Rucklers Lane in early Summer

This evocative description of the woods and fields by Rucklers Lane in the Springtime and early Summer a century ago, no doubt , typifies the Kings Langley countryside of the time.

The coming of spring was every year a festival, consciously awaited. The tyranny of cold and darkness gradually weakened; the house woke up again to prepare for my parents' home-coming; the servants remembered their duties, and gradually, as the weather improved, we became free to walk in the lanes again. The first rite of spring was to go down Rucklers Lane, over the half-dry ridges of the winter's mud, to get to the woods and look for the earliest primroses. Rucklers Lane, in­deed (it is now a suburban street of tiny villas), was then the road to Arcady. For a little later the woods it led to were misty with bluebells and foaming with wild cherry blossom; and then in June the long chalky slope to the south was starred with a tiny cistus, honey sweet. In June we would follow the lane that smelled of dust and dog-roses, half-way to the woods, and then take to a field-path through the hay meadows. Here a few orchises grew, and every year we hunted for them, not to pick, but to admire. I think in those days I could have drawn a map of the field, with every unusual plant marked upon it; but I should have found it hard to name them, for Nannie, like most countrywomen, was no botanist, and her nomenclature did not go far beyond ham-and-eggs and Star of Bethlehem. At the end of June the hay was cut, and the glory of the meadow departed. In the woods themselves a dense greenness and a fungus breath lay heavy on the air; and we spent more time in our own garden and went less far a field.

(From Prelude and Fugue (1964) the autobiography of Joan Evans, who was the child of Sir John Evans, himself a nephew of John Dickinson. Joan Evans also wrote The Endless Web (1955) , the story of the John Dickinson paper company).