These iron-making and mining operations caused the forest to be intersected by roads and tramways, as old maps and reports of the forest shew us; so that few beasts, except those passing between their more secluded haunts, were to be found there; and, as the stragglers preferred the tender vegetation the garden of the cottager afforded, even these were sometimes noosed, or shot with bows and arrows, which made no noise.
To such an extent had destruction of timber in this and other forests in the country been carried, that it was feared that in the event of a foreign war sufficient timber could not be found for the use of the navy. A reaction, however, set in: wealthy landowners set themselves to work to remedy the evil by planting and preserving trees, especially the oak; and many of the woods and plantations which gladden the eye of the traveller in passing through the country, and which afford good sport to the Wheatland and Albrighton packs, were the result.
To this indigenous and deep-rooted love of sport we are therefore indebted, to a very great extent, for those beautiful woods which adorn the Willey country and many other portions of the kingdom. But for our woods and the “creeping things” they shelter, we should have imperfect conceptions of those earlier phases of the island:—
“When stalked the bison from his shaggy lair,
Thousands of years before the silent air
Was pierced by whizzing shafts of hunters keen.”
The country would have been wanting in subjects such as Creswick, with faithful expressions of foliage and knowledge of the play of light and shade, has depicted. It would have lost the text-work of those characteristics Constable revelled in, and those Harding gave us in his oaks. We should have lost subjects for the poet as well as for the painter; for the ballad literature of the country is redolent of sights and sounds associated therewith. To come down from the earliest times. How the old Druids reverenced them! how the compilers of that surprising survey of the country we find in Domesday noted all details concerning them! what joyous allusions Chaucer, Spenser, and later writers make to them! what peculiar charms the “merry green-wood” and the deep forest glades had for the imagination of the people! Hence the popular sympathy expressed by means of tales and traditions in connection with Sherwood’s sylvan shade, and the many editions of the song of the bold outlaw, and of the adventures contained therein. Even the utilitarian philosopher and the ultra radical, fleeing from the stifling atmosphere of the town, and diving for an hour or so into some paternal wood, is inclined, we fancy, to sponge from his memory the bitter things he has said of the owners and of that aristocratic class who usually value and guard them as they do their picture galleries. Thanks to such as these, there is now scarcely a run in the Willey country but brings the sportsman face to face with vestiges of some sylvan memorial Nature or man has planted along the hill and valley sides, memorials renewed again and again, as winter after winter rends the red leaves from the trees: and the man who has not made a pilgrimage, for sport or otherwise, through these far-reaching sylvan slopes along the valley of the Severn, stretching almost uninterruptedly for seven or eight miles, or through some similar wooded tract, witnessing the sheltered inequalities of the surface, varied by rocky glens and rushy pools—the winter haunt of snipe and woodcock—has missed much that might afford him the highest interest. Here and there, on indurated soils along the valley sides, opportunities occur of studying the manner in which trees of several centuries’ growth send their gnarled and massive roots in between the rocks in search of nourishment, for firmness, or to resist storms that shake branches little inferior to the parent stem. Few places probably have finer old hollies and yew-trees indigenous to the soil, relieving the monotony of the general grey by their sombre green—trees rooted where they grew six or eight centuries since, and carrying back the mind to the time of Harold and the bowmen days of Robin Hood.
Spoonhill, a very well-known covert of the Wheatland Hunt, was a slip of woodland as early as a perambulation in 1356, when it was recorded to lie outside the forest, its boundary on the Shirlot side being marked by a famous oak called Kinsok, “which stood on the king’s highway between Weston and Wenlock.”
The Larden and Lutwyche woods for many years have been famous for foxes. The late M. Benson, Esq., told us that a fox had for several seasons made his home securely in a tree near his house, he having taken care to keep his secret. The woods, too, on the opposite side of the ridge, rarely fail to furnish a fox; and it is difficult to imagine a finer spot than Smallman’s Leap, [49a] or Ipikin’s Rock, on the “Hill Top,” presents for viewing a run over Hughley and Kenley, or between there and Hope Bowdler. Near Lutwyche is a thick entangled wood, called Mog Forest; and in the old door of the Church of Easthope, [49b] near, is a large iron ring, which is conjectured to have been placed there for outlaws of the forest who sought sanctuary or freedom from arrest to take hold of. Now and then, in wandering over the sites of these former forests, we come upon traditions of great trees, sometimes upon an aged tree itself, “bald with antiquity,” telling of parent forest tracts, like the Lady Oak at Cressage, which formerly stood in the public highway, and suffered much from gipsies and other vagabonds lighting fires in its hollow trunk, but which is now propped, cramped, and cared for, with as much concern as the Druids were wont to show to similar trees. A young tree, too, sprung from an acorn from the old one, has grown up within its hollow trunk, and now mingles its foliage with that of the parent.
