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.
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