Grain and Chaff from an English Manor

by Arthur Herbert Savory

"When a man walks a mile he takes on an average 2,263 steps, lifting the weight of his body with each step. When he rides a bicycle of the average gear he covers a mile with the equivalent of 627 steps, bears no burden, and covers the same distance in less than one third of the time."

People constantly tell me that cycling is all very well for getting from place to place, but otherwise they don't care about it, which I can only account for by supposing that they find it a labour more or less irksome, or that they have never developed their perceptive faculties, and have no real sympathy with the life of woods and fields or the spirit of the ancient farms and villages.

Cycling to me is a very easy and pleasant exercise, but it is far more than that; it is like passing through an endless picture-gallery filled with masterpieces of form and colour. The roads of England not only present these delights to the physical sense, but they stir the imagination with historic visions from the earliest times. There are the ancient camps, now silent and deserted, which become at the bidding of fancy peopled with the unkempt and savage British, and later with their well-disciplined and well-equipped Roman conquerers: archers and men in armour appear; pilgrims' processions such as we read of in Chaucer; knights and ladies on their stately steeds. There are the ghosts of royal progresses, kings and queens, and wonderful pageantry gorgeous in array; decorously ambling cardinals and abbots with their trains of servitors; hawking parties with hawks and attendants; soldiers after Sedgemoor in pursuit of Monmouth's ill-fated followers; George IV. and his gay courtiers on the Brighton road; beaux and beauties in their well-appointed carriages bound for Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham, or Bath; splendid teams with crowded coaches, and great covered waggons laden with merchandise; the highwayman at dusk in quest of belated travellers, and companies of farmers and cattle-dealers riding home from market together for safety.

I often see a vision here in the ancient Forest tracks of a gang of wild and armed smugglers, and among them still more savage-looking foreign sailors. They have two or three Forest trucks, made especially to fit the ruts in the little-used tracks, laden with casks of spirits and drawn by rough Forest ponies. I can hear the shouts of the drivers as they urge them forward, and I can see the steaming sides of the ponies in the misty moonlight of a winter night. The spirits were landed at Poole or Christchurch, and they are on their way to Burley where, under the old house I bought with my land, there is still the cellar, then cleverly concealed, where the casks were stored in safety from the watchful eyes of the Excise; a quaint old place built of the local rock.

There is one vision of the roads in the Forest which nobody who saw it can ever forget: the companies of infantry, the serious officers, the ruddy-faced men, and the then untried guns of the glorious Seventh Division, on their route marches, with fife and drum to cheer the way with the now classic strains of "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." There are spots where I met them in the autumn of 1914 that I never pass without feeling that for all time these places are sacred to the memory of heroes.

Besides the fancied pageantry of the roads there are the natural objects of the woods, the lanes, and the fields; the blossoming hawthorn and the wild roses trailing from the hedges, the hares and rabbits, the birds, the butterflies, and the flowers; sturdy teams with the time-honoured ploughs and harrows, the sowing of the seed, the young gleaming corn, the scented hayfields or the golden harvest; every man at his honourable labour, happy children dashing out of school; noble timber, hazel coppices, grey old villages; cattle in the pastures, or enjoying the cool waters of shallow pools or brooks; sheep in the field or the fold, the shepherd and his dog; apple blossom, or the ripe and ruddy fruit, bowery hop-gardens, mellow old cottages, country-folk going to market, fat beasts, cows and calves, carriers' carts full of gossips.

Pictures, real pictures, everywhere, endless in variety. Steady! go steady past these woods; see the blue haze of wild hyacinths, the cool carpet of primroses. Look at the cowslips yellowing that meadow; do you see the heron standing patiently in the marsh? Look overhead, watch the hovering hawk; hark! there is the nightingale. Stop a moment at the bridge; can you see the speckled beauties with their heads upstream? Thank God for the blue, blue sky! thank God for the glory of the sun, for the lights and shadows beneath the trees! Thank God for the live air, the growth, the life of plant and tree, the fragrance and the beauty! Thank God for rural England!

One can tell the most ancient, apart from the scientifically made Roman roads, by the way they were worn down from the original level, especially on hillsides, by the constant and heavy traffic. Every passing wheel abraded a portion of the surface, and the next rain carried the débris down the hill, forming in time a deep depression, between banks at the sides, often many feet deep, and giving the impression of the track having been purposely dug out to lessen the gradient. In places where the road became impassable from long use and wet, deviations on either side were made, so that ten or a dozen disused tracks can be seen side by side, often extending laterally quite a long distance from the existing road in unenclosed surroundings.

A great charm of the bicycle is its noiselessness which, with its speed, affords peeps of wild creatures under natural conditions. Cycling on the Cotswolds I came upon two hares at a boxing match; they were so absorbed that I was able to get quite close, and it was amusing to watch them standing upright on their hind legs, and sparring with their little fists like professionals. I have often seen the pursuit of a rabbit by a persistent stoat; the rabbit has little chance of escape, as the stoat can follow it underground as well as over; finally the rabbit appears to be paralyzed with fright, lies down and makes no further effort. Weasels, which probably make up for depredations of game by their destruction of rats, often cross the road, and sometimes whole families may be seen playing by the roadside. I was shooting in Surrey when I once had an excellent view of an ermine—the stoat in its winter dress. I did not recognize it until it was out of sight, but I should not have shot it in any case, for the ermine is a very rare occurrence in the south of England. I believe that further north it is not unusual, as is natural where the light colour would protect it from observation in snow, but as far south as Surrey this would be a danger, and I should scarcely have noticed it in the thick undergrowth had it been normal in colour.

We had a squirrel's nest, or "drey," as it is called, near my house last year, and the squirrels have been about my lawn and the Forest trees ever since. It was charming, in the summer, to watch them nibbling the fleshy galls produced on the young oaks by a gall-fly (Cynips). They chattered to each other all the time, holding the galls between their fore feet, fragments dropping to the ground beneath the trees. Squirrels are fond of animal food, and I wondered, as there was so much apparent waste, whether they were not really searching for the grubs in the galls. Of late years squirrels have been scarce here; they were formerly abundant, but their numbers were much reduced by an epidemic. They seem to be increasing again, possibly the felling of so many Scots-firs has driven them from their former haunts into adjoining oak and beech woods, such as those which almost surround my land.