Round About a Great Estate

by Richard Jefferies

A much-neglected path led from the park through some fir plantations down to the fishpond. After the first turn of the narrow track the close foliage of the firs, through which nothing could be seen, shut out the world with green walls. The strip of blue sky visible above was wider than the path, because the trees sloped away somewhat, their branches shortening towards the top; still it was so contracted that a passing woodpigeon was seen but for a second as he went over. Every step carried me into deeper silence—the sudden call of a jay was startling in its harsh contrast. Presently the path widened where the thickly planted firs were succeeded by sycamores, horse-chestnuts, alders, and aspen—trees which stand farther apart, and beneath which some underwood grew. Here there were thickets of hawthorn and bramble and elder bushes which can find no place among firs.

The ground now sloped rapidly down into a hollow, and upon this descent numbers of skeleton leaves were scattered. There was no other spot all over the Chace where they could be seen like this; you might walk for hours and not find one, yet here there were hundreds. Sometimes they covered the ground in layers, several leaves one on the other. In spring violets pushed up through them and blue-bells—sweet hope rising over grey decay.

Lower down a large pond almost filled the hollow. It was surrounded on three sides by trees and thickets; on the fourth an irregular margin of marshy grass extended. Floating leaves of weeds covered the surface of the water; these weeds had not been disturbed for years, and there was no check to their growth except their own profusion, for they choked each other. The pond had long ceased to supply fish for the table. Before railways brought the sea so near, such ponds were very useful. At that time almost everything consumed came from the estate itself: the bread, the beef, the mutton, the venison, game, fish, all was supplied by the adjacent woods, the fields, or the water. The lord in old days hunted the deer on his own domain, brought down game with a crossbow or captured it with nets, and fished or netted his own streams and ponds. These great parks and chaces enclosed everything, so that it was within easy reach of his own door. Sometimes the lord and his visitors strolled out to see the fishponds netted.

This pond had originally been one of a series, but the others had been drained and added to the meadows. It was said to be staked at the bottom to prevent illicit netting; but if so, the stakes by this time were probably rotten or buried in mud formed from the decaying weeds, the fallen leaves, and branches which were gradually closing it up. A few yards from the edge there was a mass of ivy through which a little brown thatch could be distinguished, and on approaching nearer this low roof was found to cover the entrance to a cave. It was an ice-house excavated in the sloping ground or bank, in which, 'when George the Third was King,' the ice of the ponds had been preserved to cool the owner's wine in summer. Ice was then a luxury for the rich only; but when so large a supply arrived from America, a supply increased by freezing machines, the ice-house lost its importance. The door, once so jealously closed, was gone, and the dead leaves of last year had gathered in corners where the winds had whirled them.

The heat of a warm June day seemed still more powerful in this hollow. The sedges, into which two or three moorhens had retired at my approach, were still, and the leaves on the boughs overhanging the water were motionless. Where there was a space free from weeds—a deeper hole near the bank—a jack basked at the surface in the sunshine. High above on the hill stood a tall dead fir, from whose trunk the bark was falling; it had but one branch, which stood out bare and stark across the sky. There came a sound like distant thunder, but there were no clouds overhead, and it was not possible to see far round. Pushing gently through the hawthorn bushes and ash-stoles at the farther end of the pond, I found a pleasant little stream rushing swiftly over a clear chalky bottom, hastening away down to the larger brook.

Beyond it rose a mound and hedgerow, up to which came the meadows, where, from the noise, the cattle seemed racing to and fro, teased by insects. Tiny black flies alighting on my hands and face, irritated the skin; the haymakers call them 'thunder-flies;' but the murmur of the running water was so delicious that I sat down on a bulging tree-root, almost over the stream, and listened to the thrushes singing. Had it been merely warm they would have been silent. They do not sing in dry sunshine, but they knew what was coming; so that there is no note so hated by the haymaker as that of the thrush. The birds were not in the firs, but in the ash-trees along the course of the rill.

The voice of the thrush is the most 'cultivated,' so to speak, of all our birds: the trills, the runs, the variations, are so numerous and contrasted. Not even the nightingale can equal it: the nightingale has not nearly such command: the thrush seems to know no limit. I own I love the blackbird best, but in excellence of varied music the thrush surpasses all. Few birds, except those that are formed for swimming, come to a still pond. They like a clear running stream; they visit the sweet running water for drinking and bathing. Dreaming away the time, listening to the rush of the water bubbling about the stones, I did not notice that the sky had become overcast, till suddenly a clap of thunder near at hand awakened me. Some heavy drops of rain fell; I looked up and saw the dead branch of the fir on the hill stretched out like a withered arm across a black cloud.

Hastening back to the ice-house, I had barely entered the doorway when the lightning, visible at noonday, flashed red and threatening, the thunder crackled and snapped overhead, and the rain fell in a white sheet of water. There were but two of these overpowering discharges with their peculiar crack and snap; the electricity passed on quickly, and the next clap roared over the woods. But the rain was heavier than before, the fall increased after every flash, however distant, and the surface of the pond was threshed by the drops which bore down with them many leaves weakened by blight.

Doubtless the mowers in the meadows had hidden the blades of their scythes under the swathe, and the haymakers had placed their prongs in the ditches: nothing is so likely to attract a shock of lightning as a prong carried on the shoulder with the bright steel points upwards. In the farmhouses the old folk would cover up the looking-glasses lest the quicksilver should draw the electric fluid. The haymakers will tell you that sometimes when they have been standing under a hedge out of a storm a flash of lightning has gone by with a distinct sound like 'swish,' and immediately afterwards the wet ground has sent forth a vapour, or, as they say, smoked.

Woodpigeons and many other birds seem to come home to woods and copses before and during a storm. The woodpigeon is one of the freest of birds to all appearance: he passes over the highest trees and goes straight away for miles. Yet, though it is usual to speak of wild birds and of their freedom, the more you watch their ways the more you feel that the wildest have their routes and customs: that they do not act entirely from the impulse of the moment, but have their unwritten laws. How do the gnats there playing under the horse-chestnut boughs escape being struck down by the heavy raindrops, each one of which looks as if it would drown so small a creature? The numbers of insects far exceed all that words can express: consider the clouds of midges that often dance over a stream. One day, chancing to glance at a steeple, I saw what looked like thin smoke issuing from the top of it. Now it shot out in a straight line from the gilded beak of the weathercock, now veered about, or declined from the vane. It was an innumerable swarm of insects, whose numbers made them visible at that height.