The first half-mile of the main road through Streatley to Wantage is the beginning of the Ridgeway’s ascent; but a little past the fork to Wallingford the Ridgeway becomes separate from this main road, and goes westward out of it. There was at first no possibility of an alternative out of Streatley to the west, and I set out on the same road as when I followed the Ridgeway. On my left I saw “Lyndhurst,” “Bellevue,” and “Montefiore,” or their more expensive equivalents. I ignored the first coombe, the turning up it of the Ridgeway, and went on upon the roadside grass bordered with wormwood and traveller’s joy. Almost at once the road crossed the entrance to another coombe running up westward into the Moulsford Downs, and those woods which the Ridgeway skirts on the south. It was a shallow coombe, the sides dappled with thorns, the bottom covered with corn, and in the midst of it a barn called Well Barn. Through the mouth of the coombe which opened towards the river in the east I saw the pale corn, and the dark woods above it, of the Chilterns. Crossing this coombe the road had no hedges, but corn on both sides. It was usually hedgeless, but banked as it went up and down, and dipped into another coombe of the same kind called Moulsford Bottom, where a quarter-mile north of the thirteenth milestone from Wantage a road came in from the South Stoke Ferry, the continuation, perhaps, of a track from the Icknield Way near Ipsden. From Moulsford Bottom the main road went visibly curving uphill, but from the top of Kingstanding Hill, at three hundred feet, it went straight between its low hedges and grassy banks towards Blewburton Hill. It had still corn on both sides in stooks, downs on the left, and on the right the valley of dark trees stretching far away into mist. It was a plain, well-kept road of easy gradients, no corners, and such banks or hedges that anything approaching in front could be seen. It lacked the company of telegraph wires.
The villages of Aston were almost completely hidden on my right, as I passed within a third of a mile of them. That was by the eleventh milestone from Wantage, and there the road was following along and under one of the low, natural walls of chalk which so often guide a road and are in turn defined by it. My road, Icknield Way or not, went hedgeless under this wall, with oats above and stubble below. The flowers on its narrow green edges were chiefly yellow parsnip and white carrot, both dear for their scents, and succory, that pale blue flower which a strange fate has closely attached to the coarsest and stiffest of dark stems and placed where dust is likely to be most thick.