marshes--far more level than the green waves of the great
Wiltshire Down--are cut up by a network of innumerable ditches,
narrow indeed, yet not always easily passed, as the little army of
King Monmouth proved only too well. These "rhines," as they are
called in the West Country, take the place of hedge-rows, and
serve also to drain away into the sluggish moorland stream the
water which in rainy seasons would collect on the low ground. Turf
Moor is a strange looking country, with its interminable stacks of
black peat, its great hollows from which turf has been taken, its
miles of straight-cut dykes by which the water is drained away
into the rivers. The sombre hue of the great plain is relieved by
picturesque groups of turf-cutters, by dense masses of noble
Scotch firs--trees that flourish well in the peaty soil--and by an
occasional belt of coppice that runs in among the peat workings--a
jungle of reeds and bulrushes, of bracken and tall royal fern, a
sort of No-Man's Land, a very paradise for beast and bird.
The moormen happen on strange things sometimes when they are
digging in the peat. It is no very rare thing for the
turf-cutter's tool to clash on pottery or rude weapons far below
the present level of the moor. Some years since a bow was thus
discovered, whose once heavy yew wood was so altered by its long
soaking that it was as light as cork. At one place an iron anchor
was found, at another the paddle of an old canoe.
There is a tradition in the marshes that, years ago, whenever
after a dry summer the water was low in one of the great rhines, a
boat became visible, embedded in the bank. "Squire Phippen's Big
Ship," as it was called, has long been lost sight of, but in more
recent times another canoe has been found on the moor, which
happily has met with the attention it deserves.
Some labourers who had been employed every autumn to clear out the
rhines on Cranhill Moor, near Glastonbury, had often been
inconvenienced at one point by what they thought was the trunk of
an old tree--such as are frequently found buried in the peat. The
place was pointed out to a local archæologist, Mr. Arthur Bulleid,
of Glastonbury, and he saw at once that the supposed tree-trunk
was an old British canoe, in splendid preservation, most skilfully
worked out of a single log. The end which had projected from the
bank is damaged by the spades with which the labourers had
repeatedly in past years tried to cut it away, but the rest is
uninjured. This curious old craft is flat-bottomed, and pointed at
each end, just as are the boats that still navigate the rhines of
the district. It measures about seventeen feet in length, is
perhaps thirty inches broad, and ten or eleven inches deep.
This canoe might have continued for years a mere obstacle to the
clearing of the rhine--now a small ditch, but once a navigable
water-way--were it not that the whole district was interested in
the recent discovery of an ancient British village, of which it is
safe to say that few things of more importance have rewarded
recent archæological research in this country.
The ancient Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Northern Italy,
though our knowledge of them is not yet half-a-century old, are
familiar wherever Archæology is studied. In the forty years which
have elapsed since they were first examined, it has been found
that there are many places, even now, where huts, constructed on
the same plan, are still in use. Such dwellings exist in the
shallows along the Amazon and the Orinoco. Travellers have
described them, as they are at this moment, in Borneo and New
Guinea. Cameron found them in the heart of the Dark Continent. To
this very day Roumelian fishermen inhabit huts built on piles over
the water, in the same spot where, twenty-five centuries ago, the
children of the Paeonian Lake Dwellers were, according to
Herodotus, tied by the leg to prevent them falling into the water.
But, long before the discovery of the Swiss Lake Villages in 1853,
another somewhat similar form of primitive habitation was known,
confined, as far as can be at present ascertained, to countries
inhabited by Celtic races. This was the Crannog, or Marsh Village,
from the Celtic word _crann_, a tree--not built on piles in the
water, but on platforms of timber laid over brushwood arranged on
the soft soil of a morass. The existence of such dwellings had
long been known, but little attention was paid to them before the
famous researches of Keller, in Switzerland. Modern Archæologists
have, however, explored at least a hundred of these Villages in
Ireland, and about half that number in Scotland; and many most
interesting remains have been recovered from them.
The Scotch and Irish Crannogs appear to belong to the Iron Age.
Implements of the more primitive materials have, it is true, been
found in them, but they were not such as were in use in the Bronze
or Stone Ages. They differ both in shape and in the style of their
ornamentation. A few stone celts have been found in Irish
Crannogs, but no object belonging to a time earlier than the Age
of Iron has yet been met with in the Marsh Villages of Scotland.
