Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
This re-issue of BB's classic memoir will be enjoyed by all who appreciate fine country writing, and who believe passionately in the resilience of Mother Nature, despite the follies of mankind. Denys Watkins-Pitchford (better known as BB) wrote these wonderful essays on the English countryside in the 1930s - a time of peace and renewal between two world wars. The book was finally published in 1941 when, as BB puts it, England was 'in the darkest hour of our history.' BB captures here in words and sensitive wood engravings the wonders of English wildlife and countryside. Includes essays on: - ravens and rookeries - the stone curlew - the purple emperor butterfly - a woodcutter's house - an encounter with a wildfowler one frosty dawn - a night fishing on the Solway - the strange behaviour of song thrushes - the rescue of a black labrador - a favourite copse - the accidental death of a groom - village characters - hedgerows - and many more topics
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 383
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
The Wayside Fire
THE COUNTRYMAN’S BEDSIDE BOOK
by ‘BB’
Illustrated by D. J. Watkins-Pitchford
To
Ida Mary Downing
‘The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.’
INTRODUCTION
This book has been written from an accumulation of notes which I have made over a number of years and contains all kinds of odd happenings and incidents of sport and natural history. In some cases it may simply be the description of a scene or an effect of colour, of a walk or a wood, a field pond or a hedgerow. It is perhaps more in the nature of a scrap book in which I have recorded all those things which interested me in my rambles afield.
Bearing this in mind perhaps the reader will not become too impatient when I skip from one subject to another like a field cricket in the sun.
This book was begun long ago in the days of peace and is concluded in the darkest hour in our history. I believe that because men have been so blind to nature and followed their own ideals we now find ourselves in this gloomy place. Could we but realize that it is the simple and natural things that matter, we should find the way to the perfect life. It is the artificial world of our own creating which employs most of our energies and interests, yet how pathetically we long for peace and quietness and the loveliness of this green island of ours. Greed and jealousy and all the baser human attributes seem to have gained the upper hand. Our life is brief enough in all truth yet, like spoilt children, we cut it short.
In the present century there has been a sudden awakening to the beauty of natural things; the old philosophers took them for granted, so much so that they never even wrote about them. Now we are beginning to realize what Nature means to us and how, inwardly, it is part of ourselves and we of it. Is it too late?
One day this dark dream will be over, the iron of winter will pass, the village bells ring out again over the tranquil meadows and we shall have peace again. When that hour comes let us help to build a saner, simpler world on the one true foundation.
Nature is master of all, there will be wild violets blooming along the sheltered bank whatever we may do, the joyous birds will sing, grass will cover the old scars. In this I find quiet comfort and a pointer to Man’s folly.
‘BB’ Northants April 1941
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Wayside Fire
Cornish Road
Common Buzzard
Buzzards in Devon
Exhausted Sand Martin
Cornish Cattle
Spring in Devon
Cornish Cliffs
Beech Stump
Stone Curlew in Flight
Oak in Salcey Forest
Brooding Bullfinch
Young Bullfinch
A Forest Ride
White Admiral on Honeysuckle Spray
Purple Emperor
Dark Green Fritillary
The River
Goose Country – Dawn
Icebergs on the Estuary
Grazing Greylags
Shore Gunner
The Fowler
Labrador with Greylag Goose
Wild Geese in Skein
Leaping Salmon
A Devon Lane
My Garden
Frog
Jock’s Pool
Long Eared Bat
Holland
In the Woods
Brooding Mallard
Old Sheepwash
Faxton Church
Rookery
Hunting Hedgehog
Snail shells
The Skeins coming in to Feed
A Wildwood Rabbit
Baby Chaffinch
Lambs
Stoat
Swallow’s Nest
The Field Pond
The Stream in Early Spring
Singing Thrush and Bomb Crater
THE OLD UNHAPPY THINGS
Clean pebbles spotted like a trout,
Where ripple patterns meet,
Wild Iris blades, and in and out
The prints of secret feet,
Green catkins hanging in the rain,
The easy grace of wings;
Time to forget, time to forget,
The old unhappy things.
A willow set with silver studs,
Wry mirror of the stream,
Prim pattern of a folded bud,
The hawthorn’s ivory dream,
In quiet woods where no man comes
A mottled song thrush sings,
‘Time to forget, time to forget’,
The old unhappy things.
