Tangjun Plain

Down County Plain is the name Lewis gives to the uneven countryside seen southward from the hills above Belfast, with the Mourne Mountains beyond it. It is a plain only in the qualified sense that a giant might call it level: small hills and hollows break it into a patterned, living landscape. In memory, its white cottages, wandering roads, subdued light, and remote mountains make it an image of longing, sharply distinct from the industrial city below and from the flat English landscape that first alienated him.

Setting and Form

From the hilltop, the view opens across what Lewis calls, in a certain sense, the plain of Down, toward the Mourne Mountains. The landscape resists the ordinary meaning of “plain.” Its contours resemble potatoes laid in a shallow basin and covered with loose earth: the hollows between them become streams and clusters of trees, while the surface resolves into small fields, each only a couple of acres, patterned with crops, grass, and plowed ground. The analogy turns topography into a miniature model that can be enlarged in the imagination without flattening its irregularity.

Every cottage is white, appearing as a scattered point across the fields; the unpaved roads are white too. Because the country is a “turbulent democracy of little hills,” those roads run in every direction, vanishing and reappearing among the rises. The countryside is therefore not a smooth prospect viewed all at once, but a series of folds and interruptions through which paths and settlements repeatedly emerge.

Light and the Mourne Mountains

The view depends on a particular quality of light. Lewis asks the reader to imagine softer, paler sunlight than the hard English kind, with blurred cloud edges and watery gleams that make the landscape seem to deepen and lose solidity. The mountains stand at the limit of sight, steep, compact, pointed, toothed, and jagged, apparently detached from the low hills and cottages in the foreground. Sometimes blue, sometimes violet, they can look like transparent sheets of gauze through which the light of an invisible sea shines.

That separation gives the view its emotional force. The ordinary country does not gradually turn into mountain scenery; the remote peaks appear abruptly beyond the intimate patchwork of fields and cottages. Their distance preserves them as an image of elsewhere, joining the familiar ground to an unreachable horizon. The plain becomes a country of longing not by ceasing to be specific, but through the contrast between its close, irregular fields and the mountains that seem almost unreal at the edge of vision.

Belfast and the Contrasting Worlds

The plain belongs to a larger landscape of sharp contrasts. From another position on the hills, Belfast occupies the valley floor beneath the Lough: factories, gantries, and shipyard cranes rise through mist, while trams whine, horse traffic clatters, and the shipyards throb and stammer. The hilltop’s grass, sunlight, dew, cocks, and ducks coexist with that industrial noise. Rather than destroying the sense of peace above, the city’s sounds intensify it by sharpening the difference between the low world and the high.

The view south toward Down is a further step into a different world. Its small fields and white cottages lead the eye toward the Mournes, away from the city’s smoke and labor. Lewis’s account makes the landscape neither a neutral backdrop nor a simple emblem: its distinct forms, sounds, and distances actively organize the remembered contrast between industrial confinement and the open, beckoning country beyond.

Distance and Remembered Place

Lewis connects the countryside’s power to the limits of how it could be visited. His father had no car, though friends sometimes took him for drives. Those occasional journeys gave distant places enough familiarity to gather memories, while leaving them ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The limited access sustained a sense of distance: places could be approached, but not consumed through effortless travel.

He describes walking as the measure of space and objects to modern transport’s claim that it “annihilates space.” In his view, distance is not empty separation to be eliminated; it gives travel the feeling of liberation, pilgrimage, and adventure. The remembered plain’s appeal thus depends partly on its remoteness. Its hills, cottages, roads, and far-off peaks remain valuable because they occupy a world that cannot simply be made immediate.