A Strange Piece of Country
The other evening a friend and I ascended the steep western slope of our valley. A strange new world opens out at the top on a well- wooded uninhabited plateau, four hundred feet or so above the river. It is obviously a plain of marine denudation, subsequently raised to its ,present elevation and cut into gentle upland hollows by untold centuries of weathering and erosion. For hours we walked and talked without meeting another soul. Once, long centuries ago, part of this great wood- land was arable. It is presumed that difficulty of access by road and rising costs of labour made arable farming unprofitable here, and it fell down to scrub and silver birch. A few years ago this land was planted with conifers for the first time. Through the picturesque, almost unreal, depths of this extensive wood, winding tracks and roads rise and fall easily with the gentle slopes. The silver birch is varied by the newly planted conifers and well-established chestnuts, and the whole scene dissolves in the distance into the sky-blue of far-off shadows.
We saw strangely few animate creatures, a few birds, mainly jack- daws and partridges, with a glimpse of a pheasant's nest with eight eggs ; and, as we descended, and it was deepening from dusk to nightfall, two black fallow deer in an opening about 200 yards away kept us under close observation before moving gracefully off.
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