1941
Cornish Road
CHAPTER I
The writings of Hudson • a curious coincidence • the buzzard’s nest • a Cornish farmer’s story • the ‘Land’s End’ • personality of Hudson • the Gurnard’s Head rock • peregrine falcon • Hudson’s vision • vipers on the ‘banks’ • a story of a wreck • gale at the Horse’s Back • wildfowl on Marazion marsh • more notes on the buzzard • ravens in Devon and Whittlebury.
W.H. Hudson describes the habit of jotting down notes as ‘gathering sticks’. This is a good simile, for in time one finds there are enough to make a fire – or a book, according to the mood of the moment.
This custom of carrying a notebook on various journeyings is one I have followed for a number of years, for only by putting down on paper one’s immediate thoughts and reactions can one hope to preserve a faithful picture.
I like to think of Hudson wandering over the downs which attracted him so strongly, talking with the shepherds and watching the clouds go over, observing with minute care every bird, every incident which came to him. And then, after a long day spent in the open air, returning to his lodgings in some remote village to write down what he had seen.
Most of these incidents are very ordinary in themselves yet Hudson could see them in a new way, from a different angle, and through his simple and powerful prose they take on a magic we should have missed.
This I think is the chief charm of his writing; when we read his books we suddenly become aware that we too have seen just that same incident – such as the floating thistledown described in Nature in Downland – yet were blind to the inward beauty of the passing hour.
And as at the moment my thoughts are turning to Hudson I must relate a curious coincidence which happened to me recently.
My wife and I were visiting Cornwall for the first time, gathering material for a book on Cornish birds by the late Dr. Walmsley, entitled Winged Company.
One evening we found ourselves on the road from St. Ives to Zennor. About a mile out of St. Ives we saw a stockily built man walking along the road in front of us. He turned about as we approached and as he seemed to be wanting a lift we stopped and offered to help him on his way.
It turned out he was like myself, an artist, one John Barclay who lived in a little cottage in which D. H. Lawrence spent a good deal of his Cornish life.
As my particular study was birds he was able to tell me a good deal of interesting things about the local species and incidentally of the finest scenery.
He told me that within a mile or two of his cottage there was a buzzard’s nest, built in the cliff-face of a lonely cove.
As he talked my eyes were on the dark moorland spread out below us, the patchwork of the fields, the innumerable banks and scattered farms, all small and grey and just a little mean. It was an evening of golden light. The blackthorn was in full bloom, not so white as the Devon blackthorn, but speckled sparse and grey on the low crouching thickets.
The distant edge of the cliffs was dark under a brooding sunset cloud and even though it was almost summer there was a strange sense of desolation in the scene before us. The road wound away round the shoulder of a moor, against the misty gold of the sunset strange rocks were stacked. Somewhere to the right, in the fearful cliffs which fell hundreds of feet to the sea, the buzzard had its nest.
I went the next day to find it. About the squat grey farms the first swallows were hawking and from every blackthorn thicket came the lilting song of the chiff-chaff. After crossing a deep and noisy stream which tumbled its way joyfully to the sea I came to a cove. When I topped the ridge of the next hill the confused roar of the Atlantic surf loudened and through the booming cannonade came the thin mourning cries of gulls.
Barclay had given me a rough idea where the nest was built but it was some little while before I found it. After scrambling about for some time I came to a deep chasm where the sea had bitten into the granite cliffs, an awesome place.
A buzzard flew out from under my feet, so judging the nest to be in the cliff face below me, I crossed the head of the chasm to get a view of the rocks through my glasses. When I got to the other side however, no nest was to be seen though I scanned every ledge and cranny. I gave it up as a bad job and went back to the other side. Almost immediately the hen flew off a ledge directly opposite me and flapped, mewing, away, to perch on a distant rock pinnacle. My glasses picked out the nest which was built on a narrow ledge about ten feet from the top of the cliff. It was a surprisingly slight affair, a mere scrape among the turf, with a few heather branches arranged round the edge of the nest. I could see three eggs, appearing from this distance no larger than wren’s eggs.
