A Cotswold Village; Or, Country Life and Pursuits in Gloucestershire

by J. Arthur Gibbs

Mr. Aubrey De Vere relates an amusing story about Sir William Rowan Hamilton which exactly illustrates my meaning: "When he had soared into a high region of speculative thought he took no note of objects close by. A few days after our first meeting we walked together on a road, a part of which was overflowed by a river at its side. Our theme was the transcendental philosophy, of which he was a great admirer. I felt sure that he would not observe the flood, and made no remark on it. We walked straight on till the water was half way up to our knees. At last he exclaimed, 'What's this? We seem to be walking through a river. Had we not better return to the dry land?'"

There is a spot in the woods by the River Coln that is almost untrodden by man. It is the favourite resort of foxes. Nobody but myself and the earth-stopper has been there for years and years, save that when the hounds come the huntsman rides through and cheers the pack. It is in the conyger wood. No path leads through its quiet recesses, where ash and elm and larch and spruce, mostly self-sown, are mingled together, with a thick growth of elder spread beneath them. It was here, in an ancient, disused quarry, that the keeper pointed out not long since the secret dwelling-house of the kingfishers. A small crevice in the limestone rock, from which a disagreeable smell of dried fish bones issued forth, formed the outer entrance to the nest. One could not see the delicate structure itself, for it appeared to be several feet within the rock. A mass of powdered fish bones and the pungent odour from within were all the outward signs of the inner nest. By standing on a jutting ledge of the soft cretaceous rock, and holding on by another ledge, which appeared not unlikely to come down and crush you, one could peep into the hole and comfort oneself with the thought that one was nearer a kingfisher's nest than is usually vouchsafed to mortal man. It would be easy to get ladder and pickaxe and break open the rock until the nest was reached, but why disturb these lovely birds? They have built here year by year for centuries; even now some of this year's brood may be seen among the willows by the back brook.

From this quarry was dug in the year 1590 the stone to build the old manor house yonder. A few miles away toward Burford is the quarry from which men say Christopher Wren brought some of the stone to raise St. Paul's Cathedral. Yet the local people do not care a bit for this beautiful freestone of the Cotswold Hills. They want to bring granite from afar for their village crosses, and ugly blue slates for the roofs of the houses. At a parish council meeting the other day it was seriously proposed to erect a "Jubilee Hall" of red brick in our village. Anything for a change, you see; these people would not be mortal if they did not love a change. The pure grey limestone is commonplace hereabouts; I have actually heard it said that it will not last. Yet in every village stand the old Norman churches, built entirely of local stone, walls and roof; and many an old manor house as well lies in our midst, as good as it was three hundred years ago. To me, this limestone of the hills is one of the most beautiful features of the Cotswold country. I love to stand in a limestone quarry and mark the layers and ponderous blocks of clean white virgin rock--a tiny cleft in "the great stone floor which stretches over the face of the earth and under the limitless expanse of the sea." That solid cretaceous mass is but the remnants of the countless inhabitants of the old seas,--life changed into solid, hard rock; and even now, as the green grass and the sweet sainfoin spring up on the surface, feeding the flocks and herds that will soon in their turn feed mankind, earth is turning back again into life. Thus onwards in an endless cycle, even as the earth goes round, and the waters return to the place from whence they came, does nature's work go on; and when we consider these things, eternity and infinity lose part of their strangeness. Does it seem strange when we look upon this glorious country?--in May a sea of golden buttercups, in summer a sea of waving grass, and in the autumn a sea of golden corn; once it was a sea of salt water. And these great rounded banks, these hills and valleys, these billowy wolds,--could they but speak to us might tell strange things of the passing of the waters and of the inhabitants of the old ocean ages and ages ago; the mystery of the sea would be sung in every vale and echoed back by every rolling down.

A very wonderful matter it certainly is that the stone in which the whole history of the country-side is writ, not only in rolling downs and limestone streams, but even in church, tithe-barn, farm, and cottage, as well as in the walls and the roads and the very dust that blows upon them, should be nothing more nor less than a mass of dead animals that lived generation after generation, thousands of years ago, at the bottom of the sea.

There is silence in the woods--the drowsy silence of summer. Most of the birds have gone to the cornfields. An ash copse is never so full of birds as the denser woodlands, where the oaks grow stronger on a stiff clay soil. Here are no laughing yaffels, no cruel, murderous shrikes, and very few song-birds. Still, there are always the pigeons and the cushats, the wicked magpies and the screaming "jaypies," as the local people call the jays. Then, too, there are the birds down among the watercress and the brooklime in the clear pool below the spring, moorhens occasionally awakening the echoes by running down a weird chromatic scale or calling with their loud and mellow note to their friends and relations over at the brook; here, too, the softer croak of the mallard and the wild duck is also heard. A hawk, chasing some smaller bird, is darting and hovering over the tops of the firs, but, catching a glimpse of me, disappears from sight. Presently a little bird, with an eye keener even than the cruel hawk's, comes out from the hazels and perches on a post some ten yards away. It is a fly-catcher. As he sits he turns his eyes in every direction, on the look-out for dainty insects. He seems to have eyes at the back of his head, for instantly he sees a fly in the air right behind him, makes a dash, catches it, and flies on to the next post. He repeats the performance there, then once more changes his ground. When he has made another successful raid, he returns to his first post, always hunting in a chosen circuit, and always catching flies. He was here yesterday, and will be here again to-morrow. When you try to approach him, however, he flies away and hides himself in the firs.

