Afoot in England

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That old grey, crumbling wall of ancient Calleva, crowned with
big oak and ash and thorn and holly, and draped with green
bramble and trailing ivy and creepers--how good a shelter it
is on a cold, rough day! Moving softly, so as not to disturb
any creature, I yet disturbed a ring snake lying close to the
wall, into which it quickly vanished; and then from their old
place among the stones a pair of blue stock-doves rushed out
with clatter of wings. The same blue doves which I had known
for three years at that spot! A few more steps and I came
upon as pretty a little scene in bird life as one could wish
for: twenty to twenty-five small birds of different species
--tits, wrens, dunnocks, thrushes, blackbirds, chaffinches,
yellowhammers--were congregated on the lower outside twigs of
a bramble bush and on the bare ground beside it close to the
foot of the wall. The sun shone full on that spot, and they
had met for warmth and for company. The tits and wrens were
moving quietly about in the bush; others were sitting idly or
preening their feathers on the twigs or the ground. Most of
them were making some kind of small sound--little exclamatory
chirps, and a variety of chirrupings, producing the effect of
a pleasant conversation going on among them. This was
suddenly suspended on my appearance, but the alarm was soon
over, and, seeing me seated on a fallen stone and, motionless,
they took no further notice of me. Two blackbirds were there,
sitting a little way apart on the bare ground; these were
silent, the raggedest, rustiest-looking members of that little
company; for they were moulting, and their drooping wings and
tails had many unsightly gaps in them where the old feathers
had dropped out before the new ones had grown. They were
suffering from that annual sickness with temporary loss of
their brightest faculties which all birds experience in some
degree; the unseasonable rains and cold winds had been bad for
them, and now they were having their sun-bath, their best
medicine and cure.

By and by a pert-looking, bright-feathered, dapper cock
chaffinch dropped down from the bush, and, advancing to one of
the two, the rustiest and most forlorn-looking, started
running round and round him as if to make a close inspection
of his figure, then began to tease him. At first I thought it
was all in fun--merely animal spirit which in birds often
discharges itself in this way in little pretended attacks and
fights. But the blackbird had no play and no fight in him, no
heart to defend himself; all he did was to try to avoid the
strokes aimed at him, and he could not always escape them.
His spiritlessness served to inspire the chaffinch with
greater boldness, and then it appeared that the gay little
creature was really and truly incensed, possibly because the
rusty, draggled, and listless appearance of the larger bird
was offensive to him. Anyhow, the persecutions continued,
increasing in fury until they could not be borne, and the
blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble. But he
was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and
away into another bush, and again into still another further
away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into
the bleak wind on the other side. Then the persecutor came
back and settled himself on his old perch on the bramble, well
satisfied at his victory over a bird so much bigger than
himself. All was again peace and harmony in the little social
gathering, and the pleasant talkee-talkee went on as before.
About five minutes passed, then the hunted blackbird returned,
and, going to the identical spot from which he had been
driven, composed himself to rest; only now he sat facing his
lively little enemy.

I was astonished to see him back; so, apparently, was the
chaffinch. He started, craned his neck, and regarded his
adversary first with one eye then with the other. "What, rags
and tatters, back again so soon!" I seem to hear him say.
"You miserable travesty of a bird, scarcely fit for a weasel
to dine on! Your presence is an insult to us, but I'll soon
settle you. You'll feel the cold on the other, side of the
wall when I've knocked off a few more of your rusty rags."

Down from his perch he came, but no sooner had he touched his
feet to the ground than the blackbird went straight at him
with extraordinary fury. The chaffinch, taken by surprise,
was buffeted and knocked over, then, recovering himself, fled
in consternation, hotly pursued by the sick one. Into the
bush they went, but in a moment they were out again, darting
this way and that, now high up in the trees, now down to the
ground, the blackbird always close behind; and no little bird
flying from a hawk could have exhibited a greater terror than
that pert chaffinch--that vivacious and most pugnacious little
cock bantam. At last they went quite away, and were lost to
sight. By and by the blackbird returned alone, and, going
once more to his place near the second bird, he settled down
comfortably to finish his sunbath in peace and quiet.

I had assuredly witnessed a new thing on that unpromising day,
something quite different from anything witnessed in my wide
rambles; and, though a little thing, it had been a most
entertaining comedy in bird life with a very proper ending.
It was clear that the sick blackbird had bitterly resented the
treatment he had received; that, brooding on it out in the
cold, his anger had made him strong, and that he came back
determined to fight, with his plan of action matured. He was
not going to be made a fool every time!