Just above the nest was another, a bulky affair of sticks and roots, built under an overhanging cornice. Both appeared quite inaccessible, even with the aid of a rope. I lay down on the very lip of the chasm, behind a tuft of heather which I drew across my face, and waited for the hen to return but she would not do so. She sat on the top of a rock about a quarter of a mile distant, mewing occasionally and preening. Very soon her mate joined her and they sat side by side for over half an hour. Tired of waiting I returned to the road.
Very soon I met a farmer driving two horses, harnessed to a harrow, coming down the lane, and he stopped and talked to me. He told me an interesting thing about the buzzards. They had nested in that particular chasm for as long as he could remember, and had always done so in his father’s time, and for aught he knew long before that, for his family had lived in that farm for many generations. As a young man, he said, he had quarrelled with the buzzards for they had taken some of his tame pigeons. He was very fond of pigeons and the buzzards had taken them one by one until there were none left.
This surprised me for it is usually a comparatively cowardly bird, feeding on voles and young rabbits, grasshoppers, and other insects caught among the grasses and whins on the tops of the cliffs. But the buzzards were so wary that he could not get a shot at them and after a while he had left them alone, and they were now friends again.
Suddenly he asked me whether I had read any of Hudson’s books? When I said ‘yes’, he asked me if I had read The Land’s End.
Now as it happened, I had never read it, but only that morning in Newlyn, I had seen that very book in a shop window and had bought it. Then it appeared the farmer knew Hudson and remembered him well, a tall bearded man with keen black eyes. He had come to talk to the boys in the village school about birds and beasts and the farmer had very vivid memories of those dark piercing eyes, which he said, noticed things which other people passed by. One quarrel which the farmer had with the book was that Hudson makes out the farmers, as a class, to be uncouth and uneducated peasants, uncivilised folk who were little better than beasts.
If this farmer I was speaking to was typical of the Cornish farming class then Hudson must have been unjust, for this man was well educated and talked as intelligently, and a great deal more so, than many so called ‘educated’ people I have met.
Standing there in the strong evening sun, with his hands on his harrow-handles, he seemed a noble man with a dignity and ease of bearing. When I left him I carried away with me the curious sense that Hudson was still alive and his spirit walking with me across that sunlit cliff.
On reaching the Gurnard’s Head Hotel I told my wife of the strange coincidence of the book The Land’s End.
After supper something prompted me to go out again and I went alone, for the first time, down to the Gurnard’s Head rock. The light was fading, away on the calm sea a magnificent sunset flamed, with cornices and stacks of cloud low down against the yellow glare, shaped fantastically like the very rocks before me.
I scrambled up the cliff and soon saw, placed on the highest pinnacle of rock, what I took to be a bird, with its head sunk in its shoulders. As I drew near however it did not move and I began to marvel that the rock could be so fashioned, it stood out so solid and black. Nearer and nearer I approached and then at last I saw it was indeed a bird, a female peregrine. She sat hunched on the rock within twenty yards of me, gently bobbing her head.
That picture will long remain with me; she seemed to be the very spirit of this primitive and cruel coast, brooding there against the dying sky, black, black as the rock itself that frowned towards the loud and darkling sea. At last she dropped off into space with a leisurely flicker of sickle wings and was gone.
I chose a flat rock which overlooked the sea and sunset and for a long while sat there watching the slow rounded Atlantic rollers mechanically marching in one behind the other to burst in a smother upon a reef at the foot of the cliff. Cormorants flew low above the surface of the heaving waves so that they threw a shadow upon the water and I saw noisy white gulls far down the cliff, ranging themselves for the night on a massive rock.
I cannot say that Hudson was in my mind at the moment, indeed I think I had forgotten all about him, and of my meeting with the farmer up the sunny stony road. There was so much to see spread out below. Each roller as it moved inexorably towards the cliff caught the sunset’s flare on its rounded back and when they hit the rocks I could feel the cliff shudder at the impact. What power in those slow battering rams!
When I got back to the Inn I chanced to open the book, The Land’s End, for the first time and I immediately saw these words:
‘The rocky forelands I haunted were many but the favourite one was Gurnard’s Head, situated about midway between St. Ives and Land’s End. It is the grandest and one of the most marked features of that bold coast. Seen from a distance, from one point of view, the promontory suggests the figure of a Sphinx, the entire body lying out from the cliff, the waves washing over its huge black outstretched paws and beating on its breast, its stupendous deformed face composed of masses of granite looking out on the Atlantic. I was often there afterwards spending long hours sitting on the rocks of the great head and shoulders, watching the sea and the birds that live in it; and later when April set the tiny bell of the rock pipit tinkling, and the wheatear, hovering over the crags, dropped its brief delicious warble, and when the early delicate flowers touched the rocks and turf with tender, brilliant colour, I was more enamoured than ever of my lonely castle by the sea.’
