Recollections from an English countryside ramble.
I walked across the moor, ancient and squishy. The long green grass pushes down into the saturated dark soil.
Squish, squish, squish. I was grateful for my Gore-Tex boots. After cutting through the grass I found my way back onto the footpath.
“These footpaths are nearly a thousand years old, Tim. And the bridal paths, just as old. Horse and carriage pulled up and down the hills and villages and we still use them today,” said a new friend who took me on a drive into the Windermere countryside.
As I slogged through the elements and soaked countryside, I thought about C.S. Lewis’s love for taking walks, and the outdoors in general.
He was a rambler. He loved scrambling around the English countryside. He possessed a deep affection for the simple rustic pleasures of the empty sky, the unspoilt hills, and the white silent roads on which you could hear the rattle of a farm cart half a mile away.
He once told his older brother, Warren, how he wished he’d have had “gumboots and oilskins and a sou’wester” when he was younger, for outdoor play during periods of rain. If Lewis were alive today, I’m convinced we’d most likely find him tramping some remote countryside in Gore-Tex boots, and a Patagonia Nano Puff in search of a quiet beautiful place.
Footpaths scribble all over England, across farmland and private estates. They connect the villages. Their entrances sometimes pop out at you, hidden between trees, or along the wall beside a private residence, or tucked behind a hedgerow. But I didn’t have to look far to find the footpaths near our house.
I turned right out of our driveway, walked down Cumnor Hill and took Hurst Lane heading east toward the old dirt road.
I walked the lane and immediately I could see the hill of the Seven Sisters rise to my right. The locals named the hill after the seven large pine trees up top. The top of the Seven Sisters offers a sprawling view of The Vale of the White Horse. If you can catch the sunset up on the hill, you’re in for a treat.
But on this day, I decided to walk farther along.
I walked another quarter mile, then took a footpath that cut away to the southeast.
The path rose into the woods. As I approach the woods, a quick rain shower passed by.
Perhaps I should’ve stayed in, had some soup and read with the girls, I think.
But the storm-laden sky drew me out and it didn’t disappoint. The woods on the hill sounded noisy with wind, as it banged branches back and forth and sprayed rain.
The low clouds move like upside-down waves, white-capping and crashing further up into one another, filling the sky with billowing columns. The wind-rushed sky hurried along, brushed with blue-grey washes and sagging rain-droppers.
Dusk approached, but I was too far to turn back.
An iron gate obscured the trail entrance into the woods. I unlocked it and walked under a canopy of hardwoods. I passed Youlbury Scout Adventure Camp on my right. It’s quiet there. No one was out.
The exasperated light dimmed above the barren winter limbs.
The wind snapped but the air dried for a spell. Beneath a veil of straggly elms and ash trees I walked and whistle like I do when there’s no one around; loud with an overexaggerated vibrato.
Up, I continued, up to the gravel path, up to an unmarked road, over and up and along White Barn Road then right, onto a new footpath near the top of the hill toward the southwest.
The path hugged a wooden fence that outlined a large pasture.
A great white horse dined on the wet grass, unfazed by the turbulent weather. His mane hung low around his neck and over his lazy eyes. The stout white beast didn’t flinch as I passed. He chewed as my eyes moved from his mane to the undulating backdrop; a green field and a line of woods.
The Haunted Beauty of Boars Hill
An age ago the British poet, Matthew Arnold, walked these same footpaths. The westward view of The Vale of the White Horse, which is now obscured by ash trees, used to extend, on a clear day, to Berkshire Downs. The view inspired Arnold; so much so that the field was named the Matthew Arnold Field and Reserve. It explodes with yellow buttercups in late spring and summer—this I’d see firsthand on my spring return to the field.
This is Boars Hill. An ancient rise a few miles southwest of Oxford as the crow flies, but one much changed over time. Another poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, lived here in the 1840s when the hill was still unwooded and offered spectacular views on all sides. It was Clough who introduced Arnold to the spot. Later Arnold would describe the view of Oxford from the northeast side of the hill:
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening …
The dreaming spires, the assemblage of high steeples—exclamation points of the Oxford University gothic architecture and associate churches—vault towards heaven, and though I had to walk a bit I found Arnold’s view of the spires. It did not disappoint.
Heaven in Plain View
I encountered the beautiful out there on my walk among the hills through my senses. And yet, I also know something else hovers among the trees or lingers in the twilight or rings out in the clack-clack of the winter trees.
Beautiful moments like this remind us that beauty signals something far grander than even the most intense experiences of natural wonder. The French philosopher Simone Weil (pronounced “sea-moan vay”) considered beauty impossible to define because in order to define it, one must try to wrap their mind around God himself.
When we sense the wonderful, the awful, the tremendous, the mysterious in our world, Weil thought this to be God.
Christians like to toss around the words “transcendence” and “immanence” to describe God. But these terms emerged only a few hundred years ago. It was a way for Englightenment thinkers to better describe God. And yet, this language paints too little a picture of God. It uses contrastive images to describe the indescribable.
God’s invisible qualities remain for me to see and experience as I did on my Boars Hill ramble. And his exact radiance exists in the one called Immanuel—God with us. So you and I are not left with either distance or closeness. Instead, we enjoy the overwhelming bounty of a life lived with all of heaven within us, and his creative wonder in plain view.
Thoughts for your weekend.
What have I allowed to crowd out the haunting beauty of God’s creation?
Do I binge-watch mindless programming instead of bingeing on God’s beauty and wonder? How can you remedy this?
Plan a hike with a friend or your family. Take care not to speed through it, but invest time spent exploring, marveling, and sitting and laughing and taking it all in.
Book Club
I know! What happened last week? Well, I’ll be really honest with you. I got working on a project with my wife that took me into the evening, and I looked at her at around 9:30 pm and said, “Oh, no. I forgot to send out the Book Club email. Oh man, was I embarrassed!
So, the Book Club will return next week, as my family is traveling. Don’t forget to read chapter 10-12 in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I’m very sorry for the mess up! Please forgive!