Colin Clout's Calendar Author:Grant Allen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. WILD HYACINTHS. The path through the Fore Acre leads right across Venlake by tortuous windings to the tangled covert and bosky marshland of Sedgewood Cop... more »se. There is something to my mind very sweet and melodious about these dear old-world English names. Most of them go back even beyond the Norman conquest. The Fore Acre, for example, is so called, not because it once contained four acres, as the labourers will tell you, but because it is the acre or field lying just in front of the old immemorial homestead. In early English acre simply means field ; its later use as a definite measure of area, instead of the hide, is a mere modern innovation. As a matter of fact, the size of any particular Fore Acre depends usually upon the purest chance—our own here is a very small croft indeed—and the Six Acres or Ten Acres of latter-day farms are simply the results of false analogy on the part of countrymen who have misinterpreted the good old English phraseology of their forefathers. For ten centuries, in all probability, the farmhouse and barton of Shapwick Farm, for the time being, have stood on the selfsame site that the modernstone buildings now occupy; and the ancient name of the Fore Acre sufficiently vouches for the fact. So, too, in the word Venlake we have another curious old verbal relic: for lake in our country dialect hereabouts means brook or river. As to Sedgewood Copse, that clearly derives its name from its marshy nature: for all the lower part of the wood along the banks of Venlake is a deep morass of spongy bog, thickly and treacherously carpeted now in spring with an exquisite green pile of glossy liverworts, pondweed, and brooklime. But in the upper part, on the slope close by, great masses of wild hyacinths are out in blossom, dyeing the whole side of the copse ...« less