If there are not many birds in the woods just now, still, there is always the beauty of the trees. How marvellous is the symmetry of form and colouring in the trunk and branches of a big ash tree! If you put mercury into a solution of nitrate of silver, and leave them for a few days to combine, the result will be a precipitation of silver in a lovely arborescent form, the arbor Dianae, beautiful beyond description. Such are my favourite ash trees when the summer sunshine sparkles on them. It is their bare, silvered trunks that give the special charm to these hanging woods. They stand out from dark recesses filled with alder and beech and ivy-mantled firs, rising in bold but graceful outline; columns of silver, touched here and there with the sad gold and green shades of lichen and moss. The moss that mingles with golden lichens is of a soft, velvety hue, like a mantle of half drapery on a beautiful white statue. And, oddly enough, though ferns do not grow on the limestone soil of the Cotswolds, yet on the first story so to speak of every big ash tree by the river, as well as on the pollard willows, there is a beautiful little fernery springing up out of the moss and lichen, which seems to thrive most when the lichen thrives--in the winter rather than in the summer. Then, too, the foliage of all kinds of trees and shrubs is not only different in form, but the minutest serrations vary; so that the leaves of two kinds of trees are no more alike than any two human faces are alike. The elm leaves are rough to the touch, like sandpaper, and their edges are clearly serrated; those of the beeches are smooth as parchment, and though the edges appear at first sight to be almost clean cut, they have very slight serrations, as if nature had rounded them with a blunt knife. The lobed ivy leaves are likewise highly polished, and they have sharp, pointed tips. The leaves of the common stinging-nettle ("'ettles" the labourers call them) have deep indents all round them. A great dock leaf, in which the chives have a strange resemblance to the arteries in the human frame, has small shallow indents all round it. Hazels are rough and almost round in form, save for a pointed tip at the end; they have ragged edges and ill-defined serrations. Everybody knows the sycamore from its five lobed leaves; and the chestnuts and oaks are, again, as different as possible. These are only a few instances; one might go on for a long time showing the endless variations of form in foliage.

Then there is the remarkable difference in colour and shade; not only are there a dozen different greens in one wood, but in one and the same beech you may see a marked contrast in the tone of its leaves. For about midsummer some trees put forth a second growth of foliage, so that there is the vivid yellow tint of the fresh shoots and the dark olive of the older leaves on one and the same branch. Of the rich autumnal shades I am not speaking; they would require a chapter to themselves.

There are other things to be noted in the woods besides the trees and the birds: lots of rabbits and squirrels, not to mention an occasional hedgehog. Squirrels are the most delightful of all the furred denizens of the woods. Running up the trees, with their long brushes straight out behind, they are not unlike miniature foxes. The slenderness of the twigs on which they manage to find support is one of the greatest wonders of the woods. The harmless hedgehog, as everybody is aware, rolls himself up into a lifeless ball of bristles on being disturbed. By staying quietly by him and addressing him in an encouraging tone, I lately induced a very large hedgehog to unroll himself and creep slowly along close to my feet.

It is very extraordinary how all wild animals, especially when young, can be won by kindness. I once came across a young hedgehog about three-parts grown; he was running about on the grass in front of the house in broad daylight, and kept poking his little nose into the earth searching for emmets and grubs. I made friends with him, dug him up some worms, and in less than half an hour he became as tame as possible. Tom Peregrine, the keeper, stood by and roared with laughter at his antics, saying he had never seen such a "comical job" in all his life. And it really was a curious sight. The hedgehog, with the merriest twinkle in his eyes, would take the worms out of my hand; and when I dangled them five or six inches off the ground, he would rear up on his hindlegs and snatch and grab until he secured them. Then he would sit up and scratch himself like a dog. He would allow me to take him up in my hands and stroke him, and yet not retire into his bristly shell. He ate a dozen worms and a bumble-bee straight off the reel, and then with all the gluttony of the pig tribe he went searching about for more food. I noticed that he ate the grass, in the same way as dogs do, for medicinal purposes. We put him into a large box with some hay in it, and as he still seemed hungry that evening, we gave him a couple of cockchafers from the kitchen, which he appeared to relish mightily. The little fellow was as happy as a king, crying and squeaking whenever we went to look at him, and hunting round the box for food. But, alas! we had overfed him. To our intense regret he died the next day from acute indigestion.

There are but few snakes or vipers in the district of which I am writing. But quite recently a man found a large trout about eighteen inches in length lying dead in the Coln, and protruding from the mouth of the fish was a large snake, also dead. The snake must have been swimming in the water (as they are known to do occasionally), and the trout being in a backwater, where food was scarce, must have seized the snake and choked himself in his efforts to bolt it This was a remarkable occurrence, because a Coln trout is most particular as to his bill of fare, and snakes are certainly not usually included in the list. There is such a plentiful supply of larvae, caddis, "stone-loach," fresh-water shrimps, crayfish, and other crustaceans, to say nothing of flies, minnows, and small fry, that a trout would very seldom attack a snake. A large lobworm, however, as every one knows, is a very attractive bait for any kind of fresh-water fish except pike.