The birds all gone their several ways at last, I got up from
my stone and wondered if the old Romans ever dreamed that this
wall which they made to endure would after seventeen hundred
years have no more important use than this--to afford shelter
to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched
them--from the bleak wind. Many a strange Roman curse on this
ungenial climate must these same stones have heard.
Looking through a gap in the wall I saw, close by, on the
other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing
up huge piles of earth. They were uncovering a small portion
of that ancient buried city and were finding the foundations
and floors and hypocausts of Silchester's public baths; also
some broken pottery and trifling ornaments of bronze and bone.
The workmen in that bitter wind were decidedly better off than
the gentlemen from Burlington House in charge of the
excavations. These stood with coats buttoned up and hands
thrust deep down in their pockets. It seemed to me that
it was better to sit in the shelter of the wall and watch the
birds than to burrow in the crumbling dust for that small
harvest. Yet I could understand and even appreciate their
work, although it is probable that the glow I experienced was
in part reflected. Perhaps my mental attitude, when standing
in that sheltered place, and when getting on to the windy wall
I looked down on the workers and their work, was merely
benevolent. I had pleasure in their pleasure, and a vague
desire for a better understanding, a closer alliance and
harmony. It was the desire that we might all see nature--the
globe with all it contains--as one harmonious whole, not as
groups of things, or phenomena, unrelated, cast there by
chance or by careless or contemptuous gods. This dust of past
ages, dug out of a wheat-field, with its fragments of men's
work--its pottery and tiles and stones--this is a part, too,
even as the small birds, with their little motives and
passions, so like man's, are a part. I thought with self
shame of my own sins in this connection; then, considering
the lesser faults on the other side, I wished that Mr. St.
John Hope would experience a like softening mood and regret
that he had abused the ivy. It grieves me to hear it called a
"noxious weed." That perished people, whose remains in this
land so deeply interest him, were the mightiest "builders of
ruins" the world has known; but who except the archaeologist
would wish to see these piled stones in their naked harshness,
striking the mind with dismay at the thought of Time and its
perpetual desolations! I like better the old Spanish poet who
says, "What of Rome; its world-conquering power, and majesty
and glory--what has it come to?" The ivy on the wall, the
yellow wallflower, tell it. A "deadly parasite" quotha! Is
it not well that this plant, this evergreen tapestry of
innumerable leaves, should cover and partly hide and partly
reveal the "strange defeatures" the centuries have set on
man's greatest works? I would have no ruin nor no old and
noble building without it; for not only does it beautify
decay, but from long association it has come to be in the mind
a very part of such scenes and so interwoven with the human
tragedy, that, like the churchyard yew, it seems the most
human of green things.

Here in September great masses of the plant are already
showing a greenish cream-colour of the opening blossoms, which
will be at their perfection in October. Then, when the sun
shines, there will be no lingering red admiral, nor blue fly
or fly of any colour, nor yellow wasp, nor any honey-eating or
late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on
the ivy's sweetness. And behind the blossoming curtain, alive
with the minute, multitudinous, swift-moving, glittering
forms, some nobler form will be hidden in a hole or fissure in
the wall. Here on many a night I have listened to the
sibilant screech of the white owl and the brown owl's clear,
long-drawn, quavering lamentation:

"Good Ivy, what byrdys hast thou?"
"Non but the Howlet, that How! How!"

Chapter Nine: Rural Rides

"A-birding on a Broncho" is the title of a charming little book
published some years ago, and probably better known to readers
on the other side of the Atlantic than in England. I remember
reading it with pleasure and pride on account of the author's
name, Florence Merriam, seeing that, on my mother's side, I am
partly a Merriam myself (of the branch on the other side of
the Atlantic), and having been informed that all of that rare
name are of one family, I took it that we were related, though
perhaps very distantly. "A-birding on a Broncho" suggested an
equally alliterative title for this chapter--"Birding on a
Bike"; but I will leave it to others, for those who go
a-birding are now very many and are hard put to find fresh
titles to their books. For several reasons it will suit me
better to borrow from Cobbett and name this chapter "Rural
Rides."

