With branches cedared by the salten gale,
Stretched back, as if with wings that cannot flee,
is how Gordon Hake describes the appearance, seeing, as I do, the desire and struggle to escape—to fly from that pitiless persecution. But the "wings" I do not see: in summer the foliage is to my sight but a ragged mantle; in winter the human expression is strongest and most pathetic. Held by the feet in the grip of earth, the beaten bush strains to get away; it suggests the figure of a person crawling, or trying to crawl, the knee-like joints on the ground, the body-like trunk thrown forward, the long bare branches and terminal twigs, like the brown, thin naked arms and claw-like opened fingers of a starving scourged slave in the tropics, extended imploringly towards the land.
This being the nature of the country the farmer can but hedge his land and fields with stone: he is in a measure compelled to do so, since the earth is full of it and the land strewn with boulders; to make a field he must remove it and bestow it somewhere. Now after centuries of this process of removing and piling up stones, the farm land has become covered over with a network of these enduring hedges, or fences, intersecting each other at all angles; and viewed from a hill-top the country has the appearance of a patched quilt made of pieces of all sizes and every possible shape, and of all shades of green from darkest gorse to the delicate and vivid greens of the young winter grass.
That half-reclaimed district, especially the strip of coast from St. Ives Bay to Cape Cornwall, was a good winter hunting ground, and I spent many weeks in ranging about the fields and waste or incult places among them. Here you can wander at will, without fear of hurting the farmer's feelings, as in Devonshire, by walking on his land. The cultivation is little, the fields being mostly grass: the small farm-house is out of sight somewhere behind the stone hedges; it is rare to meet with a human being, and the few cows or calves you occasionally come across follow you about as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing over the next hedge into the next field you find nobody there but a pig who stares at you, then welcomes you with a good-humoured grunt; or an old solitary plough-horse; or no semi-human domestic creature at all, only a crowd of busy starlings; or starlings mixed with daws, field-fares, missel-thrushes and a few wagtails; or a couple of magpies, or a small flock of wintering curlews to be found day after day on the same spot. After crossing two or three such fields you come upon an unreclaimed patch, or belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses of old furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale brome-grass. A lonely, silent, peaceful place, where, albeit a habitation of man for untold centuries, it is wild Nature still.
Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, I did not at first pay much attention to the hedges: I simply got over them, or, in thorny and boggy places, walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise an attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, like the planted hedges of other districts, were man's creation but in part, since Nature had added much to make them what they are. Human hands first raised them: the process is going on all the time; the labourer, the cow-boy, the farmer himself, when there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles up stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to the height or length of an old hedge, and so on, but the wall once made is taken over by Nature as in the case of the planted hedge. She softens and darkens the crude harsh surface, clothes it in grey and yellow lichens and cushioned green moss, and decorates it with everything that will grow on it, before the time comes for her to ruin and finally to obliterate. But what time is needed here for demolition with such a material as granite to work on, where there are no trees to insinuate their roots into the crevices, slowly to expand the pliant fibres into huge woody wedges to thrust the loose stones apart and finally to pull them down! We can imagine how slow the destructive processes are when we look at innumerable Cornish crosses scattered over the county, showing clearly the lines cut on them in the early days of Christianity in this district. Still more do we see it in the ancient sacred stones—the cromlechs, coits, hurlers and holed stones, moor-stones or "merry maidens," and many others—which have stood and resisted the disintegrating effect of the weather since prehistoric times. The wall built is practically everlasting, but Nature works slowly on it, and the hedges I had about me differed greatly on this account, from the rude walls raised but yesterday or a dozen or twenty years ago to those which must have stood for centuries or for a thousand years or longer. Indeed, it was the appearance of extreme antiquity in one of these hedges, which I often crossed and sometimes walked on, which first excited my interest in the subject. It looked, and probably is, older than the walls of Silchester, which date back 1700 or 1800 years, and are now being gradually pulled down by the trees that have grown upon them. It was the longest of the old hedges I found, beginning among the masses of granite on the edge of the cliff, and winding away inland to lose itself eventually among the rocks and gullies and furze-thickets at the foot of a great boulder-strewn hill. Its sinuosity struck me as a mark of extreme age, as in this it resembled the huge prehistoric walls or earthworks made of chalk on the downs in Southern England, which meander in an extraordinary way. It was also larger than the other hedges, which crossed its winding course at all angles, being in most parts six to seven feet high, and exceedingly broad; moreover, where the stones could be seen they appeared to be more closely fitted together than in other hedges. Most of the stonework was, however, pretty well covered over, in some places with a very thick turf, in others by furze and bracken, rooted in the crevices and in places hiding the wall in a dense thicket.
But of all the plants growing on it the ivy was most remarkable. It is not a plant that flourishes in this district, where it has as hard a struggle as any tree to maintain its existence. It is found only in sheltered situations on this coast, in the villages, and on the landward side of steep banks and large masses of rock. On this old wall there was really no shelter, since the furious blasts from the sea swept both sides of it with the same violence. Yet in places the ivy had got possession of it, but it was an ivy very much altered in character by the unfavourable conditions from that greenest luxuriant plant we know so well. In place of the dark mass of foliage, the leaves were few and small and far apart, so that viewing the wall from a little distance away you would not notice that it had any ivy growing on it, but would see that the more naked portions were covered with a growth of rope-like stems.