The metal objects are, as a rule, characteristic of the period
between the 9th and the 12th centuries, though we have evidence
that some of the Irish Crannogs were in use long after that time.
Allusions to them frequently occur in the old writers. We learn
from "The Annals of the Four Masters" that the historic Crannog of
Lough Gabhor--the first that was examined in Ireland--was burnt
A.D. 848, and again, by the Danes, in 933. An account, written at
the time, of the expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to put down
the rebel Earl of Tyrone, describes a Crannog in County Down,
which "was seated in the midst of a great bog, and no way
accessible but through thick woods, hardly passable. It had about
it two deep ditches, both encompassed with strong pallisadoes, a
very high and thick rampart of timber, and well flanked with
bulwarks. For defence of the place, forty-two musqueteers and some
twenty swordsmen were lodged in it." This was in 1602. Later
still, Sir Felim O'Neill, who had headed the rebellion of 1641,
was captured in a Crannog, in 1642.
Until recent years no Crannog had been found in this country. The
discovery of a very extensive Settlement of this kind, in the turf
moor near Glastonbury, is thus an event of great Archæological
interest, which is much increased by the fact that, whereas the
remains found in the Scotch and Irish Crannogs point to a period
so recent as from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, the
Marsh Village discovered in Somersetshire has yielded, so far, no
object which appears to be so late even as the Roman occupation.
But these broad flats on Turf Moor, their patches of coppice, the
edges of the green "droves," the waste lands where turf has been
cut, and which have been left to recover themselves by the rest
and growth of perhaps half a century, even the very ditches of the
moor, are in summer-time a happy hunting-ground for the
naturalist.
The plants of these monotonous marshes, the birds, the beasts, the
insects, have a character of their own. In summer-time the meadows
that stretch from rhine to rhine are crimson with orchis and
clover, with sheep sorrel and ragged robin, are golden with
flower-de-luce, whitened with tall oxeye daisies and soft tufts of
cotton grass. Now the whole moorland is sobered to a dull,
monotonous hue of mingled browns and greys tinged with a
sad-coloured note of green. The rhines that to-day are but
straight-cut belts of water, with no beauty and hardly more of
interest, were filled then to the very brim with sedges and iris
and tall stems of flowering rush. Along their hedges grew teazels
and skullcap and comfrey, and down their steep banks the moneywort
poured its lavish streams of gold. Few plants of any sort are
to-day visible in the water. But the still depths were covered
then with a green film of weed, crossed and re-crossed with a very
labyrinth of tracks, where rat or moorhen or water-rail had cut
its devious way. Here grew the arrow-head, with its beautiful
white flowers. Here floated the star-like blossoms of the frogbit.
And here the bladderwort, that now rests unseen on the mud at the
bottom, buoyed up by multitudinous little floats of air, lifted
its exquisite spike above the surface.
The busy life that in the summer filled these interminable ditches
has ebbed away. The green jungle of flags and water plants where
the sedge warbler sang--not from dawn till nightfall only, but
from sundown till the east was grey--is gone. The reeds among
whose slender stems the warbler wove her exquisite nest are
beaten down. The peewits who reared their scanty broods among
these open meadows are here still. Even the quails that hid their
beautiful eggs among the summer clover may still be couching in
the withered grass; and water-rails find shelter still among the
brown and broken reeds.
The banks are honeycombed with the burrows of water-rats--as most
people call them. Beautiful creatures, not really rats at all, and
having little in common with their evil-minded, mischievous,
objectionable namesakes. Their habit of burrowing is perhaps their
one fault, and has more than once helped to break down the bank of
a river here, and so deluge the moors with miles of tawny water.
Water-rats are out at all times, all the year, except in the very
coldest weather. But twilight is their favourite hour. Then as you
steal quietly along by the bank you may watch the soft brown balls
of fur crouched on the narrow fringe of shore; may envy their
incomparable feats of diving; may follow their course by a slight
ripple on the surface as they swim to some secret hiding place.
The owls know their habits well. This very month a barn owl was
seen in the twilight, flying over the moor on its soft and
soundless wings. Suddenly it swooped below the bank of a rhine,
reappearing a moment later with a water-rat in its claws. Scared
by a shout, it dropped its prey, but the rat, though warm, was
stone dead.
