Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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Not far from the hop-kiln I found a place where charcoal-burning was
carried on. The brown charcoal-burner, upright as a bolt, walked slowly
round the smouldering heap, and wherever flame seemed inclined to break
out cast damp ashes upon the spot. Six or seven water-butts stood in a
row for his use. To windward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles
as they are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break the
force of the draught along the hill-side, which would have caused too
fierce a fire. At one side stood his hut of poles meeting in a cone,
wrapped round with rough canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short
ladder, he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent half double,
and fitted to a handle in the same way as a spade. This was for sifting
charcoal when burned, and separating the small from the larger pieces.
Every now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and drifted along;
it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick smell of smothered wood coal, to
me not disagreeable, but to some people so annoying that they have been
known to leave their houses and abandon a locality where charcoal-burning
was practised. Dim memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible
to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met
with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the
noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their
castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is
there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other
mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which
of yore stretched between cultivated places. I looked at the modern
charcoal-burner with interest. He was brown, good-looking, upright, and
distinctly superior in general style to the common run of working men. He
spoke without broad accent and used correct language; he was well
educated and up to the age. He knew his own mind, and had an independent
expression; a very civil, intelligent, and straightforward man. No rude
charcoal-burner of old days this. We stood close to the highway road; a
gentleman's house was within stone's throw; the spot, like the man, was
altogether the reverse of what we read in ancient story. Yet such is the
force of association that I could not even now divest myself of those dim
memories and living dreams of old; there seemed as it were the clank of
armour, a rustic of pennons in the leaves; it would have been quite
natural to hold bow and arrow in the hand. The man was modern, but his
office was ancient. The descent was unbroken. The charcoal-burner traced
back to the Norman Conquest. That very spot where we stood, now
surrounded with meadows and near dwellings, scarcely thirty years since
had formed part of one of the largest of the old forests. It was forest
land. Woods away on the slope still remained to witness to traditions. As
the charcoal-burner worked beside the modern highway, so his trade had
come down and was still practised in the midst of modern trades, in these
times of sea-coal and steam. He told me that he and his brothers were
maintained by charcoal-burning the year through, and, it appeared, in a
very comfortable position. They only burned a small quantity here; they
moved about from place to place in the woods, according as the timber was
thrown. They often stopped for weeks in the woods, watching the fires all
night. A great part of the work was done in the winter, beginning in
October--after the hop-picking. Now resting in his lonely hut, now
walking round and tending the smoking heap, the charcoal-burner watched
out the long winter nights while the stars drifted over the leafless
trees, till the grey dawn came with hoar-frost. He liked his office, but
owned that the winter nights were very long. Starlight and frost and slow
time are the same now as when the red deer and the wild boar dwelt in the
forest. Much of the charcoal was prepared for hop-drying, large
quantities being used for that purpose. At one time a considerable amount
was rebaked for patent fuel, and the last use to which it had been put
was in carrying out some process with Australian meat. It was still
necessary in several trades. Goldsmiths used charcoal for soldering. They
preferred the charcoal made from the thick bark of the butts of birch
trees. At the foot or butt of the birch the bark grows very thick, in
contrast to the rind higher, which is thinner than on other trees. Lord
Sheffield's mansion at Fletching was the last great house he knew that
was entirely warmed with charcoal, nothing else being burnt. Charcoal was
still used in houses for heating plates. But the principal demand seemed
to be for hop-drying purposes--the charcoal burned in the kiln where I
had been resting was made on the spot. This heap he was now burning was
all of birch poles, and would be four days and four nights completing. On
the fourth morning it was drawn, and about seventy sacks were filled, the
charcoal being roughly sorted.

The ancient forest land is still wild enough, there is no seeming end to
the heath and fern on the ridges or to the woods in the valleys. These
moor-like stretches bear a resemblance to parts of Exmoor. The oaks that
once reached from here to the sea-shore were burned to smelt the iron in
the days when Sussex was the great iron land. For charcoal the vast
forests were cut down; it seems strange to think that cannon were once
cast--the cannon that won India for us--where now the hops grow and the
plough travels slowly, so opposite as they are to the roaring furnace and
the ringing hammer. Burned and blasted by the heat, the ground where the
furnaces were still retains the marks of the fire. But to-day there is
silence; the sunshine lights up the purple heather and the already
yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the
stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind
to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place
that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression
of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road--up the
hill--it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and
firm, and fit for any traffic; but a growth of minute weeds has sprung
up, and upon these our wheels leave their marks. Of roads that have
become grass--grown in war--desolated countries we have all read, but
this is our own unscathed England.

