Still higher, on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its earthen trenches.

What few of us realised at the time was that Osborne, while endorsing most of Jimmy’s jeremiads, also had a sneaking sympathy for his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, an upper-class relic of the Raj.

It still runs across the chalk hump from north-east to south-west, from Leatherhead to Guildford, but now it's the A246, a prosaic enough name for what is now a prosaic enough artery that has done its part to bring commuterdom to the old villages of the northern edge of the chalk, where a narrow strip of more fertile soil links the chalk with the London clay.

And so one may re-read 'Epithalamion', observing that to put off bleached linen and woven woolwear and twiny boots is (even if comic) to shuffle off this mortal coil[…]