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On the first day I fell for the usual country' trick
“Look under here to see where the milk comes out,” the farmer said.
I bent down to look, and he squirted a white jet into my face. It was pleasant though — warm and very creamy.
Lucky was a mischievous animal, and I stayed clear of her. She could jump over a barbed wire fence like the cow that jumped over the moon. When my foster sister celebrated her 21st birthday, a tent was set up in the pasture, with tables of cakes, fruit and lemonade. Before anyone could stop it, Lucky pushed her nose under the tent, and with one “swoosh," drank the entire bowl of lemonade.
What I learned in my years on the farm in Nottinghamshire has stood me in good stead. Some things have changed, but much is the same. I know that lime is worth more than fertilizer on a hay field, and the best fields come from the sharpest mower, because the roots are not pulled.
In England, as I remember it, the scourge of the pasture was the rabbit, but fortunately I don’t see many rabbits in our part of Rappahannock. Perhaps the county's foxes are more efficient at catching them, or perhaps there are more hawks circling overhead. The dark version of the redtailed hawk, which is so prevalent in the Blue Ridge, isn’t found in England.
In the Blue Ridge the rabbit is replaced with the pesty groundhog. On some slopes their burrows are as copious as those on an English rabbit warren, and their holes are deeper, and larger. Only rabbits live in rabbit burrows, but you never know what is down a groundhog hole. It might be a red fox, a mink or even a skunk.
There are no mountain ranges like the Blue Ridge in England, no Skyline Drives. Old Rag, eroded by millions of years of rain and hail, stands 81. feet taller today than the highest mountain in England (Scafell Pike, in the Lake District, height 3210 feet). Nor does Olde England have towns by the name of Sperry ville or Woodville.
Yet this part of Virginia comes closest to resembling England than any other part of the United States, at least in its countryside, small farms and winding roads. I guess that’s why it isn’t so surprising after all to find an Englishmen settled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Dr. Hawkins lines outside Woodville. He is a world-renouyned author and astronomer, whose books include "Stonehenge Decoded” and "Beyond Stonehenge. ”
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