beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled

and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or

landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the

summits of the hills that surround it--except perhaps during the

droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad

weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous,

and miry ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are

never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the

bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,

Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The

traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score

of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches

the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted

to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing

absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the

hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give

an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the

hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the

valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more

delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from

this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads

overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath

is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the

middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond

is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited;

with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass

and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is

the Vale of Blackmoor.

The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest.

The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from

a curious legend of King Henry III's reign, in which the killing by

a certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king

had run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine.

In those days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was

densely wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be

found in the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet

survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so

many of its pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades

remain. Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised

form. The May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on

the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or

'club-walking,' as it was there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott,

though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the

ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of

walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the

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