Page:Marlborough and other poems, Sorley, 1919.djvu/146

 Marlborough and, like Barbury Camp, guards the northern frontier of the downs. Describing a walk three months before, the author wrote, "I then scaled Liddington Castle, which is no more a castle than I am, but a big hill with a fine Roman camp on the top, and a view all down the Vale of the White Horse to the north and the Kennet valley to the south. I sat there for about an hour, reading Wild Life in a Southern County, with which I had come armed—the most appropriate place in the world to read it from, as it was on Liddington Castle that Richard Jefferies wrote it and many others of his books, and as it is Jefferies' description of how he saw the country from there." Line 7: Coate, a village to the south (now a suburb) of Swindon, and the birthplace of Jefferies.

P. 16 (VII). The Marlburian, 9 October 1913. This poem is a lament over the departure of a Marlborough master, the laureate of the school, who had resigned and left Marlborough at the end of the previous summer term. The author's acquaintance with him was entirely an out-of-school one. See note on XXXVI. Line 1: Granham hill, on the opposite side of the Kennet from Marlborough College. The horse is a rather inferior specimen of the "white horses," cut out in the chalk, of which there are other and more famous examples in the Wiltshire and Berkshire downs. It was cut by boys of a local proprietary school in 1804. Line 3: 'Four Miler, the school name for Four Mile Clump, so called because it lies at the fourth milestone on the old Swindon Road; it is in the same direction as Barbury Camp and about a mile short of it. Line 19: toun o' touns, one of several echoes in the poem of J. B.'s school songs "The Scotch Marlburian" and "All Aboard."

P. 17 (VIII). The Marlburian, 10 February 1914. Oare Hill is on the north-eastern border of Pewsey Vale between three and four miles from Marlborough 128