I have said that Dale’s Field stands at a good altitude, which is indeed a grateful truth. For standing at my door of a clear evening, and looking east and northeast, I can behold the two great hills rising up near Selby, the one called Hambleton Haugh, the other Brayton Barugh, and beyond them the long nave and high tower of Selby Abbey itself. Between me and them stretches a wide country of wood and meadow, which I am never tired of gazing upon in the summer evenings when I sit in my window with pipe and glass. For it seems to smile and smile and smile, and the green of the woods blends with the brown of the soil, and the clear blue overhead looks down on both with a smile of benediction. Somewhat of a flat land it is, that country due east, but none the less fair, seeing that it holdeth many a fair village, whose spires shoot upwards out of the green and stand clearly defined against the sky. To the northward, too, we can see a fair distance, where the high ground rises beyond Ferrybridge and Brotherton, over whose slopes the road climbs on its way to York. A prospect of this sort is always most grateful to us who are born on the soil, and more to be preferred, because of its peaceful character and gentle undulations, than the bolder scenery which you will find in our northern dales. Nevertheless, if I am minded to look upon more diversified prospects, I am not far removed from such, for across my home meadows lies the Vale of Went, than which I never saw aught more picturesque in all our land. A beautiful valley and a charming it is, as you would say did you but enter it at Church Smeaton, or even further east, and follow it to the hamlet of Wentbridge, where it widens and spreads itself out in the broad meadow-lands that stretch at the foot of the long rise of ground called Went Hill. Along this valley is much diversity of scenery, for sometimes the sides slope gently towards each other, and sometimes they are dark and rocky and frown with beetling masses of gray crag, and here and there are wild and barren, and in other places they are covered with luxuriant woods and groves of fir and pine. Nought fairer than Went Vale have I ever seen, especially as it presents itself in the early days of June, when all the trees are in leaf and the birds sing, sing, sing from morning till night, and the little stream of Went runs babbling along to join the Don some twenty miles away. Many a twist and turn does Went make as it flows through the valley. Now it is straight and placid, as between the millhouse and the bridge, and anon it winds in and out in capricious fashion, so that there is one spot where I have often stood and hurled a stone that crossed the stream five times in the one throw. Wealth, too, it hath of birds’-nests, and many a time have I tumbled down its rough and gnarly crags or from the yielding branches of its trees when hunting for the haunts of magpie and jackdaw, thrush and blackbird.
If you will look at your chart again you will find that my farmstead of Dale’s Field is removed but little space from the head of Went Hill. How many times have I stood there in the early morning, when the valley beneath was full of mist, the long banks of which dispersed as the sun rose and shone upon the land! A fair prospect it is from Went Hill top, for in the wide valley beneath lie villages and hamlets and manors that relieve the eye from the long stretches of brown and green. Across the vale rises Upton Beacon, where they lighted the great bonfire when the Spanish Armada came to attack us. Beneath it lies the hamlet of Thorpe, and a mile away the square tower of Badsworth Church rises from the thick woods that shut that village in. Further away, in the direction of Wakefield, lie Nostell and Wragby and Hemsworth, and many another fair village, and nearer
