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;