Part 9
There is a strange stillness in the woods these autumn days; a mournful silence, as of regret for the lost summer. The birds are quiet; the insects, whose life and beauty lent so much to the brightness of the summer, are dying in the sharpening air, or are creeping away to hide themselves for the winter. October is a fatal month for the lower forms of life. The different species of our native insects are numbered by tens of thousands, and of the myriads of these with which the air of August, and even of September, teemed, only a few, a very few, will survive the chillier dawns and sunsets of this month, which marks the limit of their lives. At the best their lives are brief. The lives of insects, in their perfect condition, are more often numbered only by months, or even weeks: while the little sad-coloured stone-flies that haunt the banks of streams, entering on their last stage without mouths, spend only a few days of strange existence; and there are other flies which, born after sunset and dying before sunrise, never see the full light of day at all.
Those insects which survive the winter do so as a rule by retiring into the shelter of buildings, into crevices in walls, or into hollow trees, and there remaining, motionless and apparently lifeless, all through the cold season, coming out again at the return of spring. Some butterflies are especially fond of taking up their quarters for the winter in the roofs of houses; and the cornices of unoccupied rooms seem particularly favourite resting-places. There is a case on record in which a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, having entered a church during service-time one Sunday in August, settled calmly on a rafter over the heads of the congregation, closed its wings, and then and there took up its quarters for the season. It was happily beyond the reach of the verger's broom, though under the eyes of the clergyman,--himself a naturalist, and there it hung, week after week, all the winter through. At length, on a warm Sunday in May, after a sleep of just nine months' duration, the little creature opened its wings again and fluttered down from its perch, "apparently as fresh in colour and condition as if just out of the chrysalis".
In the same way another of the race flew into a sitting-room in a little country town, one day during the hot weather of September, and finally established itself in the cornice, where for six long months it hung motionless. One fine morning in the following March it was fluttering at the window. The sash was lifted. The little creature dashed out into the sunshine, almost with the speed of a swallow.
A striking feature of the autumn garden some years is the multitude of sober-coloured moths hovering among the flower-beds, morning, noon, and night. The moths themselves not only do no harm in the garden, but are of no small service to the gardener by carrying pollen on their tufted heads from flower to flower, and thus unconsciously fertilising many a blossom that might otherwise have borne no seed at all. But it is quite otherwise with the caterpillars, insignificant but noxious little grubs, which, in some seasons, appear in such hosts as to devastate whole fields. In Germany it has been found necessary to use a machine, drawn by horses, to sweep up these caterpillars, which are collected from it in sacks and then destroyed.
The perfect insect, the commonest perhaps of all the moths, is a beautiful little creature, though there is nothing striking in its colouring. It is known as the "Silver Y," from a conspicuous mark on each of its front wings. Its scientific name of "Gamma" has been given to it from another and more learned reading of the letter.
It has been found very difficult to bestow a rational English "popular name" on each of the two thousand species of moths that inhabit these islands. Some of the names, indeed, appear almost, if not quite, meaningless, while some, on the other hand, are highly appropriate. The Humming-bird Hawk moth is marvellously like the bird whose name it bears, as every one must admit who watches it poise with outstretched trunk before a flower, on wings that move so swiftly that they show like a halo round it. Two other Hawk moths are called Elephants, but this is because of the strange-looking head of the caterpillar, which can be extended like a sort of dwarf proboscis. Another moth, the Death's Head, bears a skull and cross-bones on its back.
The moths of the large class known as Geometers are so called because the caterpillars, as they loop themselves along, have the air of measuring the space they traverse, as a man might span it with his hand. The Tiger is a moth of brilliant colouring. The Widow and the Old Lady are clad in sombre hues. The Quakers are mostly dressed in soft shades of sober brown, while the sixteen varieties of Footmen wear among them almost as many varieties of livery.
Such names might, indeed, give rise to misconception. We can well understand the feelings of the old market-woman who, toiling up the steep path through the wood with her eggs and butter, overheard a party of schoolboys talking over their captures of the day. We can picture her dismay as she heard one youngster describe how he had chased a small Elephant through the wood, and just missed capturing a Tiger. We can imagine her alarm at hearing another boy boast of having killed two Quakers and a Footman. And how, at a distant shout from another member of the party that he had just knocked down an Old Lady, she dropped her basket and fled for her life.
But of all the signs in Nature's calendar that mark, like figures on a dial, the movement of the seasons, there is none more certain, none more full of mournful augury, than the passing of the birds.
