Field and Hedgerow

R >> Richard Jefferies >> Field and Hedgerow

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The park is open to visitors--here comes a gay four-in-hand heavily
loaded sweeping by on its road to that summer town. There is much
ironstone in the soil round about. At the edge of the park stands an old
farmhouse of timber and red tile, with red oast-house beside it, built
with those gables which our ancestors seemed to think made such excellent
rooms within. Our modern architects try to make their rooms
mathematically square, a series of brick boxes, one on the other like
pigeon-holes in a bureau, with flat ceilings and right angles in the
corners, and are said to go through a profound education before they can
produce these wonderful specimens of art. If our old English folk could
not get an arched roof, then they loved to have it pointed, with polished
timber beams in which the eye rested as in looking upwards through a
tree. Their rooms they liked of many shapes, and not at right angles in
the corners, nor all on the same dead level of flooring. You had to go up
a step into one, and down a step into another, and along a winding
passage into a third, so that each part of the house had its
individuality. To these houses life fitted itself and grew to them; they
were not mere walls, but became part of existence. A man's house was not
only his castle, a man's house was himself. He could not tear himself
away from his house, it was like tearing up the shrieking mandrake by the
root, almost death itself. Now we walk in and out of our brick boxes
unconcerned whether we live in this villa or that, here or yonder. Dark
beams inlaid in the walls support the gables; heavier timber, placed
horizontally, forms, as it were, the foundation of the first floor. This
horizontal beam has warped a little in the course of time, the alternate
heat and cold of summers and winters that make centuries. Up to this beam
the lower wall is built of brick set to the curve of the timber, from
which circumstance it would appear to be a modern insertion. The beam, we
may be sure, was straight originally, and the bricks have been fitted to
the curve which it subsequently took. Time, no doubt, ate away the lower
work of wood, and necessitated the insertion of new materials. The slight
curve of the great beam adds, I think, to the interest of the old place,
for it is a curve that has grown and was not premeditated; it has grown
like the bough of a tree, not from any set human design. This, too, is
the character of the house. It is not large, nor overburdened with
gables, not ornamental, nor what is called striking, in any way, but
simply an old English house, genuine and true. The warm sunlight falls on
the old red tiles, the dark beams look the darker for the glow of light,
the shapely cone of the hop-oast rises at the end; there are swallows and
flowers, and ricks and horses, and so it is beautiful because it is
natural and honest. It is the simplicity that makes it so touching, like
the words of an old ballad. Now at Mayfield there is a timber house which
is something of a show place, and people go to see it, and which
certainly has many more lines in its curves and woodwork, but yet did not
appeal to me, because it seemed too purposely ornamental. A house
designed to look well, even age has not taken from it its artificiality.
Neither is there any cone nor cart-horses about. Why, even a tall
chanticleer makes a home look homely. I do like to see a tall proud
chanticleer strutting in the yard and barely giving way as I advance,
almost ready to do battle with a stranger like a mastiff. So I prefer the
simple old home by Buckhurst Park.

The beeches and oaks become fewer as the ground rises, there are wide
spaces of bracken and little woods or copses, every one of which is
called a 'shaw.' Then come the firs, whose crowded spires, each touching
each, succeed for miles, and cover the hill-side with a solid mass of
green. They seem so close together, so thickened and matted, impenetrable
to footsteps, like a mound of earth rather than woods, a solid block of
wood; but there are ways that wind through and space between the taller
trunks when you come near. The odour of firs is variable; sometimes it
fills the air, sometimes it is absent altogether, and doubtless depends
upon certain conditions of the atmosphere. A very small pinch of the
fresh shoot is pleasant to taste; these shoots, eaten constantly, were
once considered to cure chest disease, and to this day science endeavours
by various forms of inhalations from fir products to check that malady.
Common rural experience, as with the cow-pox, has often laid the basis of
medical treatment. Certain it is that it is extremely pleasant and
grateful to breathe the sweet fragrance of the fir deep in the woods,
listening to the soft caressing sound of the wind that passes high
overhead. The willow-wren sings, but his voice and that of the wind seem
to give emphasis to the holy and meditative silence. The mystery of
nature and life hover about the columned temple of the forest. The secret
is always behind a tree, as of old time it was always behind the pillar
of the temple. Still higher, and as the firs cease, and shower and
sunshine, wind and dew, can reach the ground unchecked, comes the tufted
heath and branched heather of the moorland top. A thousand acres of
purple heath sloping southwards to the sun, deep valleys of dark heather;
further slopes beyond of purple, more valleys of heather--the heath shows
more in the sunlight, and heather darkens the shadow of the hollows--and
so on and on, mile after mile, till the heath-bells seem to end in the
sunset. Round and beyond is the immense plain of the air---you feel how
limitless the air is at this height, for there is nothing to measure it
by. Past the weald lie the South Downs, but they form no boundary, the
plain of the air goes over them to the sea and space.

