Where the great rivers Thames, Humber, Tyne, Forth, Clyde, Mersey, and Severn, approached the seashore they lost themselves in wildernesses of desolate, dreary fenlands. Here a small scrubby wood of willow, birch, and alder; there a miles-wide stretch of reeds and undrained marsh intersected by sluggish, lazy rivers, or varied by stagnant pools. The bittern boomed in those marshes. Herons, geese, swans, ducks, and aquatic birds of all sorts found what is now Chelsea a paradise, only disturbed by the eagle, harrier-hawk, vulture, and the like.
Neither at the mouth nor even much higher up in its valley-course, was a river a steady stream in a defined bed. Such beds as it had were probably four or five times their present width; they would be quite irregular, meandering about, changing at every flood, full of islands, loops, backwaters, and continually interrupted by snags of trees.
The rolling hills of the lowlands would be an almost unbroken forest of oak, except where perhaps level land and the absence of drainage produced a marsh or horrible peat-moss. But when we say forest, we do not mean a glorified Richmond Park.
In good soil there might indeed be tall and magnificent trees. But it would be quite impossible to see them! The giants of the forest would be concealed in an inextricable tangle of young trees, brushwood, fallen logs, creepers, and undergrowth. Where the soil was sandy or stony, it might be a scrub rather than a forest, of gnarled, twisted, and stunted oaks, or possibly thickets of sloe, birch, rowan, hawthorn, brambles, and briers.
Every stream would be "wild water" leaping down waterfalls and cutting out irregular, little woody ravines. Here and there boulders and escarpments of rock would break through the forest soil, which would be mossy, thick with undergrowth, and entangled with rotting fallen trunks and branches, crossing at every conceivable angle. The higher hills were covered by a dreary, sombre pine forest. It was of a monotonous, desolate character. Greenish-grey tufts of Old Man's Beard lichen hung from the branches. The ground, treacherous, and broken by boulders, peaty hollows, and dead logs, would be shrouded in a soft, thick cushion of feathery Mosses, with Blaeberry, Ferns, Trientalis, Linnea, Dwarf Cornel, and other rare plants. Through it descended raging and destructive torrents which here might be checked and foamed over dead logs, whilst in another place they cut out bare earth-escarpments or started new waterfalls which ate back into the hills behind.
At the summit of the higher hills, bare rock crags projected out of occasional alpine grassy slopes, or irregular terraces, ravines, and gullies. Below, these alpine ravines ended in a peat-moss, which scattered, dwarfed, distorted, and miserable-looking Scotch Firs and Birches painfully endeavoured to colonize. Here and there on very steep hillsides, wiry, tussocky grass might be growing instead of forest or peat.
A horrible, forbidding, and desolate land, where Deer, Irish elk, bison, bear, wolf, boar, wolverine, badger, and fox, alone enjoyed themselves.
Now consider our country to-day. Mark the "trim little fields"; "that hedge there must have been clipt about eighty years"; "The lifting day showed the stucco villas on the green and the awful orderliness of England—line upon line, wall upon wall, solid stone dock and monolithic pier."[67] The road, carefully macadamized, sweeps on correct and straight or gracefully curving from neat village to countrytown. In the heart of the country the roadsides are scraped bare to produce that hideous tidiness which is dear to the soul of the County Council roadman. That is if an individual whose life is spent in stubbing up roses, briers, and every visible wild flower, can possibly possess a soul! Those fields without a rock, or even a projecting stone, have been drained, dug over, and levelled with the greatest possible care. The very rivers have been straightened and embanked; the rows of pollarded willows have been planted; they may, when in flood, overflow, but the results are very soon no longer visible. Even on the moors and in the depths of the Highlands, black-faced sheep, draining, and the regular burning of the heather, have quite transformed our country.
The original woods have long since vanished: those which now exist are mostly quite artificial plantations, and the very trees are often strangers to Britain.
The story of the Herculean labour by which our country, once as wild and as savage as its early inhabitants the Icenians and Catieuchlanians (and probably with lineaments as barbarous as those of the Coritanian and Trinobant), has been changed to peaceful, fertile meadowlands or tidy arable, is one long romance. To tell it properly would require a book to itself. In this chapter we shall only try to sketch what may have happened on one particular cornfield which exists on the trap-rocks of Kilbarchan, near Glasgow.[68] The reader must bear in mind that even this is a very ambitious attempt! It is an exceedingly difficult undertaking.