Excerpt from The Marches of Wessex
This book has been written as a pleasure to myself over a period of twenty years, in the intervals of a busy life. It began as an attempt to describe, mainly for the use of friends who shared that life, most of them now dead, the admirable fitness of Dorset for walking tours. But the more I walked in that county - and there is only one little corner of it that I have not visited at least once - the more I learnt of England; and I modified my original idea. It seemed to me that here, on the frontier of England (for Dorset was really that until late in the Middle Ages), I had the true story of England; not the extremes of romance and war and politics, but the mean. So I changed my plan, and have tried to do or combine three things in each chapter of the book - to sketch very slightly the main tendency of English history in a series of epochs; to apply that history to its local exhibition in Dorset; and, finally, to describe a string of places, within the compass of a reasonable days walk, in which some remains of the epoch dealt with are still patent. The Ruttier at the end - "ruttier" is a good old word borrowed from a great English classic, and might well be restored as a shibboleth for alleged patriots - shows how these walks can be combined and worked out in practice. But I have not attempted (God forbid) to write a "gossiping guide," or series of "rambles": my concern is at least as much with my country as with the county in it which I love best.
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