Much less often seen are the water-shrews, whose frolics you may
watch in broad daylight if you are so very fortunate as to come
upon a party of them at play, swimming round and round like the
tiny beetles that spin in mazy circles on the surface. The water
itself is, in the summer-time, crowded with life. Over the surface
skim rowing-flies and water-spiders. Under it a countless crowd of
creatures live out their little day--beetles and water-scorpions,
active little boatmen that paddle up and down with dexterous oars,
caddis larvæ carrying about with them their houses built of grains
of sand, or scraps of reed, or of a multitude of tiny shells.
Shells there are everywhere, small some of them, but even the very
smallest revealing under the microscope forms as marvellous as
that of the nautilus itself. Slender newts, too, swarm in the
still water, and great black tritons, the terror of the moorfolk,
in whose eyes even the viper is hardly more venomous.
Not to every one is it given to appreciate the beauty and the
wonder of the inhabitants of this happy hunting-ground. In such a
paradise two naturalists had been hard at work through a hot
summer afternoon. They were stretched contentedly by the roadside,
when a burly, red-faced farmer driving by drew rein, and seeing
their nets upon the grass asked them what sport they had had, and
if it was eels or flounders they had been catching. They proceeded
to explain. "Oh, bitles," said the farmer, somewhat
contemptuously. "And what be they vur, then?" This was a more
difficult point. It was not at all easy to make him see that there
could be any use in hoarding up such "common ornery rubbish" as
that. Butterflies, now, he could understand, or "bird eggs." He
himself had collected "bird eggs" when he was a boy. But "bitles!
Well," said he at last, "good day. I must be gwine"; and he drove
slowly off. He had not got more than fifty yards along the road,
however, when he pulled up again, and turning half round in his
seat, called out, "Hi! but I can't think what ee can want they
bitles vur!"
[Illustration: WINTER IN THE MARSHES.]
TURF MOOR: THE FROZEN MARSHES.
It is now some years since, through the giving way of the bank of
one of the moorland rivers, a large part of the low-lying land in
the heart of Somersetshire was under water all through the autumn.
Many tenants of cottages on the moor were, as they would put it,
"drownded out," and there were outlying villages that for a long
while could only be reached by means of boats. During a recent
autumn another wide area in the same county was flooded. Frost
set in while a vast tract of land was still inundated. Miles of
flooded marshland were entirely frozen over, and many cottages,
after standing in the water for months past, were surrounded by
the ice. So sharp was the cold that, on the second day of the
frost, the fortunate few who were able to avail themselves of the
opportunity had a perfect skating-ground, which must have measured
thousands of acres.
A heavy snowfall, however, has changed the face of things
altogether. Some of the moor men, whose ordinary avocations have
long been at a standstill, have cleared a pretty fair piece of
ice. But the rest is covered with snow. Much of it has sunk and
broken, owing to the draining away of the water from beneath it;
so that, vast as is still the frozen area, comparatively little of
it is good enough to satisfy a fastidious performer.
But it is a wonderful landscape that, on every side of the little
house which skaters on this part of the marshes use as their
headquarters, lies glistening in the sunshine. A few old alder
trees and storm-beaten Scotch firs shelter the cottage a little
from the wind. And its all too scanty stacks and its picturesque
sheds and outbuildings, whose roof of tiles are weathered to
every imaginable shade of red and brown, help to give an air of
warmth and comfort. A primitive place. A place such as might have
given shelter to King Alfred before that desperate fight yonder on
the hills of Ethandune. The master of the house is a neatherd too,
as it happens, and his heifers are at this moment all huddled in
the byres about the cottage, only too glad to make the
acquaintance of a sympathetic stranger. There is no entrance at
the front. The frozen ground has "lifted" and has jammed the door.
You must make your way in through the hospitable-looking
brick-floored kitchen at the back.
Before the frost began the water was over the garden, and even on
the cottage floor. And now, though the house is clear, the ice
stretches away almost from the threshold, as far as the eye can
see over the level country. It would be hard to picture a scene
more absolutely desolate. On the skyline to the southward, just
seen through the wintry haze, is a long line of low bluehills,
with patches of snow on them dimly showing. Over a dark belt of
fir trees to the eastward rises the Tor of Glastonbury, snow
covered, too, for once. And right to the bases of the hills, over
field after field, stretches for miles the great white plain,
broken only by lines of pollard willows, by tall aspens and clumps
of alder; with patches of furze that look strangely out of place
rising up through the ice, with here and there a gate,
half-hidden, with haystacks standing forlorn upon the wintry
level, and, sadder still, with cottages that, long since rendered
uninhabitable by the water, are now completely surrounded by the
ice.
