But here, above, around, below,
On mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,
Nor aught of vegetative power,
The weary eye may ken.
But austereness, too, has its place, and often is to the mountains what fertility is to the fields, not a blemish, but a glory; and if grey crag[19] and wild hillside bear no visible fruitage, yet many are the spiritual crops which may be gathered from them by the understanding eye and mind.
Some centuries ago the Lake District, as Wordsworth has remarked, “must have been covered with wood to a great height up the mountains, where native Scotch firs must have grown in great profusion, as they do in the northern part of Scotland to this day”; and he quotes a traditional saying that a squirrel might have travelled from Wythburn to Keswick without touching earth. In Wales the same conditions once existed, and Pennant, in 1773, referred to the earlier destruction of the oak forests which had clothed the upper dales. “Avarice,” he wrote, “or dissipation, and its constant follower, poverty, have despoiled much of our Principality of its leafy beauties.” We can no longer say of Snowdon or of Helvellyn, as of Mont Blanc, that “around his waist are forests braced”—even miniature forests—but a closer knowledge will teach us that the hillside, even when barren of vegetation, is never barren of charm, and it may be that these mountains have gained as much as they have lost by the change. Certainly there is a keen pleasure to the climber in standing free of all entanglement of trunk or thicket on the bare and open fells.
Not that the mountain is often a mere treeless and shrubless waste, for in some places, on the lower slopes, there is a thick ground-growth—carefully shunned by the traveller, but rich and beautiful in itself—of heather, bracken, and bilberry, and there are not a few spots where the flanks of the hills are a very wilderness of intermingled crags and brushwood, ancient lurking-place of “mart” or fox, but rarely if ever trodden by foot of man. When these fail, there may often be seen a line of stunted yews, or hollies, or junipers, straggling up the slope, or a mountain-ash jutting out slantwise from the side of some narrow ravine and almost bridging the watercourse. The bilberry, like the heather, is at times found growing at great heights, especially in the rockier and less accessible places, such as the sides of Tryfan or Scafell Pike, where it flourishes amazingly in some seasons and produces berries of giant size.[20]
Not less delightful is that close-fitting vestment of the hills, which follows so faithfully each ripe curve and contour, and so trimly encircles the projecting bosses of rock—the short crisp sward, on which the mountain sheep have their pasture. Even the stoniest tracts are softened, here and there, by these verdant interspaces, and it is refreshing to see a steep saddle of turf flung across a craggy ridge, or a streak of greenery running far down, like a path, among the grey and pathless screes. These grass banks are in parts notched and graded into a kind of natural stair, easy to climb and luxurious to descend; elsewhere they have a smooth and glassy surface which in dry weather becomes highly polished and rather treacherous to the feet.
Very inviting, too, are the narrow winding tracks, models of skilful engineering, which sheep and shepherds between them have worn along the slopes—slender thoroughfares which often skirt the fells for some distance at the same level, and offer a less toilsome footing to those whose course is round some projecting bluff or hollow combe. A terrace-road, where one has a steep rise on one side and a steep drop on the other, is always a delight, even when one’s terrace is but a tiny sheep-path of a few inches’ width; nor is there any need to go to show places, such as the so-called “Precipice Walk” at Dolgelly, for a sensation which can be enjoyed in abundance on any unfrequented hillside.