Combes

So they built down in the valleys and in the long low inlets from the sea that were called combes, and as a result one might stand on the high moors looking across country, and never know there was a house within a mile. ❋ Rupert Sargent Holland (1915)

a superb drive of about five hours, amid wild gorges, grandiose rocks that have here taken every imaginable form -- rampart, citadel, fortress, tower, all trellised and tasselled with the brightest green; and narrow mountains, valleys, here called "combes" -- delicious little emerald islands shut in by towering heights on every side. ❋ Matilda Betham-Edwards (1877)

I think of them as intrinsic to the anciently mild wooded valleys, or combes, of western Britain, and yet their pallor and their music has been forged as much in the coppery earth of the forests of Congo and West Africa. ❋ TIM DEE (2009)

November 6, 2008 at 2:06 pm mai kitteh doze nawt nom teh pishours, butt he noms teh tishew payper liek combes in teh gift bags. ❋ Unknown (2008)

Down through warm woods, all fragrant with dying autumn flowers, leaving far above the keen Atlantic breeze, into one of those delicious Western combes, and so past the mill, and the little knot of flower-clad cottages. ❋ Unknown (2007)

“Good heavens! how lovely!” exclaimed Caroline when standing on the green ridge where the forest of Montmorency begins, she saw lying at her feet the wide valley with its combes sheltering scattered villages, its horizon of blue hills, its church towers, its meadows and fields, whence a murmur came up, to die on her ear like the swell of the ocean. ❋ Unknown (2007)

Old Stow House stands, or rather stood, some four miles beyond the Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of those combes of which I spoke in the last chapter. ❋ Unknown (2007)

This aftenoone Gabriel came aboord with his skiffe, and then I rewarded him for the good company that he kept with vs ouer the shoales with two small iuory combes, and a steele glasse, with two or three trifles more, for which he was not vngratefull. ❋ Unknown (2003)

The western side of the valley beckoned her—its steep inclines covered with short grass, sea-pinks and thyme, and crowned by a great mass of boulders—to the inland where barren ridges gave way to a profusion of copses and thickets, several deeply cleft combes brimming with trees and purple-crimson flowers. ❋ Melanie George (2003)

Its topography is diversified — hill and valley, forest and jungle, grassy combes and bare rocky shoulders, gloomy pockets and hollows, cliffs and precipices, bold promontories and bluffs, sandy beaches, quiet coves and mangrove flats. ❋ Unknown (2003)

In one of the chalky combes just below the hill is an old Quaker burial ground, as remote and lonely as the more famous Jordans ground was before the ❋ Edric Holmes (N/A)

The ridges of these North Dorset highlands are traversed to a large extent by good roads from which most delightful views may be had, delightful not only for their great extent but for the exquisite near peeps at the remote and lost villages and hamlets that sleep in their deep combes. ❋ Edric Holmes (N/A)

Through the forest they went first, and thereafter the road ran along a ridge of high ground, with the great downs and combes falling and heaving below their feet, the sun flashing back from lakes and streams, the bees humming at the flowers in the grass, and the larks rising with thrilling song in the warm sweet air of the spring. ❋ Henry Gilbert (N/A)

Together, the friends visited Sir Joshua's birthplace, and roamed over the moors and combes of Devonshire. ❋ George Paston (N/A)

Leading inland from Ilfracombe are 'lovely combes, with their green copses, and ridges of rock, and golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red long-horns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads.' ❋ Rosalind Northcote (N/A)

Milton Abbas, a charming village surrounded by verdured hills and deep leafy combes. ❋ Edric Holmes (N/A)

High in one of the combes at this end of the valley is the small village of All Cannings, said to have been of much importance in the dark ages as a Saxon centre. ❋ Edric Holmes (N/A)

East and south is that beautiful and still lonely country that lies between the oldest Wessex and the sister, and ultimate vassal, kingdom of Sussex; the country of the Meonwaras, a region of heather hills and quiet pine combes that stretch down to the Solent Sea and the maritime heart of ❋ Edric Holmes (N/A)