, and there at the office set down my day's work, and then home to bed. 3rd.
Willingdon has an interesting old church and is pleasantly situated, but the village is too obviously the "place to spend a happy day" to call for further comment. On the other hand, Jevington with its ancient but over-restored church, is quite unspoilt and, lying in one of the most beautiful of the Down combes, should certainly be visited.
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