He goes on to speak of a vision he had upon the Gurnard’s Head of a hunter who, wearying of his sport, went to sleep upon a jutting ledge of rock and fell into the sea.
Common Buzzard
Hudson awoke after his vision believing that he too was falling from the rock. He concludes:
‘In a moment I became awake, for I did not wish to perish by accident just yet, and, jumping up, I stretched out my arms, stamped my feet, and rubbed my eyes vigorously to get rid of my drowsiness; and then sat down quietly and resumed my watch of gulls and gannets.’
So that rock on which I sat may have been the very rock where the great naturalist had his dream and watched the sea that summer day so long ago.
In another part of the book I also found references to the Inn where I was staying and a whole chapter on Zennor itself. And in my fancy I thought that maybe his spirit had been transformed into that black hunched figure of the peregrine which seemed so unafraid of my approach.
I had other talks with the farmer mentioned earlier in these notes and was able to catch a glimpse of what life means to a man in this part of the country who must battle with the grim and stony ground of Cornwall. He told me some interesting things about adders. They were common on the cliffs, especially in springtime, and the places to find them were stony hedges facing the sea (a hedge in Cornwall is a raised bank, sometimes surmounted by a wall) and he described how, one afternoon, as he and his brother were having their tea in a little meadow near the top of the cliff, they had a bad fright from an adder.
It was a very hot day, a Sunday, and they were sitting under one of these hedges in the full blaze of the sun. He put down his cup, full of tea, close beside him on the grass, and a minute or two later happened to glance towards it. There, within a few inches of the cup was a viper, weaving its head from side to side, about to strike at his hand!
He had lost several dogs through adder bites, one a very valuable spaniel. It was bitten in the throat and died in great agony. Sheep are very often bitten when grazing on the cliffs, usually through the nose.
He went on to talk of other things and as was perhaps natural, of wrecks. Many people will remember the tragic loss of the St. Ives lifeboat crew one wild winter’s night a few years ago.
That night, he said, was the worst he had ever experienced, with the wind reaching a force of nearly a hundred miles an hour. So terrific was its strength nothing could stand up against it and when he went out to look at some calves he had in an outbuilding of the farm his lantern was repeatedly blown out. Even in the shelter of the stone walls of the yard he could scarcely stand. Next morning he had news of the loss of the St. Ives lifeboat crew who had gone out to answer a signal of distress farther down the coast, but where the wreck was no man knew.
It was not until next day, when the wind had abated and the sun shone once more, and the business of the farm could continue, that he saw wreckage in his cove. Eleven bodies were brought up out of the cruel sea, all stripped of their clothes, some torn and mutilated beyond description by the ferocity of the waves.
It was the very cove where I had found the buzzard’s nest and when next I saw that lonely place, with the translucent sea, the colour of a zircon or some other rare stone, beating its sonorous rhythmic pulse among the black rocks, I thought of that wild night when the sea showed itself in its most terrible and merciless mood.
Lying on the warm turf among the soft cushions of the thrift and the scent of the golden gorse (strongly reminiscent of some tropical fruit) I thought of this spirit of the sea as some god or evil thing that had killed so many of my kind.
If all the men, women, and children that the sea had claimed since man first walked the earth, were to rise out of the waves and come trooping up the white sand two hundred feet below me, they would number many millions, more than the eye could count.
Perhaps there is a spirit of all natural things which must be appeased from time to time by human sacrifice; a spirit of fire, disease, and now, in the present age of machinery, a new spirit who is insatiable and who claims so many thousands each year and every day.
Though my memories of Cornwall are sunny ones, of golden gorse and speckled blackthorn and enchanting green seas washing loudly among the caves, I have one memory of a great gale, almost as great a gale perhaps as that in which the lifeboat crew was lost.