Their going is secret, silent; they vanish unseen and unheard. We have learnt much in recent years with regard to migration. With one single exception, we know where every one of the summer migrants goes to rear its brood. The haunt of one only--the curlew-sandpiper--still defies discovery. But there is as much cause for wonder as ever that the stork and the swallow observe the time of their coming. And how some birds contrive to find their way over vast stretches of unbroken sea is as great a mystery as when Anacreon saw the
"Cranes from hoary winter fly, To flutter in a kinder sky;"
or when the Hebrew watched the wandering hawk stretch her wings toward the south.
Among the few sounds that break the stillness of the autumn night is a faint and hurried cry, that at times may be heard out of the darkness--the note of some bird passing over unseen. It is the cry of the redwing--a feeble note, and yet the very trumpet-call of coming winter. In the spring the sight of the first swallow raises hopes of better times, of sunshine and warm weather. In autumn this voice calling out of the dark is a warning that cold and hunger are driving the redwing from its Northern home, that the Arctic night is settling down among the Norway hills.
Vast indeed is the array of these feathered fugitives. And if most of us see but little of plover or wild duck, of goose or swan or sandpiper, we may perhaps hear them as they pass. Often in the silence of these autumn nights, or even when the wind is blowing, we may hear the swift flight of the mallard overhead, or the musical voices of plovers; perhaps at times the trumpet-notes of geese, or even the whistling of the whooper's wings. Now and then, too, there floats down out of the starlit stillness the wild call of some unknown bird, the voice of some nameless stranger crying in the dark:
"And with no language but a cry."
TURF MOOR: A HAPPY HUNTING GROUND.
The traveller who at this season of the year is whirled along the iron highway of the northern part of Somersetshire will perhaps be led to form but a poor opinion of West Country scenery, for he sees little from the rail of the heath-covered heights of Exmoor, of the wooded glens of Quantock, or of the green heart of Mendip. The line is laid for many miles across a wide stretch of low-lying moorland--so low that it would be flooded each high tide were it not for the old sea wall by the shore. There are parts of the monotonous expanse that may well remind the wayfarer of the opening lines of one of Ingoldsby's ballads:
"O, Salisbury Plain is bleak and bare, At least so I've heard many people declare, For I fairly confess that I never was there. Not a shrub nor a tree, nor a bush can you see, No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles, Much less a house or a cottage for miles."
There are indeed parts of this great plain that are almost absolutely bare of timber save for a few scanty rows of pollard willow trees. There are hardly any hedge-rows, there are few gates, and fewer stiles. The cottages are far apart, built only on the low risings--once islands in the Severn sea, which the moorfolk fondly call "hills," because they are not "drownded out" in flood time.
Yet there is one striking difference. The Somersetshire marshes--far more level than the green waves of the great Wiltshire Down--are cut up by a network of innumerable ditches, narrow indeed, yet not always easily passed, as the little army of King Monmouth proved only too well. These "rhines," as they are called in the West Country, take the place of hedge-rows, and serve also to drain away into the sluggish moorland stream the water which in rainy seasons would collect on the low ground. Turf Moor is a strange looking country, with its interminable stacks of black peat, its great hollows from which turf has been taken, its miles of straight-cut dykes by which the water is drained away into the rivers. The sombre hue of the great plain is relieved by picturesque groups of turf-cutters, by dense masses of noble Scotch firs--trees that flourish well in the peaty soil--and by an occasional belt of coppice that runs in among the peat workings--a jungle of reeds and bulrushes, of bracken and tall royal fern, a sort of No-Man's Land, a very paradise for beast and bird.
The moormen happen on strange things sometimes when they are digging in the peat. It is no very rare thing for the turf-cutter's tool to clash on pottery or rude weapons far below the present level of the moor. Some years since a bow was thus discovered, whose once heavy yew wood was so altered by its long soaking that it was as light as cork. At one place an iron anchor was found, at another the paddle of an old canoe.
There is a tradition in the marshes that, years ago, whenever after a dry summer the water was low in one of the great rhines, a boat became visible, embedded in the bank. "Squire Phippen's Big Ship," as it was called, has long been lost sight of, but in more recent times another canoe has been found on the moor, which happily has met with the attention it deserves.
Some labourers who had been employed every autumn to clear out the rhines on Cranhill Moor, near Glastonbury, had often been inconvenienced at one point by what they thought was the trunk of an old tree--such as are frequently found buried in the peat. The place was pointed out to a local archæologist, Mr. Arthur Bulleid, of Glastonbury, and he saw at once that the supposed tree-trunk was an old British canoe, in splendid preservation, most skilfully worked out of a single log. The end which had projected from the bank is damaged by the spades with which the labourers had repeatedly in past years tried to cut it away, but the rest is uninjured. This curious old craft is flat-bottomed, and pointed at each end, just as are the boats that still navigate the rhines of the district. It measures about seventeen feet in length, is perhaps thirty inches broad, and ten or eleven inches deep.
