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Updated: June 4, 2025
It is generally a wide, hedgeless stretch of country that lies between Lisieux and Falaise, but for the first ten miles there are big farm-houses with timber-framed barns and many orchards bearing a profusion of blossom near the roadside. A small farm perched above the road and quite out of sight, invites the thirsty passer-by to turn aside up a steep path to partake of cider or coffee.
Hitherward Henchard often resorted, glass in hand, and scanned the hedgeless Via for it was the original track laid out by the legions of the Empire to a distance of two or three miles, his object being to read the progress of affairs between Farfrae and his charmer. One day Henchard was at this spot when a masculine figure came along the road from Budmouth, and lingered.
There was a dreamy, sunny stillness over the hedgeless fields stretching to the boundary of poplars; and to Gwendolen the talk within the carriage seemed only to make the dreamland larger with an indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purgatorial Gadsmere which she would never visit; till at her mother's words, this mingled, dozing view seemed to dissolve and give way to a more wakeful vision of Offendene and Pennicote under their cooler lights.
The route thither is hedgeless and treeless I need not add deserted. The moonlight is sufficient to disclose the pale riband-like surface of the way as it trails along between the expanses of darker fallow. Though the road passes near the fortress it does not conduct directly to its fronts. As the place is without an inhabitant, so it is without a trackway.
In some places I heard a sort of chirruping sound, as of some forlorn bird haunting the ruins of the old farmsteads. But no! the chirrup was a vile delusion. It proceeded from the shrill creaking of the coal-winding chains, which were placed in small tunnels beneath the hedgeless road. I went into some of the forges to see the workmen at their labours.
Scarcely need we say that open spaces for the popular games and diversions were then numerous in the suburbs of the metropolis, grateful to some the fresh pools of Islington; to others, the grass-bare fields of Finsbury; to all, the hedgeless plains of vast Mile-end.
The wide concave of cloud, of the monotonous hue of dull pewter, formed an unbroken hood over the level from horizon to horizon; beneath it, reflecting its wan lustre, was the glazed high-road which stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a directing-post where another road joined it, and on to the less regular ground beyond, lying like a riband unrolled across the scene, till it vanished over the furthermost undulation.
Detached farms are few, the farmers congregating in and around the little villages that stand in the midst of hedgeless corn and beet fields stretching far and wide. Here the Somme flows with many crooked turns, now broadening into a lake, now flowing between bluffs and through swamps. There is, or rather was, an inviting, peaceful look about this country.
Scarcely need we say that open spaces for the popular games and diversions were then numerous in the suburbs of the metropolis, grateful to some the fresh pools of Islington; to others, the grass-bare fields of Finsbury; to all, the hedgeless plains of vast Mile-end.
Majestic in their suggestion of spaciousness were those broad stretches of hedgeless, fenceless fields, their crop lines sharply drawn as are all lines from a plane, fields between the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, revealing a land where all the soil is tilled. Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, straight highways that I had often traveled in my comings and goings.
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