It was the day after I found the buzzard’s nest. Instead of the calm warm light of the low sun shining upon the crags, there were lowering clouds and driving hail which stung the face like thorns driven into the flesh. It was quite impossible to open one’s eyes fully to watch the sea, and what a sea!
There is a place not far from Zennor called ‘The Horse’s Back’. It is a rib of rock which juts out from the mainland far into the Atlantic, forming a gully very like that in which I found the buzzard’s nest, though if anything more awe inspiring. It is hardly wide enough to walk down the rib, though a daring climber could do so and think nothing of it.
That morning I stood, or rather crouched, on the sloping slippery cliff above and watched the huge rollers, walls of green translucent water, come surging up that narrow alley with mighty detonations, to break in driven white foam that was enhanced by the ebony rocks.
Down in that frightful black abyss, where the rocks gleamed wet with spray, a gull was perched, a big handsome fellow, and every now and then, as though to cry defiance to the waves, he opened wide his mouth and let forth a hellish ringing laugh which I could hear above the noise of the surf.
Other gulls came sailing in over the chasm, tilting unconcernedly in the roaring gale, alighting on the ledges in the most blasé fashion. Wild weather is nothing to them, they glory in it. Different indeed from the poor little sand martins and swallows I had seen earlier in the day, flitting, like butterflies after a shower, in the lee of a bank by Marazion marsh. One little sand martin seemed utterly spent. It crouched on the wire of a fence rocking miserably to and fro, with its head sunk into its shoulders. Then I saw the whole corner of the pool alive with swallows and martins, hovering just above the surface of the water, evidently catching flies, though it was hard to believe any insect could live in such wild wind and wet. What a rude welcome it must have been for those poor feathered sprites, newly in from across the sea.
Not far away, a shoveller drake all resplendent in his gorgeous plumage, was diving about in the shallow water, upending like a domestic duck to find succulent morsels in the weeds. Close to him was the duck, likewise engaged. Soon they saw me watching them and swam slowly away to a screen of slender reeds and were lost to view.
Before very long the weather changed, the wild wet clouds blew away from the moors and there began the loveliest summer we have had for many years.
I was speaking just now of The Horse’s Back, near Zennor. The most impressive thing about this particular rock formation is the way the rollers, as they enter the narrow cleft or passage are piled up, and what a moment before was naked glistening rock is buried the next instant under many feet of swirling water. Then, at the shock, of impact, the granite trembles, white foam shoots high in a graceful pillar to drift and melt magically away.
At the height of the storm I happened to glance upwards at a castellated battlement of jagged granite just in time to see two peregrines come curving over the edge, both in their element and revelling in the gale.
This brings me once more to the buzzard; I cannot leave him without relating a few more incidents with regard to this bird.
At first sight he seems noble, even royal as the eagle is royal, especially when he is seen sailing majestically on rigid wings above the crags and precipices.
Yet like some people one has met, on better acquaintance we find that he is in some ways a spurious bird.
Seen close at hand, the head is small and beak puny, and his feet, which one would suppose to be huge scaly talons with a gripping dagger-shod clutch, are undersized, barely powerful enough to hold an infant rabbit. He is also a coward and has none of the dash and ferocity of the falcon tribe.
I shall always carry in my mind a very lovely picture of buzzards. I was walking down a Devon lane one sunny morning in early spring. Primroses made gay yellow splashes on the rough steep banks of the lane where all manner of ferns were growing; hart’s tongue, pennywort, and hundreds of other beautiful local ferns and plants which I never see in the prosaic midlands.
Not far away was a dense wood crowning a hill which overlooked the Dart, a wood in which trolls might conceivably dwell. It was composed of Corsican pines, a tree which thrives exceedingly in the rich red soil of Devon. Beneath the wood was a little flashing brook which wound its way down the green valley, in and out between groves of wild iris. Soon I saw a buzzard, sailing along beneath the wood, hardly moving its wide spotted wings. Its mate soon joined it and then they began a graceful spiral, still without moving their wings, or appearing to do so, up and up, higher and higher as though they were swinging on invisible threads. Seen against the dark foliage of the pines they reminded me of two richly coloured moths.
Before long I heard, from high above, the thin mews of yet another buzzard and looking up I saw not one but three or four tiny specks against a huge white cumulus cloud which towered like a vast mountain against the soft blue of the sky.
