the place for the sole but sufficient reason that it had been his home.
Had it not been for this feeling he had produced in me I should not, I
imagine, have cared to stay long in it. As it was, I did stay, then came
again and found that it was growing on me. I wondered why; for the mere
interest in the old shepherd's life memories did not seem enough to
account for this deepening attachment. It began to seem to me that I
liked it more and more because of its very barrenness--the entire
absence of all the features which make a place attractive, noble
scenery, woods, and waters; deer parks and old houses, Tudor,
Elizabethan, Jacobean, stately and beautiful, full of art treasures;
ancient monuments and historical associations. There were none of these
things; there was nothing here but that wide, vacant expanse, very
thinly populated with humble, rural folk--farmers, shepherds,
labourers--living in very humble houses. England is so full of riches in
ancient monuments and grand and interesting and lovely buildings and
objects and scenes, that it is perhaps too rich. For we may get into the
habit of looking for such things, expecting them at every turn, every
mile of the way.

I found it a relief, at Winterbourne Bishop, to be in a country which
had nothing to draw a man out of a town. A wide, empty land, with
nothing on it to look at but a furze-bush; or when I had gained the
summit of the down, and to get a little higher still stood on the top of
one of its many barrows, a sight of the distant village, its low, grey
or reddish-brown cottages half hidden among its few trees, the square,
stone tower of its little church looking at a distance no taller than a
milestone. That emptiness seemed good for both mind and body: I could
spend long hours idly sauntering or sitting or lying on the turf,
thinking of nothing, or only of one thing--that it was a relief to have
no thought about anything.