The High South

The High South has no legal existence, and that want is the first thing to be understood about the belt. No charter names it, no officer holds it, no court sits for it, and no tax is levied in its name. Carriers use the word, and clergy, and the Westminster offices that must send their letters somewhere; nobody inside the region uses it of himself, so that a valleys man, a Cambridge man and a Sarrum man would each be mildly insulted to be collapsed into the other two. Yet the term endures, and it endures because it names what the formal county names do not: a run of country in which three different kinds of refusal overlap.