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Updated: June 12, 2025
Venturing onward, however, you soon find yourself in the heart of Whitnash, and see an irregular ring of ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the village-green, on one side of which stands the church, with its square Norman tower and battlements, while close adjoining is the vicarage, made picturesque by peaks and gables.
It was, indeed, a scene that seemed quiet and serene, with the English union of the feudal and the pastoral life, the village-green, with its trim scattered cottages; the fields and pastures that spread beyond; the turf of the park behind, broken by the shadows of the unequal grounds, with its mounds and hollows and venerable groves, from which rose the turrets of the old Hall, its mullion windows gleaming in the western sun; a scene that preached tranquillity and content, and might have been equally grateful to humble philosophy and hereditary pride.
Fourth, and this to very many may appear as potent as any of the preceding reasons, I had in my boyhood a strange fancy for church-belfries and liberty-poles. This fancy led me, in school-vacations, to perch my small self for hours on the cross-beams in the old belfry, and to climb to the very top of the tall pole which still surmounts the little village-green.
For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared. He was a boy again on the village-green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young days. He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot everything except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground.
The church-yard is very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, but a very scanty head of foliage; though its boughs still keep some of the vitality which perhaps was in its early prime when the Saxon invaders founded Whitnash.
He says that a marked change in his mental condition suddenly began while playing a game of "tip-cat" on Sunday afternoon on the village-green, having listened in the morning to a sermon upon Sabbath-breaking. His conscience smote him; he abandoned the game, leaving his cat upon the ground, and then began his great spiritual struggle.
Dear country home, where every sound is ministry; the morning cock and cackling hen, the birds' hopeful morning song, the twittering swallow, noon's rest and healthy appetite, the lowing cattle, the birds' thankful evening note, the village bell old curfew's echo, the pattering on the pane, the wind in the treetops, the watchdog's distant bark for lullaby, and quiet restful sleep; his greatest sports those of the evening village-green the apple bee, the husking, and the weekly singing-school.
At the village of Wormridge, where some members of the Clive family are buried, there is a grand old elm on the village-green around which the people used to assemble for wrestling and for the performance of other rural amusements. At the base of this tree stood the stocks, that dungeon "all of wood" to which it is said there was
Rather than such monotony of sluggish ages, loitering on a village-green, toiling in hereditary fields, listening to the parson's drone lengthened through centuries in the gray Norman church, let us welcome whatever change may come, change of place, social customs, political institutions, modes of worship, trusting, that, if all present things shall vanish, they will but make room for better systems, and for a higher type of man to clothe his life in them, and to fling them off in turn.
The little village-green of Castlewood slopes down towards the river, which is spanned by an old bridge of a single broad arch, and from this the ground rises gradually towards the house, grey with many gables and buttresses, and backed by a darkling wood.
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