Laurie Lee's wonderful book has been read on BBC4 for the past few days, and its descriptions of the country he travels through are some of the most evocative ever written.
He begins to walk towards the Wiltshire Downs on country roads that
"…still followed their original tracks, drawn by packhorse or lumbering cartwheel, hugging the curve of a valley or yielding to a promontory like the wandering line of a stream. It was not, after all, so very long ago, but no one could make that journey today. Most of the old roads have gone, and the motor car, since then, has begun to cut the landscape to pieces, through which the hunched-up traveller races at gutter height, seeing less than a dog in a ditch."
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| A30 near Chilbolton |
And in Spain
"The violence of the heat seemed to bruise the whole earth and turn its crust into one huge scar. One's blood dried up and all juices vanished; the sun struck upwards, sideways, and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper. I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in, and because it seemed the only way to agitate the air around me...I walked on as though keeping a vow, till I was conscious only of the hot red dust grinding like pepper between my toes."
Contrast the gentle evening gold of ripening grain-fields near Winchester
and the soft shade near Wilton
