Chapter Six: By Swallowfield


One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country
near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and
includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and
Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been
one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is
perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home
feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat
country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in
Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about
Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat;
it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have
spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile
Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a
dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it
seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to
leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that
Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus
in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles
long in various directions--little rows and single and double
cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary