[Illustration:  THE INKPEN COUNTRY.]

At the back of the Beacon is the lonely little village of Combe, sunk deep in a hollow of the hills that rise all around it.  It has a small Early English church of little interest, but the village is worth a long detour to see because of its unique position.  Here was once a cell of the Abbey of Bec in Normandy.  A stony hill-road goes out of the settlement southwards, between the huge bulk of Oat Hill (936 feet) and Sheepless Down, back into Hampshire.  The road eventually leads to Linkenholt, another hamlet lost in the wilderness of chalk, and then by Upton to the Andover highway at Hurstbourne Tarrant on one of the headwaters of the Test.  The map name is rarely used by the natives, who term the place “Up Husband”; it was officially spelt “Up Hursborn” as lately as 1830.  It is a village in a delightful situation and delightful in itself, though of late years the architecture of the “general stores” has replaced some of the old timber-framed houses on the main street.  But the George and Dragon, even if it shows no timbers on its long front, wears an old-fashioned air of prosperity that belongs to the coaching past.  Tarrant Church, like so many others hereabouts, has been sadly “well restored,” but still retains a Transitional south door and some rather remarkable wall paintings.

The Andover road rises through Dole’s Wood and passes over the hill to Knight’s Enham and Andover.  The last-named busy little town of to-day owes much of its prosperity to the fact that it is an important meeting place of railways connecting three great trunk lines.  To outward view Andover is utterly commonplace; everything ancient has been ruthlessly improved away, and that curse of the railway town, an appendix of mean red-brick villas, mars the approach from the west.  It has a past, however, which goes back to such remote times that its beginnings are lost in those “mists of antiquity” which shroud so much of the country described in our preceding chapter.  The “dover” in the town-name is probably the pre-Celtic root which meets the traveller when he arrives at Dover and greets him again in unsuspected places from the “dor” in Dorchester and the Falls of Lodore to the “der” in Derwent and smoky Darwen.  All have the same meaning—­water; and “an,” strangely enough, is a later and Celtic word for the same element, the equally ubiquitous “afon.”  So that Andover should be a place of many waters, which it is not.  A small stream—­the Anton—­flows almost unnoticed through the town, though its name seems to have been given occasionally to the whole of the longer Test that it meets a few miles to the south.