This wild tract of Ashdown Forest bears much resemblance to Exmoor; you
may walk, or you may ride, for hours and meet no one; and if black game
were to start up it would not surprise you in the least. There seems room
enough to chase the red stag from Buckhurst Park with horn and hound
till, mayhap, he ended in the sea at Pevensey. Buckhurst Park is the
centre of this immense manor. Of old time the deer did run wild, and were
hunted till the pale was broken in the great Civil War. The 'Forest' is
still in every one's mouth--'on the Forest,' 'by the Forest,' 'in' it, or
'over' it, everything comes from the 'Forest,' even stone to mend the
roads, or 'through the Forest,' as up from Brighton. People say this farm
used to be forest, or this garden or this house was the first built on
the forest. The enclosures are small, and look as if they had been hewn
out of wood or stubbed out of heather, and there are numbers of small
owners or settlers. Here and there a house stands, as it seems, alone in
the world on the Forest ridge, thousands of acres of heather around, the
deep weald underneath--as at Duddleswell, a look-out, as it were, over
the earth. Forest Row, where they say the courtiers had their booths in
ancient hunting days; Forest Fold, Boar's-head Street, Greenwood
Gate--all have a forest sound; and what prettier name could there be than
Sweet-Haws? Greybirchet Wood, again; Mossbarn, Highbroom, and so on.
Outlying woods in every direction are fragments of the forest, you cannot
get away from it; and look over whatever gate you will, there is always a
view. In the vale, if you look over a gate you only see that field and
nothing beyond; the view is bounded by the opposite hedge. Here there is
always a deep coombe, or the top of a wood underneath, or a rising slope,
or a distant ridge crowned with red-tiled farmstead, red-coned
oast-house, and tall spruce firs. Or far away, miles and miles, the
fields of the weald pushed close together by distance till in a surface
no larger than the floor of a room there are six or seven farms and a
village. Clouds drift over; it is a wonderful observatory for cloud
studies; they seem so close, the light is so strong, and there is nothing
to check the sight as far as its powers will reach. Clouds come up no
wider than a pasture-field, but in length stretching out to the very
horizon, dividing the blue sky into two halves; but then every day has
its different clouds--the fleets of heaven that are always sailing on and
know no haven.

HOUSE-MARTINS.