In that cottage, some hundred yards farther on, whose walls have
settled so much in the soft peat that there is not a straight line
in all its primitive architecture, the water is still nine inches
deep in all the rooms. The tenant of it is that moor man standing
yonder, lending a helping hand to the skaters preparing for the
ice. A picturesque figure, whose old brown coat, with its endless
varieties of shade would delight the soul of an artist. You can
understand why he wears boots up to his knees when you learn that
every day, from the beginning of December until a fortnight since,
he waded to his door through more than a foot of water. He is
better off since the frost, for now he can slide in.
A characteristic touch about these cottages is the store of winter
fuel, the stacks of peat heaped against the wall. Almost more
characteristic still is the quaintly-shaped boat, flat-bottomed,
sharp at both ends, that you see in so many gardens; for not only
are floods here far too common, but the innumerable ditches make
convenient waterways for bringing home grass or peat.
A strange silence broods over the landscape. No birds are visible
save the few that hang about the outbuildings. The flocks of gulls
and the few ducks that were here before the floods were frozen
have all disappeared. Multitudes of skylarks, too, passed over
when the snow set in, but they soon vanished. This was once a
great country for wild-duck. Twenty years ago there were four
decoys almost in sight from this cottage. Now they are all
drained--"let off" as the moor folk put it. The only sound besides
the low lament of the wind among the alders, the plaintive
protests of the heifers in the byres, and the laughter and voices
and occasional clink of steel where the skaters are preparing for
work, is a strange, hollow, booming sound under the ice, or the
sharper crash when it gives way because the water has gone from
under it. It is strange to see great sheets of ice caught in the
bushes or among the alder stems, feet above the general level.
It is a wintry wind that sweeps over the frozen marshes. But here,
in this sunny corner, with a heap of dry peats to sit on, in the
shelter of a stable on whose door is nailed a lucky horseshoe,
there is the warmth of very summer.
But hark, the ring of skates upon the ice! And see, the skaters
are leaving their little camping ground just outside the garden.
Already there are moving figures far out on the frozen meadows. As
you watch them start, some bold and fearless, as to the manner
born, some doubtful and hesitating, and hardly venturing to lift
their feet, you might almost read something of their story in
their very movements.
That tall figure yonder, so absolutely at home upon his skates,
had more time in one long Canadian winter to learn the art he
practises so well than most of us get in a lifetime. And to one
who, in a forced march across the Dominion in the dead of winter,
has tried in vain to sleep on the snow with the thermometer forty
degrees below zero, and who has put down his boiling can of grog
to take it up next minute frozen solid, cold like this is
nothing. And you might have known that the stalwart skater further
out, whose wife is the most graceful among many graceful figures
in the moving throng, gained his first experiences on skates in
latitudes where the frost sometimes holds unbroken for twelve long
dreary weeks.
The frozen-out moor men are ready enough to volunteer assistance.
And as the day wears on it is really marvellous to see with what
dexterity they carry cups of tea to the skaters; while their dogs,
with an eye to biscuits, make friends with each little group in
turn. A kindly race, these Somerset folks, sunny of face, and
pleasant of speech, in spite of the hard times, and the enforced
idleness and the bitter weather. But they hold strong views as to
the incapacity of engineers who fail to guard against such floods
as this. "What be the use," said one, "of they Drainage
Commissioners, what charges we two and eightpence poundage for
keeping the water off of we? This here flood have lasted since
before Christmas. Here be the rent going on all the time, and the
land won't be no use till May."
Pleasant it is to watch from this sheltered corner the evolutions
of the skaters. The wind that blows so keen over the miles of
frozen marshland, and that lends a heightened colour to their
glowing faces, cannot reach you here. Pleasant, too, is the scent
of the hay and the breath of cattle from the byres. But pleasanter
still is the ingle nook within the cottage, in a tiny room, so low
that the beam across its ceiling is a trap for even the shortest
of the group on the old settle, by the fragrant fire of peat. By
such a fire it was that Alfred sat. Yet there is a long gap
between the half-shaped bow of the old story and the gun, ancient
as it is, hanging yonder on the wall; and if there are cakes about
this hearth, you will not hear the tall, blue-eyed, winsome damsel
who dispenses them
"... scold with kindling eye,
In good broad Somerset,"
as the neatherd's wife, a thousand years since, scolded the Royal
fugitive in these very marshes.