The nature of the ancient forest, its quiet and untrodden silence,
adheres to the site. Far down in the valley there is more stirring, and
the way is well pulverised. In the hollow there is an open space, backed
by the old beech trees of the park, dotted with ashes, and in the midst a
farmhouse partly timbered. Here by the road-side they point out to you a
low mound, at the very edge of the road, which could easily be passed
unnoticed as a mere heap of scrapings overgrown with weeds and thistles.
On looking closer it appears more regularly shaped; it is indeed a grave.
Of old time an unfortunate woman committed suicide, and according to the
barbarous law of those days her body was buried at the cross-roads and a
stake driven through it. That was the end so far as the brutal law of the
land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to
this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however
beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always
a melancholy feeling in passing the place. This thistle-grown mound
saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were,
under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark
of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human
being has passed into dust. The circumstance of the mound having been
kept up so many years bears curious testimony to the force of tradition.
Many writers altogether deny the value of tradition. Dr. Schliemann's
spade, however, found Troy. Perhaps tradition is like the fool of the
saying, and is sometimes right.

SWALLOW-TIME

The cave-swallows have come at last with the midsummer-time, and the hay
and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has
been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so
delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human
fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical
circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the
compasses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green
cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, and all things that say, 'It
is summer.' Not many of them even now, sometimes only two in the air
together, sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very greatest
number--a mere handful, for these cave-swallows at such times should
crowd the sky. The white bars across their backs should be seen gliding
beside the dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should be seen
everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the eaves, where half last
year's nest remains; over the meadows and high up in the blue ether.
White breasts should gleam in the azure height, appearing and
disappearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide through those
long boomerang-like flights that suddenly take them a hundred yards
aside. They should crowd the sky together with the ruddy-throated
chimney-swallows, and the great swifts; but though it is hay-time and the
apples are set, yet eight eave-swallows is the largest number I have
counted in one afternoon. They did not come at all in the spring. After
the heavy winter cleared away, the delicate willow-wrens soon sang in the
tops of the beautiful green larches, the nightingale came, and the
cuckoo, the chimney-swallow, the doves softly cooing as the oaks came
into leaf, and the black swifts. Up to May 26 there were no eave-swallows
at the Sussex hill-side where these notes were taken; that is more than a
month later than the date of their usual arrival, which would be about
the middle of April. After this they gradually came back. The
chimney-swallows were not so late, but even they are not so numerous as
usual. The swifts seem to have come more in their accustomed numbers.
Now, the swallows are, of all others, the summer birds. As well suppose
the trees without leaves as the summer air without swallows. Ever since
of old time the Greeks went round from house to house in spring singing
the swallow song, these birds have been looked upon as the friends of
man, and almost as the very givers of the sunshine.

The swallow's come, winging
His way to us here;
Fair hours is he bringing,
And a happy new year!

They had a song for everything, the mill song, the reapers' song, just as
in Somerset, the apple country, they still have a cider song, or perhaps,
rather, an orchard song. Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay
and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of
the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn
festival. It seems so natural that the events of the year should be met
with a song. But somehow a very hard and unobservant spirit has got
abroad into our rural life, and people do not note things as the old folk
did. They do not mark the coming of the swallows, nor any of the dates
that make the woodland almanack. It is a pity that there should be such
indifference--that the harsh ways of the modern town should press so
heavily on the country. This summer, too, there seems a marked absence of
bees, butterflies, and other insects in the fields. One bee will come
along, calling at every head of white clover. By-and-by you may see one
more calling at the heathbells, and nothing else, as in each journey they
visit only the flower with which they began. Then there will be quite an
interval before a third bee is seen, and a fourth may be found dead
perhaps on the path, besides which you may not notice any more. For a
whole hour you may not observe a humble-bee, and the wasp-like
hover-flies, that are generally past all thought of counting, are
scarcely seen. A blue butterfly we found in the dust of the road, without
the spirit to fly, and lifted him into a field to let him have a chance
of life; a few tortoiseshells, and so on--even the white butterflies are
quite uncommon, the whites that used to drift along like snowflakes.
Where are they all? Did the snow kill them? Is there any connection
between the absence of insects and the absence of swallows? If so, how
did the swallows know beforehand, without coming, that there were no
insects for them? Yet the midsummer hum, the deep humming sound in the
atmosphere above, has been loud and persistent over the hayfields, so
that there must have been the usual myriads of the insects that cause
this sound. While I was thinking in this way a swallow alighted on the
turf, picked up a small white moth from among the short grass, and went
off with it. In gloomy overcast weather the swallows at the sea-side
frequently alight on the pebbles of the beach to pick up the insects
which will not rise and fly. Some beaches and sandbanks are much
frequented by insects, and black clouds of them sometimes come drifting
along, striking the face like small hail.