Of five houses, a stable, and chapel wall, much frequented by martins,
the aspects were as follows:--House No. 1, nests on the north side, south
side, and east, both the south and east very warm; No. 2, on the south
and east walls--these walls met in an angle, and as it were enclosed the
sunbeams, making it very heated sometimes; No. 3, on the south and west
walls, the warmest sides of the building; No. 4, all along under the
southern eaves, a very warm wall; No. 5, also under the southern eaves,
and not elsewhere. The stable fronted south; there were nests front and
back, north and south; the chapel eave that was frequented faced towards
the west. In the case of several other houses the nests were on the sunny
side; but I am not so well acquainted with the localities. So far as my
observation goes, I think the house-martin--with all the swallow
tribe--prefers warmth, and, if possible, chooses the sunny side of a
building. A consideration, however, that weighs much with this bird is
the character of the take-off; he likes a space immediately in front of
his nest, free of trees or other obstructions, so that when rushing out
from his little doorway he may not strike against anything. For ages it
has also been remarked that the house-martin likes the proximity of man,
and will build by choice in or over a porch or doorway, whether of house
or stable, or over a window--somewhere where man is about. It is curious
that in this country, so subject to cold and cold winds, so many houses
are built to face north or east, and this fact often compels the
house-martin to build that side, the back of a house being frequently
obstructed. In the case of house No. 1 there was a clear take-off on the
north side, also with the stable. Houses are generally built to face the
road, quite irrespective of the aspect, which custom is the origin of
many cheerless dwellings. I think that house-martin fledglings and eggs
are capable of enduring the utmost heat of our English summer, and the
nests found deserted were abandoned for some other reason. More likely
that the deficiency of insect food caused by the inclement weather
weakened the parent. Sometimes these harmless and useful birds are
cruelly shot. I have never seen a nest injured by heats; on the contrary,
I should imagine that heat would cause the mortar to cohere more firmly,
and that damp would be much more likely to make it unsafe. At house No. 2
the heat in the angle of the two walls was scarcely bearable on a July
day. If a nest were taken down and put in an oven I should doubt if it
would crack. In nature, however, everything depends on locality. The
roads in that locality were mended with flint, and the mortar from
puddles appeared to make good cement. Possibly in some districts there
may be no lime or silicon, and the mortar the birds use may be less
adherent. The more one studies nature the more one becomes convinced that
it is an error to suppose things proceed by a regular rule always
applicable everywhere. All creatures change their habits with
circumstances; consequently no observation can be accepted as final.

AMONG THE NUTS.

The nuts are ripening once more, and it is almost the time to go
a-gipsying--the summer passes like the shadow of a cloud which strikes
the edge of the yellow wheat and comes over and is gone; it does not give
you time to rub out a single ear of corn. Before it is possible to gather
the harvest of thought and observation the summer has passed, and we must
bind the hastily stitched book with the crimson leaves of autumn. Under
these very hazel boughs only yesterday, _i.e._ in May, looking for
cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, there rolled down a brown
last year's nut from among the moss of the bank. In the side of this
little brown nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with a
sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling. Through this hole
the kernel had been extracted by the skilful mouse. Two more nuts were
found on the same bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked as
if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed. Unless the nut had
shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once;
it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same
amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so,
dividing the shell in two, would have let the kernel out bodily--a plan
more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to
nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily
swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick
hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals,
there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers. His quick eye--you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'--caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent--a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.

The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked head, fits in
perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.
The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling
than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the
adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This
adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to
be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just
there--a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. We saw, too, a very
large lizard under the heath. Three little effets (efts) ran into one
hole on the bank yesterday. Some of the men in spring went off into the
woods to 'flawing,' _i.e._ to barking the oak which is thrown in May--the
bark is often used now for decoration, like the Spanish cork bark. Some
were talking already of the 'grit' work and looking forward to it, that
is, to mowing and haymaking, which mean better wages. The farmers were
grumbling that their oats were cuckoo oats, not sown till the cuckoo
cried, and not likely to come to much. So, indeed, it fell out, for the
oats looked very thin and spindly when the nuts turned rosy again. At
work hoeing among the 'kelk' or 'kilk,' the bright yellow charlock, the
labourers stood up as the cuckoo flew over singing, and blew cuckoo back
to him in their hollow fists. This is a trick they have, something like
whistling in the fist, and so naturally done as to deceive any one. The
children had been round with the May garland, which takes the place of
the May-pole, and is carried slung on a stick, and covered with a white
cloth, between two little girls. The cloth is to keep the dust and sun
from spoiling the flowers--the rich golden kingcups and the pale anemones
trained about two hoops, one within the other. They take the cloth off to
show you the garland, and surely you must pay them a penny for thought of
old England. Yet there are some who would like to spoil this innocent
festival. I have heard of some wealthy people living in a village who do
their utmost to break up the old custom by giving presents of money to
all the poor children who will go to school on that day instead of
a-Maying. A very pitiful thing truly! Give them the money, and let them
go a-Maying as well. The same bribe they repeat at Christmas to stay the
boys from going round mumming. It is in spring that the folk make most
use of herbs, such as herb tea of gorse bloom. One cottage wife exclaimed
that she had no patience with women so ignorant they did not know how to
use herbs, as wood-sage or wood-betony. Most of the gardens have a few
plants of the milky-veined holy thistle--good, they say, against
inflammations, and in which they have much faith. Soon after the May
garlands the meadow orchis comes up, which is called 'dead men's hands,'
and after that the 'ram's-horn' orchis, which has a twisted petal; and in
the evening the bat, which they call flittermouse, appears again.