[Illustration: WINSCOMBE--THE CHURCH PORCH.]
WINSCOMBE: A CAMP OF REFUGE
On the edge of a broad valley in the Mendips, on the gentle slope
of a line of low green hills, there stands a quiet hamlet, almost
hidden now among its clustering trees. At the foot of the slope,
standing some way back from the village street, is a white-walled
cottage, whose lawns and garden grounds only a slender fence
divides from the fields that fringe the village.
On one side of the garden runs a narrow lane, losing itself
presently in the meadows, a quieter backwater of the quiet village
life, in whose old walls and deep-browed hedgerows many birds find
lodging. On the other side, beyond a row of picturesque old sheds
and ruinous old buildings, with brown roofs of thatch and crowns
of thick-growing ivy, stretch the bird-haunted aisles of an
orchard. The nuthatches love its cavernous trees. Its shades are
musical, long before the dawn, with the songs of thrush and
blackbird, of redstart and willow-wren. Among the old buildings
tits and wagtails and robins hide their nests in crannies of the
crumbling masonry.
But to the garden itself, islanded by lanes and meadows, with its
trees and shrubs, its broad thickets of laurel and rhododendron
and arbutus, the birds come as to a Camp of Refuge. In the tall
evergreen above the gate, wreathed in a great bower of ivy,
blackbirds even now are feeding their young. There are nests in
the lilacs, in the laurels, in the hedges, in the trellis on the
wall.
Through the open windows the warm air brings all pleasant scents
and sounds. The low of cattle, on distant farms, the mellow
chiming of the old church bells, the rich strains of thrush and
blackbird, the sweet song of the swallow, clink of oxeye, call of
cuckoo, jay's harsh cry, and wood-pecker's light-hearted laughter,
mingle with the perfume of the roses and the woodruff. The
swallows that sing on the brown gable of the barn beyond the
precincts may have their nests plundered by prowling schoolboys.
The hollow trees in the orchard, the chinks in the old wall of the
lane, are not wholly safe from the village birds'-nester. But here
is sanctuary inviolate, from which no bird was ever driven.
Year after year the fly-catchers repair their nest in the plum
tree trained against the wall. No hand disturbs the martins that
build under the broad eaves. No sweet singer ever here paid with
his life the penalty of his taste for cherries.
Here no blackbird ever suffered for his raids upon the strawberry
beds. This garden is to him the garden of the laureate:
"The espaliers and the standards tall
Are thine; the range of lawn and park;
The un-netted black-hearts ripen dark,
All thine, against the garden wall."
Here the bullfinch may pillage at his will. The only unpardonable
crime that even the house-sparrow can commit is to take wrongful
possession of a martin's nest. Even then the culprit has never
suffered anything but reproaches. Even when, with its own untidy
heap of hay and feathers, it has blocked up a rain-water pipe, the
disaster that it caused was not held warrant for eviction. And
never surely were there sparrows quite so bright of plumage--so
glossy their sleek heads, so rich their chestnut feathers, so
stainless the white bars across their wings.
Here, too, in the hard winter weather, the birds have learnt by
long experience to come as for corn in Egypt. The missel-thrush
and the nuthatch, the marsh-tit and the oxeye, know well the
brilliant berries they may plunder at their will from the tall
Irish yew before the window. In the very bearing of the birds that
haunt the garden, of the robin and the sparrow and the
song-thrush, that in hard times come to the very window to be fed,
with firm faith in their gentle almoners, you may read the
confidence born of long experience, the result of years of welcome
and protection.
The fly-catcher brooding on her nest, her glossy head just
showing over the rim of the little cradle she has slung between
the plum-tree and the wall, watches your approach without the
least alarm. And as you stroll between the borders, bright with
thickets of peonies, covered with great rose-like blooms, with
their flags and pansies and pale yellow poppies, and with all
their hundred flowers, she will flicker lightly by to her
favourite resting-place on the rose-hung arch over the garden
path, or to the handle of the walking-stick set upright in the
grass for her sovereign pleasure, or to the leafless laurel bough
that, while shears and pruning-knife are merciless to every other
dead wood in the garden, is spared for her sake alone.