When swallows fly low, just skimming the ground, it is supposed to be a
sign of rain. During the frequent intervals of heavy, overcast weather
which have marked this summer, they might have been observed flying low
for a week together without a spot of rain falling. Chilly air drives
insects downwards, and, indeed, paralyses a great many of them
altogether. It is a fall of temperature, and not wet, that makes the
swallows chase their prey low down. Insects are not much afraid of rain
if it is warm and soft, so that in the midst of showers, if there is
sunshine too, you may see the swallows high in the atmosphere. It is when
they fly low, but just missing the grass, that their wonderful powers of
flight appear. In the air above there are no obstacles, and if you shoot
an arrow it travels to the end of its journey without let or hindrance;
there are no streets there to turn corners, no narrow lanes, no trees or
hedges. When the shallow comes down to the earth his path is no longer
that of the immortals, his way is as the way of men, constantly
obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his
passage. Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a
manner that it might travel about seven inches above the ground--how far
would it go before it would strike a tall buttercup, a wiry bennet, or
stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power
to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between
the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men or animals, not to
come in contact with other animated arrows, and by some mysterious
instinct to know what is or what is not out of sight on the other side of
the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest of narrow lanes, a
hedge at the back, in front thick fir trees, whose boughs touched the
ground, almost within reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader
footpath. It was one of those overcast days when the shelter of the hedge
and the furze was pleasant in July. Suddenly a swallow slid by me as it
seemed underneath my very hands, so close to the ground that he almost
travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part would have stopped
him. Almost before I could lift my head he had reached the end of the
lane and rose over the gate into the road--not a moments pause before he
made that leap over the gate to see if there was a waggon or not in the
way; a waggon-load of hay would have blocked the road entirely. How did
he know that a man or a horse would not step into his course at the
instant he topped the bar?

A swallow never hesitates, never looks before he leaps, threads all day
the eyes of needles, and goes on from half-past two in the morning till
ten at night, without so much as disturbing a feather. He is the
perfection of a machine for falling. His round nest is under the eaves,
he throws himself out of window and begins to fall, and keeps on fall,
fall, for twenty hours together. His head is bullet-shaped, his neck
short, his body all thickened up to the shoulders, tailing out to the
merest streak of feather. His form is like a plummet--he is not unlike
the heavily weighted minnow used in trolling for pike. Before the bend of
the firmly elastic rod, the leaded minnow slides out through the air,
running true and sinking without splash into the water. It is
proportioned and weighted so that its flight, which is a long fall, may
be smooth, and perfectly under control. If wings could be put to the
minnow, it would somewhat resemble the swallow. For the swallow is made
to fall, and his wings to catch him, and by resisting his descent these
outstretched planes lift him again into the sky. He does not fall
perpendicularly, the angle of his fall is prolonged and very low, and the
swifter he goes the more nearly it approximates to the horizontal. I
think he goes swifter when flying just over the ground than when lounging
in the easy hammock of the atmosphere. My swallow that came down the
lane, in twenty yards opened his wings twenty times and checked his fall,
almost grazing the earth, and imperceptibly rose a little, like a flat
stone thrown by a boy which suddenly runs up into the air at the end of
its flight. He made no blow with his wings; they were simply put out to
collect the air in the hollow of their curves, and so prolong his fall.
Falling from morn till night, he throws himself on his way, a machine for
turning gravity into a motive force. He fits to the circumstances of his
flight as water fits to the circumstances of the vessel into which it is
poured. No thought, no stop, no rest. If a waggon had been in the way,
still he would have got left or right through the very eye of the needle.
If a man had been passing, the rush of his wings would not have disturbed
the light smoke from his cigar. Farther up the lane there are two
gateways opposite without gates. Through these swallows are continually
dashing, and I have often felt when coming up the lane as if I must step
on them, and half checked myself. I might as well try to step on
lightning. A swallow came over the sharp ridge of a slate roof and met a
slight current of wind which blew against that side of the shed and rose
up it. The bird remained there suspended with outstretched wings, resting
on the up-current as if the air had been solid, for some moments. He rode
there at anchor in the air. So buoyant is the swallow that it is no more
to him to fly than it is to the fish to swim; and, indeed, I think that a
trout in a swift mountain stream needs much greater strength to hold
himself in the rapid day and night without rest. The friction of the
water is constant against him, and he never folds his fins and sleeps.
The more I think the more I am convinced that the buoyancy of the air is
very far greater than science admits, and under certain conditions it is
superior to water as a supporting medium. Swift and mobile as is the
swallow's wing, how much swifter and how much more mobile must be his
eye! This rapid and ever-changing course is not followed for pleasure as
if it were a mazy dance. The whole time as he floats, and glides, and
wheels, his eye is intent on insects so small as to be invisible to us at
a very short distance. These he gathers in the air, he sees what we
cannot see, his eyes are to our eyes as his wings are to our limbs. If
still further we were to consider the flow of the nerve force between the
eye, the mind, and the wing, we should be face to face with problems
which quite upset the ordinary ideas of matter as a solid thing. How is
it that dull matter becomes thus inexpressibly sensitive? Is not the
swallow's eye a miracle? Then his heart, for he sings as he flies; he
makes love and converses, and all as he rushes along--his hopes, his
fears, his little store of knowledge, and his wonderful journey by-and-by
to Africa. Remember, he carries his life in his wings as we should say in
our hands, for if by chance he should strike a solid object, his great
speed renders the collision certain death. It stuns him, and if he
recovers from that his beak is usually broken so that he must starve.
Happily such accidents are rare. The great rapidity of a bird's heart
beating so fast seems to render it peculiarly susceptible to death from
shock. Great fright will sometimes kill a bird, as for instance, when
they have wandered inside a room, and been thoughtlessly held in some
one's hand. Without visible injury, the heart, after beating excessively
violently, almost as rapidly slows, the nictitating membrane is drawn
over the eyes, the head falls to one side, and the bird becomes lifeless
from nervous exhaustion. The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for
they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our
hearts.

