ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1938, Page 5

ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

A visit to Sutton Courtenay, a village near Oxford, inspired the late Mr E. V. Lucas to write of the rural riches of England as follows: —As I came away I though again of the wealth of beauty spots in this little England of ours: how small it is and yet how impossible it would be, even in a highly-powered car, and doing nothing else, for one explorer to see every one of them. All those delectable regions await the phantom period of leisure that (or course) must some day set in. And yet I have been moving about, to, alert for what is fresh and beautiful and interesting and quaint, for more years than it is seemly to record; which is another testimony to the inexhaustibleness of this socalled tiny England in which we dwell. When we are told that the whole of Great Britain could be put into one of the States of America and still leave a margin of room, we are properly humiliated; we know how contemptible we must appear. But no sooner do we begin to walk about it or even drive about it than our composure and pride return, and we hold up our heads once more, because England really is enormous. Compared with the desert of Sahara, or the great alkali plains of the West, it may be minute; but it is they really that are small, because they have so little to disclose, whereas England is vast because at every step you must pause or you will miss something.