The buzzards by the wood still continued their ascent; becoming smaller and smaller until they joined those other specks in the upper sky. It was wonderful to see the way the birds made use of every upward air current, tilting their fan-shaped tails and climbing round and round, higher and higher, until they also were mere dots high against the blue ceiling.
Buzzards in Devon
Not very far from the wood of Corsican pines there was an old quarry in the side of a hill. It was an interesting place and a paradise for birds.
Below the cliff of rock, which was the quarry’s face, birch and alder grew thickly, the slender white stems of the former appearing as silver threads against the dark tones of the rock.
For many days I had heard a raven croaking and had often seen him winging his leisurely way across the valleys or tumbling in sheer ecstasy over the patchwork pattern of red and green fields.
I was sure the ravens had a nest in the quarry and when I explored the place I saw it, built on a ledge half way down the face of the cliff in a quite inaccessible position. It was a huge structure of twigs and sticks which had obviously been added to over a succession of years. I could not see whether it contained eggs, as the cup of the nest was too deep.
The raven turns up in curious places. I remember one hot afternoon in July in the old forest of Whittlebury hearing the deep croak of this kingly crow and seeing a pair fly over the trees. They may have been the descendants of ravens that had always lived in the forest since very early times. If it was not so persecuted the raven would be a common bird once more as it was in the days of Robin Hood.
Exhausted Sand Martin, Marazion Marsh
CHAPTER II
Lack of trees in Cornwall • lichens • Cornish cattle • birds on the cliffs • a wonderful spectacle • character of the Cornish cliffs • hunting the chough • disappearance of certain species of birds unexplained • Cornish tin mines • depressing effect • golden gorse • sea birds on the ledges • evening on the coast • a beautiful Cornish garden • unimaginative Man • a disfiguring advertisement • the tragic end of a beech avenue.
The uttermost ends of Britain have something in common; a windswept wilderness, a treeless land, the same weatherworn farms which crouch, like the few stunted thorn brakes, with their backs, as it were, to the sea. But unlike Caithness, Cornwall has a gentler climate and consequently there is a limited tree growth in the sheltered places, twisted ‘Arthur Rackhamish’ blackthorn, heavy and bearded with grey green lichen speckled with greyish blossoms in the spring of the year.
These blackthorn jungles form magnificent cover for the numerous small warblers on their spring and autumn migrations. There is something rather strange in hearing the chiffchaff’s clear lilting song and the bubbling spring of the whitethroat in a country so devoid of real trees. One associates their song with the deep and leafy woods, among the branching ferns and forest glades where the foxglove and willowherb raise their slender spires.
I have often wondered why these stunted blackthorn thickets are so smothered with lichen. Is it some protection to the branches from the cutting sea winds?
The apple orchards of Devon are the same, but only the very old trees are covered. Down on the cliff tops the lichens are of a different order, some a bright rusty gold, a most rare colour which is a lovely contrast to the grey granite. I was reminded, in looking at these many coloured lichens, growing in flat ‘seals’ on the boulders, of the colour schemes of two of the greatest of the world’s painters, Degas and Velazquez. Each artist was much in love with these soft harmonies, of grey and pink and gold.
Sometimes I have seen such a rock, smothered in gold and pink, against the green-blue of the sea below; then is the tonal and colour charm greater still.
As far as I remember, north of, say, Wick in Caithness there are no trees whatever, not even the stunted blackthorn one finds in Cornwall. Perhaps on those very northern hills the winds of winter are too fierce even for so hardy and iron-barked trees as the thorn.
I was amused the other day to see a Cornish farmer calling his cattle home on the cliffs by Gurnard’s Head. The beasts were graceful, slender legged creatures, Guernseys, which I believe are more intelligent than the slow-moving brown and white cows of my native county, which seem more like big tanks in action.
Cornish Cattle
The man stood by the gateway of the farm, clad in oilskins from top to boot as though he were a sailor, and his long drawn cry was like the call of a sea bird on the cliffs.
A gale was blowing off the sea, rain-charged and stinging, and as the cows came into view each beast held its head at an angle to the wind and rain with eyes half closed, just as a man turns his face against driving sleet. They all came running in a line, as gracefully as deer.
