Itchen Valley
At Alresford there are some watered meadows, which are the beginning of a chain of meadows that goes all the way down to Winchester, and hence to Southampton; but, even these meadows have, at Alresford, chalk under them. The water that supplies them comes out of a pond, called Alresford Pond, which is fed from the high hills in the neighbourhood. These counties are purely agricultural; and they have suffered most cruelly from the accursed Pitt-system. Their hilliness, bleakness, roughness of roads, render them unpleasant to the luxurious, effeminate, tax-eating crew, who never come near them, and who have pared them down to the very bone. The villages are all in a state of decay. The farm-buildings dropping down, bit by bit. ...
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... The river Itchen ... goes down the middle of this valley, and waters all its immense quantity of meadows. ... The village of Easton is, like that of Avington, close by the water-side. The meadows are the attraction; and, indeed, it is the meadows that have caused the villages to exist.
... If the hay be down all the way to Southampton in the same manner that it is along here, there are thousands of acres of hay rotting on the sides of this Itchen river. Most of the meadows are watered artificially. The crops of grass are heavy, and, they appear to have been cut precisely in the right time to be spoiled. ...
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... Just before you come to Ropley Dean, you see the beginning of the Valley of Itchen. The Itchen river, falls into the salt water at Southampton. It rises, or rather has its first rise, just by the roadside at Ropley Dean, which is at the foot of that very high land which lies between Alresford and Alton. All along by the Itchen river, up to its very source, there are meadows; and this vale of meadows, which is about twenty-five miles in length, and is, in some places, a mile wide, is, at the point of which I am now speaking, only about twice as wide as my horse is long! This vale of Itchen is worthy of particular attention. There are few spots in England more fertile or more pleasant; and none, I believe, more healthy. Following the bed of the river, or, rather, the middle of the vale, it is about five-and-twenty miles in length, from Ropley Dean to the village of South Stoneham, which is just above Southampton. The average width of the meadows is, I should think, a hundred rods at the least; and if I am right in this conjecture, the vale contains about five thousand acres of meadows, large part of which is regularly watered. The sides of the vale are, until you come down to within about six or eight miles of Southampton, hills or rising grounds of chalk, covered more or less thickly with loam. Where the hills rise up very steeply from the valley, the fertility of the corn-lands is not so great; but for a considerable part of the way, the corn-lands are excellent, and the farm-houses, to which those lands belong, are, for the far greater part under covert of the hills on the edge of the valley. Soon after the rising of the stream, it forms itself into some capital ponds at Alresford. These, doubtless, were augmented by art, in order to supply Winchester with fish. The fertility of this vale, and of the surrounding country, is best proved by the fact, that, besides the town of Alresford and that of Southampton, there are seventeen villages, each having its parish church, upon its borders. When we consider these things we are nor surprised that a spot, situated about half way down this vale should have been chosen for the building of a city, or that that city should have been for a great number of years a place of residence for the Kings of England.
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From this beautiful spot [Avington] we had to mount gradually the downs to the southward; but, it is impossible to quit the vale of the Itchen without one more look back at it. To form a just estimate of its real value and that of the land near it, it is only necessary to know, that, from its source, at Bishop's Sutton, this river has, on its two banks, in the distance of nine miles (before it reaches Winchester,) thirteen parish churches. There must have been some people to erect these churches. It is not true, then, that PITT and GEORGE III. created the English nation, notwithsanding (sic) all that the Scotch feelosofers are ready to swear about the matter. In short, there can be no doubt in the mind of any rational man, that in the time of the PLANTAGENETS England was, out of all comparison, more populace than it is now.
