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Updated: June 17, 2025
Agreeable villages lay here and there on the slope of the hill; notably, Tupigny, with the hop-poles hanging their garlands in the very street, and the houses clustered with grapes.
The trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanish chestnuts, and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decay gradually, the fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from the articulation till at last bleached skeleton leaves remain and flicker at every sigh of the wind. The ground was densely carpeted with other leaves in the same state, or about to become so.
Of the bridge remained only a few wildly vibrating hop-poles, and those hurdles which had been sunk in the mud of the approaches. "She she kicked out all the loose ones behind her as she finished with 'em," Hinchcliffe panted. "At the Agricultural Hall they would 'ave been fastened down with ribbons," said Pyecroft. "But this ain't Olympia." "She nearly wrenched the tiller out of my hand.
For it is a countryside of interminable straight lines straight roads, straight hop-poles, and poplars not less straight, reminding one in winter of one of Hobbema's landscapes without their colouring.
And as they began to discern more clearly beyond the canal, across the wide fertile plain, along the level roads lined with hop-poles and fields of ripening grain, the movement of the troops retiring along the same way by which they had advanced but yesterday, gibes and jeers rose on the air in a storm of angry ridicule. "Ah, we are taking the back track," Chouteau continued.
About two thousand acres of land in this parish alone are planted with hop bines, and as each acre takes three thousand hop-poles to support the climbing crop, it follows that there were five or six millions of these poles standing bare and upright before the astonished eye. No wonder that a conical hill at a little distance looked like a gigantic hedgehog.
"A great many cars thinks they can take this road; but they all come back. We walks after 'em at our convenience." "Meanin' that the other jaunty is now pursuin' us on his lily feet?" said Pyecroft. "Precisely." Get out!" The man obeyed with alacrity. "See those spars up-ended over there? I mean that wickyup-thing. Hop-poles, then, you rural blighter. Keep on fetching me hop-poles at the double."
It yields good turpentine, but trees that have been tapped to procure this are of no use afterwards for building purposes. The larch is said not to make good masts for ships, but its durability in all varieties of temperature and changes of weather make it valuable for vine-props. When made of larch-poles these are never taken up as hop-poles are.
But, seeing the gravel everywhere, he wondered if there might not be valuable clay about, what labour cost, and what the nearest stations were for haulage; and, seeing the hop-poles, he caught himself speculating what wood they were made of, and what varnish would best prevent their buried points from going rotten in this particular soil.
Outside, citified streets, with stores and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama with open fields; and, even as he looked, these vacant spaces ceased altogether, and successive regular lines of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike, began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing off out of view, for all the world like the avenues of hop-poles he remembered as a boy.
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