Return of the Native

"Civilisation was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation … To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained."

Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native

One of my favourite novels written by Thomas Hardy.  The National Trust has managed to buy Slepe Heath for £650,000, privately owned it will now belong to us and links two other heaths together. Amongst all the selling and privatisation that it going through this wretched government, sometimes something escapes thank goodness.