The peace could be wrecked by the whine of a chainsaw or the scream of a low-flying jet from the nearby military airbase, but on various points of the compass were the distant steeples and Norman towers of village churches almost a thousand years old, and across the landscape lay a jealously preserved latticework of old footpaths that ran through woods, across the last remaining meadows, alongside impure streams. They too, in theory, could have been rescued one day. As long as one stayed out of towns and cities, there was a continuity which must have shaped the understanding of a poet, and
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