What I found today was exactly the British Isles I'd been expecting all along: miles upon miles of meticulously-constructed stone walls neatly griding grassy and treeless meadows that were pimpled with large, fat sheep and the occasional brown Jersey cow with a brass bell about its neck.

The farms I passed were old and massive, while the buildings were long and tall and made of thick brown stone and dark slate roofs. Many of the people who lived in this stretch (and there were very few)looked to be wealthy farmers whose families had resided here for many hundreds of years.

The land continued to rise all day and at times looked so much like that I'd seeen in Wales on the bus ride from London to Holyhead. Although the rain and the gray skies never ceased, I actually enjoyed it all the more. It lent a moodiness and a mysteriousness to the land that made it feel all the more ancient.

The land itself, as it streched away for endless miles upon miles of grassy round mountains, was enough to make me walk very slowly and with awe. The curvy road I was on wound tightly up the sides of the open mountains, and I was pleased at how few vehicles passed me with each hour. At the top of the highest pass the sky's heavy clouds rolled overhead at what seemed to be but an arm's length away, and the wind blew furiously and unhindered. So desolate and empty was the setting that even the stone walls ceased to border the road. It was all to easy to think of myself as being on the western American plains, or perhaps on a treeless island like those to be found in the Falklands where England and Argentina had recently fought a war. Other than some clumps of weeds and a forlorn-looking red telephone booth, there was nothing at the highest point in the road to indicate any other life on this world.

As I wound my way down the other side of the Cumbrian hills, I saw even less people--only bigger sheep farms and so many of the stone walls that I couldn't help but be amazed. The walls were around five feet high, with more than a few as high as eight or nine feet. All were at least eighteen inches thick and built entirely of unmortared, rough-shaped gray flat stone. They looked to have been built hundreds of years ago, and yet they were in such perfect order. Hardly a stone was out of place, even though each farm must have had dozens of miles of the walls boxing in the meadows that made up the steep sides of the hills and mountains.

At one sheep farm right beside the narrow road I stopped and asked for a glass of water. A young, brown-haired farm wife answered the door, and in her arms she held a naked boy of about two whom she seemed so proud of. His name was Steven, too.

She gave me some tea, and then she surprised me with a box of cookies and biscuits. I helped myself to a couple, and she had me take a handful more. It was so nice there, I thought, and from the way she smiled and talked, and from the sparkle in her eyes each time she looked at Steven, she looked as if she couldn't be any happier with life.

After drinking my tea I crossed the road and sat on a stone wall. I watched a muscular sheep farmer and what was obviously his son herd sheep into a dipping pen, where the sheep were dragged through a reddish-brown fluid that filled a 10-foot-long cement trough. Off to the side two small black-and white border collies lay nervously watching the loudly complaining sheep. The work looked to be hard and tedious, for the son would grab a sheep by one of its horns and by its rear quarters and dump it into the trough at the deep end. Then the father, straddling the two-foot-wide trough, would hook a metal hook onto the sheep's horns and push its body and head completely beneath the dip several times. Whereupon the sheep would swim to the other end and leap out to join its equally miserable peers.

The father looked like a true country gent, even in the midst of such a messy chore. He was dressed in a white shirt, neatly-pleated trousers, and a gray gentlemen's driving cap. With the exception of the high rubber boots and all those sheep passing beneath his legs, the rest of the farmer's attire made it look as if he belonged in an office in a city.

When the farmer and son had dipped perhaps a hundred of the complaining animals, the father slipped on a spotless wool tweed jacket and called to the dogs. The collies were so eager to obey they hurdled three walls to be with the sheep and their master.

I watched the man, the sheep, and the ever-circling darting dogs move slowly and steadily up the side of an adjoining mountain meadow. Their fluid movements made it seem as if the land had no slope at all. The man had to be at least 55-years old, and yet he never looked to be slowed by the sharp steepness of the earth. He and the animals moved ever upwards, ever higher.

I thought to myself that the farmer will undoubtedly live to be very old and will work to the day he dies. This was the sort of land that only a tough people with a lot of patience could ever comfortably call home.

Steven