Tintern Abbey

Here sinking spaces with dark boughs o'ergrown,

And there the naked quarries look a town,

At length our pilgrimages home appears,

Tintern her venerable fabric rears,

While the sun, mildly glancing in decline,

With its last gilding beautifies the shrine:

(A voyage to Tintern Abbey. Rev Dr Syned Davies. 1789)

A more pleasing retreat could not easily be found. The woods and glades intermixed: the variety of the ground; the splendid ruin, contrasted with the objects of nature; and elegant the line formed by the summits of the hills, which included the whole; making all together a very inchanting piece of scenery.

(William Gilpin 1782)

Avebury

And this stupendous fabric, which for some thousand years, had brav'd the continual assaults of weather, and by the nature of it, when left to itself, like the pyramids of Egypt, would have lasted as long as the globe, [has] fallen a sacrifice to the wretched ignorance and avarice of a little village unluckily plac'd within it.

(William Stukeley. Arbury)

The great stones were then in their wild state, so to speak. Some were half-covered by the grass, others stood up in cornfields or were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under turf. But they were wonderful and disquieting, and as I saw them then, I shall always remember them.

(Paul Nash)

Marlborough Downs

Happy the man whose wish and care

a few paternal acres bound,

content to breath his natures air

in his contented ground.

(The Quiet Life. Alexander Pope)

"Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings".

(Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Thomas Hardy)