The crowd had thickened perceptibly now; and Wolf realised that he was seeing the most characteristic gathering for that portion of the countryside that he was ever likely to see. Here were smart self-satisfied tradesmen from Ramsgard with their wives and their girls. Here were weather-stained carters from Blackmore; cider-makers and cattle-dealers from Sedgemoor; stalwart melancholy-looking shepherds from the high Quantocks; a sprinkling of well-to-do farmers from the far-off valley of the Frome; sly, whimsical dairymen from the rich pastures of the Stour; and, moving among them all, slow-voiced and slow-footed, but with an infinite zest for enjoyment, the local rustic labourers that tilled the heavy fields watered by the Lunt.
The two men pushed their way back to the taut, vibrating rope, beyond which the driving contest was now proceeding; and as they rested there, Wolf's mind felt liberated from all its agitations, and he drank in the scene before him with unruffled delight. The peculiar smells that came to his nostrils - leather, and straw, and horse-dung, and tobacco-smoke, and cider-sour human breath, and paint, and tar, and half-devoured apples - were all caught up and overpowered by one grand dominant odour, the unique smell of the trodden grass of a fair-field. Let the sun shine as it would from the cold blue heaven! Let the chariots of white clouds race as they pleased under that airy tent! It was from the solid ground under human feet, under equine hooves, that this Dorsetshire world gave forth its autochthonous essence, its bitter-sweet, rank, harsh, terrestrial sweat, comforting beyond conscious knowledge to the heart of man and beast.
Nothing could have been more symbolic of the inmost nature of that countryside than the humorous gravity with which these lean yeomen and plump farmers drove their brightly-painted gigs and high dog-carts round that hoof-trodden paddock! The obvious reciprocity between the men who drove and the animals driven, the magnetic currents of sympathy between the persons looking on and the persons showing off, the way the whole scene was characterised by something casual, non-official, nonchalant - all this produced an effect that only England, and perhaps only that portion of England, could have brought into being. Behind Wolf and his companion surged a pushing, jostling, heterogeneous crowd, giving vent to a low, monotonous murmur; and behind them again could be heard the raucous cries and clangings and whistlings from the noisy whirligigs.
- John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent, London, 1929, p.174-5 (1961 edn.).