These cliff top farms are always interesting places, especially in spring. Numberless rabbits live in the blackthorn thickets and among the gorse on the hillsides. Their young must form the staple diet of marauding buzzards. The slow worm is common along the stony warm banks of North Cornwall and the farmer mentioned in the preceding chapter had seen them many times.
The commonest bird of the cliffs, if we do not count the gulls and kittiwakes, is the jackdaw. There must be many millions all down the north Cornish coast. They wheel and fly in clamouring cohorts, swirling round the granite stacks, speeding like chimney smuts over the dizzy precipices, ‘chakking’ and talking to one another as they toss and turn.
Once at the Horse’s Back I saw a wonderful picture of jackdaws. As I sat on the edge of the abyss a whole crowd of them, numbering about two hundred, suddenly came pouring over a rugged bastion of rock above my head and swooped with backswept wings in one long curved stream across the chasm.
That streak of speeding birds, forming such a graceful sinuous line which stretched, at one instant of time, from the uppermost rock to the far side of the Horse’s Back made a grand wild picture, as though some cavern had opened in that upper pinnacle to release a crowd of black spirits which had been imprisoned there, away from the sunlight and the clear sea-laden air.
They hurled themselves down with such abandonment and joy, twirling and rushing and vanishing, as suddenly as they had arrived, over the ridge of the Horse’s Back. I realized that never again would I, or any other, see such a spectacle, the same number of birds, the same light on the sea and cliffs, that same curling black thong, like the arc of a stock whip cutting across the sky, never again would that happen down the corridors of Time.
This knowledge made the experience even more precious. Do the same patterns in swirling water or in flame ever recur? I have often watched the ripples in the stream or the pattern of flame tongues in the fire and wondered if they are ever repeated. I doubt it, and in this way they resemble the stuff of which life is made.
All these cliffs on this part of the coast are adder haunted, especially on the lower heathery slopes. It is strange to note the change and character of the cliffs as one moves farther north. Around Tintagel and Boscastle, indeed all down that northern coast, the good honest granite is replaced by treacherous slate.
Slate cliffs are ugly both in colour and form, and are not nearly so impressive to my eye as the rounded bastions and pillars of lichen-stained granite. There is no need to warn the rambler on the west Cornish coast of falling slate, the cliffs are well bound with thrift and short sweet grass. Around Tintagel there are notices everywhere warning those on the beaches to look out for trouble.
I went to Tintagel to search for the chough, a bird I have never seen in its wild state. But alas! I was disappointed. I scanned the cliffs in vain for a pair of cherry-red legs and a curved red beak, only innumerable jackdaws swung in smutty bugling companies about the ivy-festooned cliffs. I did however see a pair of ravens which flew low over my head, passing guttural remarks, the male bird tumbling as he flew. As the raven is re-establishing itself I hope that the chough will do the same. I do not share the opinion of other naturalists that the jackdaw is the sole cause of its gradual disappearance, there have always been thousands of jackdaws in the cliffs.
Spring in Devon
We do not know the cause of increasing scarcity amongst birds and animals of certain species. The case of the bittern and other birds of the fens, such as the night reeler and bearded tit, can be explained by the drainage and consequent lack of suitable food and cover, but there are other species which seem to have no cause for dying out; the kite is one, and in the animal world, the red squirrel. Everyone knows that the kite was at one time a scavenger of London’s streets, yet at the present time there are only a few breeding pairs left in Wales. As to the red squirrel I touch on this in a later chapter.
Inland Cornwall depresses me, as I suppose it does most people. I dislike saying unkind things about any county, but the numerous tin mines and patched up mean fences (every gap seems to have a rusty bedstead wedged across it, there must be enough old iron in Cornwall to build a fleet), the starved fields with their crumbling turf banks, weigh heavily on the spirit. Maybe it is the lack of trees which depresses me. I love trees, without them I am miserable, save in the down country, and even there one finds noble beech groves in the sheltered coombes. The deep grassy glade and rustling floor of woodland leaves enchants me.
In Cornwall the only thing to break the monotony of the criss-cross walls and banks is an occasional tall chimney or a careless jumble of grey stone, not piled majestically as those Devon tors, but a welter of shapeless stone, all higgledy piggledy anyhow.
There is something very Irish in some parts of the Cornish landscape, the same sense of man’s weariness in battling with a stony and unkind ground.