BUCKHURST PARK.

An old beech tree had been broken off about five feet from the ground,
and becoming hollow within, was filled with the decay of its own
substance. In this wood-sorrel had taken root, and flower and leaf
covered the space within, white flower and green leaf flourishing on old
age. The wood-sorrel leaf, the triune leaf, is perhaps more lovely even
than the flower, like a more delicately shaped clover of a tenderer
green, and it lasts far on into the autumn. When the violet leaves are no
more looked for, when the cowslips have gone, and the bluebells have left
nothing behind them but their nodding seed-cases, still the wood-sorrel
leaf stays on the mound, in shape and colour the same, and as pleasantly
acid to the taste now under the ripening nuts as in May. At its coming it
is folded almost like a. green flower; at Midsummer, when you are
gathering ferns, you find its trefoil deep under the boughs; it grows,
too, in the crevices of the rock over the spring. The whortleberry
leaves, that were green as the myrtle when the wood-sorrel was in bloom,
have faded somewhat now that their berries are ripening. Another beech
has gone over, and lies at full length, a shattered tube, as it were, of
timber; for it is so rotten within, and so hollow and bored, it is little
else than bark. Others that stand are tubes on end, with rounded
knot-holes, loved by the birds, that let air and moisture into the very
heart of the wood. They are hardly safe in a strong wind. Others again,
very large and much shorter, have sent up four trunks from one root, a
little like a banyan, quadruple trees built for centuries, throwing
abroad a vast roof of foliage, whose green in the midst of summer is made
brown by sacks and sacks of beech nuts. These are the trees to camp by,
and that are chosen by painters. The bark of the beech is itself a panel
to study, spotted with velvet moss brown-green, made grey with
close-grown lichen, stained with its own hues of growth, and toned by
time. To these add bright sunlight and leaf shadow, the sudden lowering
of tint as a cloud passes, the different aspects of the day and the
evening, and the changes of rain and dry weather. You may look at the
bark of a beech twenty times and always find it different. After crossing
Virgil's Bridge in the deep coombe at the bottom of Marden Hill these
great beeches begin, true woodland trees, and somehow more forest-like
than the hundreds and hundreds of acres of fir trees that are called
forest. There is another spirit among the beech trees; they look like
deer and memories of old English life.

The wood cooper follows his trade in a rude shed, splitting poles and
making hoops the year through, in warm summer and iron-clad winter. His
shed is always pitched at the edge of a great woodland district. Where
the road has worn in deeply the roots of the beeches hang over, twisted
in and out like a giant matting, a kind of cave under them. Dark yew
trees and holly trees stand here and there; a yew is completely barked on
one side, stripped clean. If you look close you will see scores in the
wood as if made with a great nail. Those who know Exmoor will recognise
these signs in a moment; it is a fraying-post where the stags rubbed the
velvet from their horns last summer. There are herds of red deer in the
park. At one time there were said to be almost as many as run free and
wild over the expanse of Exmoor. They mark the trees very much,
especially those with the softer bark. Wire fencing has been put round
many of the hollies to protect them. A stag occasionally leaps the
boundary and forages among the farmers' corn, or visits a garden, and
then the owner can form some idea of what must have been the difficulties
of agriculture in mediaeval days. Deer more than double the interest of a
park. A park without deer is like a wall without pictures. However well
proportioned the room, something is lacking if the walls be blank.
However noble the oaks and wide the sweep of sward, there is something
wanting if antlers do not rise above the fern. The pictures that the deer
make are moving and alive; they dissolve and re-form in a distant frame
of tree and brake. Lately the herd has been somewhat thinned, having
become too numerous. One slope is bare of grass, a patch of yellow sand,
which if looked at intently from a distance seems presently to be all
alive like mites in cheese, so thick are the rabbits in the warren. Under
a little house, as it were, built over a stream is a chalybeate fountain
with virtues like those of Tunbridge Wells.

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