Sore of us do not go out on bicycles to observe the ways of
birds. Indeed, some of our common species have grown almost
too familiar with the wheel: it has become a positive danger
to them. They not infrequently mistake its rate of speed and
injure themselves in attempting to fly across it. Recently I
had a thrush knock himself senseless against the spokes of my
forewheel, and cycling friends have told me of similar
experiences they have had, in some instances the heedless
birds getting killed. Chaffinches are like the children in
village streets--they will not get out of your way; by and by
in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell
almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not
travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even
the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle
and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or
three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large
and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a
snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if I
had broken his back, but on picking him up I was pleased to
find that my wind-inflated rubber tyre had not, like the
brazen chariot wheel, crushed his delicate vertebra; he
quickly recovered, and when released glided swiftly and easily
away into cover. Twice only have I deliberately tried to run
down, to tread on coat-tails so to speak, of any wild
creature. One was a weasel, the other a stoat, running along
at a hedge-side before me. In both instances, just as the
front wheel was touching the tail, the little flat-headed
rascal swerved quickly aside and escaped.

Even some of the less common and less tame birds care as
little for a man on a bicycle as they do for a cow. Not long
ago a peewit trotted leisurely across the road not more than
ten yards from my front wheel; and on the same day I came upon
a green woodpecker enjoying a dust-bath in the public road.
He declined to stir until I stopped to watch him, then merely
flew about a dozen yards away and attached himself to the
trunk of a fir tree at the roadside and waited there for me to
go. Never in all my wanderings afoot had I seen a yaffingale
dusting himself like a barn-door fowl!

It is not seriously contended that birds can be observed
narrowly in this easy way; but even for the most conscientious
field naturalist the wheel has its advantages. It carries him
quickly over much barren ground and gives him a better view of
the country he traverses; finally, it enables him to see more
birds. He will sometimes see thousands in a day where,
walking, he would hardly have seen hundreds, and there is joy
in mere numbers. It was just to get this general rapid sight
of the bird life of the neighbouring hilly district of
Hampshire that I was at Newbury on the last day of October.
The weather was bright though very cold and windy, and towards
evening I was surprised to see about twenty swallows in
Northbrook Street flying languidly to and fro in the shelter
of the houses, often fluttering under the eaves and at
intervals sitting on ledges and projections. These belated
birds looked as if they wished to hibernate, or find the most
cosy holes to die in, rather than to emigrate. On the
following day at noon they came out again and flew up and down
in the same feeble aimless manner.

Undoubtedly a few swallows of all three species, but mostly
house-martins, do "lie up" in England every winter, but
probably very few survive to the following spring. We should
have said that it was impossible that any should survive but
for one authentic instance in recent years, in which a
barn-swallow lived through the winter in a semi-torpid state
in an outhouse at a country vicarage. What came of the
Newbury birds I do not know, as I left on the 2nd of November
--tore myself away, I may say, for, besides meeting with
people I didn't know who treated a stranger with sweet
friendliness, it is a town which quickly wins one's
affections. It is built of bricks of a good deep rich red
--not the painfully bright red so much in use now--and no
person has had the bad taste to spoil the harmony by
introducing stone and stucco. Moreover, Newbury has, in Shaw
House, an Elizabethan mansion of the rarest beauty. Let him
that is weary of the ugliness and discords in our town
buildings go and stand by the ancient cedar at the gate and
look across the wide green lawn at this restful house, subdued
by time to a tender rosy-red colour on its walls and a deep
dark red on its roof, clouded with grey of lichen.

From Newbury and the green meadows of the Kennet the Hampshire
hills may be seen, looking like the South Down range at its
highest point viewed from the Sussex Weald. I made for Coombe
Hill, the highest hill in Hampshire, and found it a
considerable labour to push my machine up from the pretty
tree-hidden village of East Woodhay at its foot. The top is a
league-long tableland, with stretches of green elastic turf,
thickets of furze and bramble, and clumps of ancient noble
beeches--a beautiful lonely wilderness with rabbits and birds
for only inhabitants. From the highest point where a famous
gibbet stands for ever a thousand feet above the sea and where
there is a dew-pond, the highest in England, which has never
dried up although a large flock of sheep drink in it every
summer day, one looks down into an immense hollow, a Devil's
Punch Bowl very many times magnified,--and spies, far away and
far below, a few lonely houses half hidden by trees at the
bottom. This is the romantic village of Coombe, and hither I
went and found the vicar busy in the garden of the small old
picturesque parsonage. Here a very pretty little bird comedy
was in progress: a pair of stock-doves which had been taken
from a rabbit-hole in the hill and reared by hand had just
escaped from the large cage where they had always lived, and
all the family were excitedly engaged in trying to recapture
them. They were delightful to see--those two pretty blue
birds with red legs running busily about on the green lawn,
eagerly searching for something to eat and finding nothing.
They were quite tame and willing to be fed, so that anyone
could approach them and put as much salt on their tails as he
liked, but they refused to be touched or taken; they were too
happy in their new freedom, running and flying about in that
brilliant sunshine, and when I left towards the evening they
were still at large.