The light is never the same on a landscape many minutes together, as all
know who have tried, ever so crudely, to fix the fleeting expression of
the earth with pencil. It is ever changing, and in the same way as you
walk by the hedges day by day there is always some fresh circumstance of
nature, the interest of which in a measure blots out the past. This
morning we found a bramble leaf, something about which has for the moment
put the record of months aside. This bramble leaf was marked with a grey
streak, which coiled and turned and ran along beside the midrib, forming
a sort of thoughtless design, a design without an idea. The Greek fret
seems to our eyes in its regularity and its repetition to have a human
thought in it. The coils and turns upon this leaf, like many other
markings of nature, form a designless design, the idea of which is not
traceable back to a mind. They are the work of a leaf-boring larva which
has eaten its way between the two skins of the leaf, much like boring a
tunnel between the two surfaces of a sheet of paper. If you take a needle
you can insert the point in the burrow and pass it along wherever the
bore is straight, so that the needle lies between the to sides of the
leaf. Off-hand, if any one were asked if it were possible to split a
leaf, he would say no. This little creature, however, has worked along
inside it, and lived there. The upper surface of the leaf is a darker
green, and seems to the touch of firmer texture than the lower; there are
no marks on the under surface, which does not seem touched, so that what
the creature has really done is to split one surface. He has eaten along
underneath it, raising it no doubt a little by the thickness of his body,
as if you crept between the carpet and the floor. The softer under
surface representing the floor is untouched. The woodbine leaves are
often bored like this, and seem to have patterns traced upon them. There
is no particle of matter so small but that it seems to have a living
thing working at it and resolving it into still more minute atoms;
nothing so insignificant but that upon examination it will be found to be
of the utmost value to something alive. Upon almost every fir branch near
the end there are little fragments like cotton, so thick in places as to
quite hang the boughs with threads; these gossamer-like fragments appear
to be left by some insect, perhaps an aphis; and it is curious to note
how very very busy the little willow-wrens are in the fir boughs. They
are constantly at work there; they sing in the firs in the earliest
spring, they stay there all the summer, and now that the edge of autumn
approaches their tiny beaks are still picking up insects the whole day
long. The insects they devour must be as numerous as the fir needles that
lie inches thick on the ground in the copse.

