As I was leaving Wantage I heard a blackbird singing in a garden beyond the church. This was near the middle of August and a full month since I had last heard one. The heat had dried up the birds’ songs all much earlier than usual, and now the rain of the last night seemed to be reviving one. The song was perfect and as strange a thing as last year’s snow.
Crossing the Letcombe brook I was out again between hedges and in the company of telegraph posts on the road to Ashbury, Bishopstone, and Swindon, which is called in the inch Ordnance Map “Roman Way.” It seemed the only continuation of Ickleton Street, and as there was no other road with anything like the same course in the valley I had little doubt that it was the “Icleton-way” of the early eighteenth century going “all under the hills between them and Childrey, Sparsholt and Uffington, so under White Horse Hill, leaving Woolston and Compton on the right, thence to Ashbury and Bishopston.” The foot of the Downs was about a mile on the left, and between them and the road the cornland dipped considerably. Looking over the hedge I saw first a broad land of grass and then a line of telegraph wires making for Letcombe and dividing the grass from a broad band of ripe corn; beyond that was a band of very green roots; then a band of newly ploughed earth; then stubble dappled with dark corn stacks, and above them the hill.