But before quitting that small isolated village in its green
basin--a human heart in a chalk hill, almost the highest in
England--I wished the hours I spent in it had been days, so
much was there to see and hear. There was the gibbet on the
hill, for example, far up on the rim of the green basin, four
hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial, that
symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years
and generations? and why had it been raised so high--was it
because the crime of the person put to death there was of so
monstrous a nature that it was determined to suspend him, if
not on a gibbet fifty cubits high, at all events higher above
the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite? The
gruesome story is as follows.

Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe,
with two sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm
in the village. She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at
Woodhay, a carrier who used to go on two or three days each
week with his cart to deliver parcels at Coombe. But he was a
married man, and as he could not marry the widow while his
wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire brain
that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and
to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one
day, he invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his
journey to the remote village, and on the way he got her out
of the cart and led her into a close thicket to show her
something he had discovered there. What he wished to show her
(according to one version of the story) was a populous
hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her
against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated
hornets to sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe,
or stayed till a very late hour at the widow's cottage and
told her what he had done. In telling her he had spoken in
his ordinary voice, but by and by it occurred to him that the
two boys, who were sleeping close by in the living-room, might
have been awake and listening. She assured him that they were
both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if
they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish
to swing, and he could not trust them to hold their tongues.
Thereupon they got up and examined the faces of the two boys,
holding a candle over them, and saw that they were in a deep
sleep, as was natural after their long day's hard work on the
farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest. Yet one of
the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time,
listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the
dreadful tale, and only when they first became suspicious
instinct came to his aid and closed his eyes and stilled his
tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep. Early
next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he
had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the
dreadful secret, they related it to someone--a carter or
ploughman on the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at
once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman
were arrested. In due time they were tried, convicted, and
sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime had been
committed.

Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for
it happened that some of their wise people had been diligently
examining into the matter and had made the discovery that the
woman had been murdered just outside their borders in the
adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy
seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense. Inkpen
was furious and swore that it would not be saddled with the
cost of a great public double execution. The line dividing
the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were
going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its
own miscreants!

As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were
compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost
to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be
erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be
ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet being
erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch
of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric
earthworks--a spot commanding one of the finest and most
extensive views in Southern England. The day appointed for
the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever
witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric
times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their
graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have
probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to
each other that it reminded them of old times. All classes
were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in
great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to
the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on
foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer
were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a
hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon
was the talk of they country for a generation or longer.
The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet
were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and
dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging,
creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and
were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never
removed.

Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring
farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died
before their time. No remedies availed and the secret of
their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long
that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin. Then, by
chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the
murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded
person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the
cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains
having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the
earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person
who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done
so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge.
But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many,
many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old
documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had
taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part
but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her! It was
Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and
Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the
gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up
together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for
ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and
Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a
brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one.
That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present
gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged
on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the
village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they
would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them
justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the
vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature,
so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger
without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came
down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I
had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely
gave up his time to me for the rest of that day. To count his
years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a
century, but he was a young man still and had never had a
day's illness in his life--he did not know what a headache
was. He smoked with me, and to prove that he was not a total
abstainer he drank my health in a glass of port wine--very
good wine. It was Coombe that did it--its peaceful life,
isolated from a distracting world in that hollow hill, and the
marvellous purity of its air. "Sitting there on my lawn," he
said, "you are six hundred feet above the sea, although in a
hollow four hundred feet deep." It was an ideal open-air
room, round and green, with the sky for a roof. In winter it
was sometimes very cold, and after a heavy fall of snow the
scene was strange and impressive from the tiny village set in
its stupendous dazzling white bowl. Not only on those rare
arctic days, but at all times it was wonderfully quiet. The
shout of a child or the peaceful crow of a cock was the
loudest sound you heard. Once a gentleman from London town
came down to spend a week at the parsonage. Towards evening
on the very first day he grew restless and complained of the
abnormal stillness. "I like a quiet place well enough," he
exclaimed, "but this tingling silence I can't stand!" And
stand it he wouldn't and didn't, for on the very next morning
he took himself off. Many years had gone by, but the vicar
could not forget the Londoner who had come down to invent a
new way of describing the Coombe silence. His tingling phrase
was a joy for ever.

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