The writer describes a walk in the ‘ghostly and colourless’ countryside around Oxford
Gilbert Keith Chesterton marches through the “ghostly and colourless” countryside around Oxford. “The fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and as cloudy,” he wrote in The Secret of a Train, for his Daily News column, collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909).
“And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen; and then they loosened and let down the dark curtains of the rain.”