ITCHEN ABBAS. The pathway to its Georgian church was lined with roses when we called, and it brings us to a giant that may be the oldest thing we see here, an ancient yew of great beauty, about 25 feet round the trunk. Hale and hearty still, this marvel of Itchen Abbas has for companion another lovely tree, one rarely found in graveyards, a graceful walnut. We do not wonder that Charles Kingsley loved to come to this village of clear streams, green meadows, and noble trees.
In one of these fields is all that is left of the home of a Roman family. After the Romans came the Normans, and they gave the church its west doorway and its chancel arch, and a style the modern builders have copied. In the sanctuary is a tablet to Robert Wright, who was rector for the first 50 years of the 19th century; and hiding in the porch are memorials to the two sons and the grand-daughter of an 18th century rector who was Dean of Chichester. All died young, one boy from a lingering illness, the other snatched away by a fever in the same year, and the girl with all the beauty of youth still about her. The charming lychgate was set up in 1933 in memory of a father and a mother. There are four consecration crosses.
In the churchyard is the grave of John Hughes, who was hanged at Westminster for horse stealing, and is said to be the last man in England hanged for that offence.
It was this corner of Hampshire, his biographer tells us, which became as ‘dear to Lord Grey of Fallodon as' Fallodon itself, and here for a full generation he enjoyed the wild life of the countryside on half an acre of land, on which he built a small cottage. It was his weekend place, and he used to say that he paid his rent in the form of bread thrown on to the grass for the birds in front of his sitting-room window. Here he would come when the worries of Parliament drove him to seek relief, and it was here that he wrote in 1895 “I shall never be in office again, and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered.” All the world knows that 20 years after this he stood by Mr Asquith’s side when these two old friends stood for the spirit of England in its darkest hours.
Once he wrote to his wife from here that he felt as if his heart was too full and might burst:
I feel as if I must come in every half-hour to write to you. I have been on the bridge and eaten my figs on it and thrown the stalks into the river. I can hardly breathe for the sacredness of the place.
Another time he was disappointed that the birds did not come to him freely; he had seen only seven out of the twelve sorts that should have come, and he felt “as offended as a Sovereign whose levee has been badly attended, and as anxious as a parent whose children have stayed out too late.”
In those bitter years when the storm of adversity seemed as if it would not cease about him, one of the blows came from this place so beloved. In 1917 Fallodon was burnt to the ground; in 1923 his post brought him a pathetic letter from the woman who looked after his cottage at Itchen Abbas:
My lord, what can I say to you? I am sore vexed, but your pretty cottage is burnt to the ground. What will you say, my lord?
It was the end of the Hampshire weekends which had brought relief to the man who for so long bore the burden of our Foreign Office on his shoulders.
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