Across a broad, dry, sandy path, worn firm, some thousands of ants
passing to and fro their nest had left a slight trail. They were hurrying
on in full work, when I drew the top of my walking-stick across their
road, obliterating about an inch of it. In an instant the work of the
nest was stopped, and thousands upon thousands of factory hands were
thrown out of employment. The walking-stick had left two little ridges of
sand like minute parallel earthworks drawn across their highway. Those
that came out of the nest on arriving at the little ridge on their side
immediately stopped, worked their antennae in astonishment, then went up
to the top of it, and seemed to try to look round. After a moment they
ran back and touched those that were coming on to communicate the
intelligence. Every ant that came did exactly the same thing; not one of
them passed the little ridge, but all returned. By-and-by the head of the
column began to spread out and search right and left for the lost track.
They scouted this way and they scouted that, they turned and doubled and
went through every possible evolution, hundreds of them, sometimes a
score at once, yet not one of them attempted to go straight forward,
which would have brought them into their old path. It was scarcely thrice
the length of an ant's body to where their path began again; they could
not see or scent, or in any way find out what was so short a distance in
front of them. The most extraordinary thing was that not one ventured to
explore straight forward; it was as if their world came to an end at that
little ridge, and they were afraid to step into chaos. The same actions
were going on behind the other ridge of sand just opposite, an inch away.
There the column of ants that had been out foraging was met with a like
difficulty, and could not find their way. There, too, hundreds of ants
were exploring right and left in every direction except straight forward,
in a perfect buzz of excitement. Once or twice an ant from either party
happened to mount on the parallel ridges at the same time, and if they
had strained forward and stretched out their antennae they could have
almost touched each other. Yet they seemed quite unconscious of each
other's presence. Unless in a well-worn groove a single ant appears
incapable of running in a straight line. At first their motions searching
about suggested the action of a pack of hounds making a cast; hounds,
however, would have very soon gone forward and so picked up the trail.

If I may make a guess at the cause of this singular confusion, I think I
should attribute it to some peculiarity in the brain of the ant, or else
to some consideration of which we are ignorant, but which weighs with
ants, and not to any absence of the physical senses. Because they do not
do as we should do under similar circumstances is no proof that they do
not possess the power to hear and see. Experiments, for instance, have
been made with bees to find out if they have any sense of hearing, by
shouting close to a bee, drawing discordant notes on the violin, striking
pieces of metal together, and so on, to all of which the bee remained
indifferent. What else could she do? Neither of these sounds hurt if she
heard them, nor seemed to threaten danger; they simply conveyed no
impression at all to her mind. Observe your favourite pussy curled up in
the arm-chair at such time as she knows the dishes have been cleared
away, and there is no more chance of wheedling a titbit from you. You may
play the piano, or the violin, or knock with a hammer, or shout your
loudest, she will take no notice, no more than if she actually had no
ears at all. Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you? As
well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not
shout in answer to it. Such noises simply do not concern her, and she
takes no notice. Now, though her eyes be closed, let a strange dog run
in, and at the light pad pad of his feet, scarcely audible on the carpet,
she is up in a moment, blazing with wrath. That is a sound that interests
her. So, too, perhaps, it may be with ants and bees, who may hear and
see, and yet take no apparent notice because the circumstances are not
interesting, and the experiment is to them unintelligible. Fishes in
particular have been often, I think, erroneously judged in this way, and
have been considered deaf, and to have little intelligence, while in
truth the fact is we have not discovered a way of communicating with them
any more than they have found a way of talking with us. Fishes, I know,
are keener of sight than I am when they are interested, and I believe
they can hear equally well, and are not by any means without mind. These
ants that acted so foolishly to appearance may have been influenced by
some former experience of which we know nothing; there may be something
in the past history of the ant which may lead them to profoundly suspect
interference with their path as indicative of extreme danger. Once,
perhaps, many ant-generations ago, there was some creature which acted
thus in order to destroy them. This, of course, is merely an illustration
put forward to suggest the idea that there may be a reason in the brain
of the ant of which we know nothing. I do not know that I myself am any
more rational, for looking back along the path of life I can see now how
I turned and twisted and went to the right and the left in the most
crooked manner, putting myself to endless trouble, when by taking one
single step straight forward in the right direction, if I had only known,
I might have arrived at once at the goal. Can any of us look beyond the
little ridge of one day and see what will happen the day after? Some
hours afterwards, towards evening, I found the ants were beginning to get
over their difficulty. On one side an ant would go forward in a
half-circle, on the other another ant would advance sideways, and meeting
together they would touch their antennae, and then the first would travel
back with the second, and so the line was reestablished. It was very much
as if two batsmen at opposite wickets should run forward each halfway,
and after shaking hands and conversing, one of them should lead the other
safely over.

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