turf-tracks

Updated: June 2, 2025

For they stood in one of the famous wood and common lands of Southern England great beeches towering overhead glades opening to right and left ferny paths over green turf-tracks, and avenues of immemorial age, the highways of a vanished life old earth-works, overgrown lanes deep-sunk in the chalk where the pack-horses once made their way gnarled thorns, bent with years, yet still white-mantled in the spring: a wild, enchanted no-man's country, owned it seemed by rabbits and birds, solitary, lovely, and barren yet from its furthest edge, the high spectator, looking eastward, on a clear night, might see on the horizon the dim flare of London.

Mrs. Humphry Ward - The Testing of Diana Mallory