This canoe might have continued for years a mere obstacle to the clearing of the rhine--now a small ditch, but once a navigable water-way--were it not that the whole district was interested in the recent discovery of an ancient British village, of which it is safe to say that few things of more importance have rewarded recent archæological research in this country.
The ancient Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Northern Italy, though our knowledge of them is not yet half-a-century old, are familiar wherever Archæology is studied. In the forty years which have elapsed since they were first examined, it has been found that there are many places, even now, where huts, constructed on the same plan, are still in use. Such dwellings exist in the shallows along the Amazon and the Orinoco. Travellers have described them, as they are at this moment, in Borneo and New Guinea. Cameron found them in the heart of the Dark Continent. To this very day Roumelian fishermen inhabit huts built on piles over the water, in the same spot where, twenty-five centuries ago, the children of the Paeonian Lake Dwellers were, according to Herodotus, tied by the leg to prevent them falling into the water.
But, long before the discovery of the Swiss Lake Villages in 1853, another somewhat similar form of primitive habitation was known, confined, as far as can be at present ascertained, to countries inhabited by Celtic races. This was the Crannog, or Marsh Village, from the Celtic word _crann_, a tree--not built on piles in the water, but on platforms of timber laid over brushwood arranged on the soft soil of a morass. The existence of such dwellings had long been known, but little attention was paid to them before the famous researches of Keller, in Switzerland. Modern Archæologists have, however, explored at least a hundred of these Villages in Ireland, and about half that number in Scotland; and many most interesting remains have been recovered from them.
The Scotch and Irish Crannogs appear to belong to the Iron Age. Implements of the more primitive materials have, it is true, been found in them, but they were not such as were in use in the Bronze or Stone Ages. They differ both in shape and in the style of their ornamentation. A few stone celts have been found in Irish Crannogs, but no object belonging to a time earlier than the Age of Iron has yet been met with in the Marsh Villages of Scotland. The metal objects are, as a rule, characteristic of the period between the 9th and the 12th centuries, though we have evidence that some of the Irish Crannogs were in use long after that time. Allusions to them frequently occur in the old writers. We learn from "The Annals of the Four Masters" that the historic Crannog of Lough Gabhor--the first that was examined in Ireland--was burnt A.D. 848, and again, by the Danes, in 933. An account, written at the time, of the expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to put down the rebel Earl of Tyrone, describes a Crannog in County Down, which "was seated in the midst of a great bog, and no way accessible but through thick woods, hardly passable. It had about it two deep ditches, both encompassed with strong pallisadoes, a very high and thick rampart of timber, and well flanked with bulwarks. For defence of the place, forty-two musqueteers and some twenty swordsmen were lodged in it." This was in 1602. Later still, Sir Felim O'Neill, who had headed the rebellion of 1641, was captured in a Crannog, in 1642.
Until recent years no Crannog had been found in this country. The discovery of a very extensive Settlement of this kind, in the turf moor near Glastonbury, is thus an event of great Archæological interest, which is much increased by the fact that, whereas the remains found in the Scotch and Irish Crannogs point to a period so recent as from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, the Marsh Village discovered in Somersetshire has yielded, so far, no object which appears to be so late even as the Roman occupation.
But these broad flats on Turf Moor, their patches of coppice, the edges of the green "droves," the waste lands where turf has been cut, and which have been left to recover themselves by the rest and growth of perhaps half a century, even the very ditches of the moor, are in summer-time a happy hunting-ground for the naturalist.
The plants of these monotonous marshes, the birds, the beasts, the insects, have a character of their own. In summer-time the meadows that stretch from rhine to rhine are crimson with orchis and clover, with sheep sorrel and ragged robin, are golden with flower-de-luce, whitened with tall oxeye daisies and soft tufts of cotton grass. Now the whole moorland is sobered to a dull, monotonous hue of mingled browns and greys tinged with a sad-coloured note of green. The rhines that to-day are but straight-cut belts of water, with no beauty and hardly more of interest, were filled then to the very brim with sedges and iris and tall stems of flowering rush. Along their hedges grew teazels and skullcap and comfrey, and down their steep banks the moneywort poured its lavish streams of gold. Few plants of any sort are to-day visible in the water. But the still depths were covered then with a green film of weed, crossed and re-crossed with a very labyrinth of tracks, where rat or moorhen or water-rail had cut its devious way. Here grew the arrow-head, with its beautiful white flowers. Here floated the star-like blossoms of the frogbit. And here the bladderwort, that now rests unseen on the mud at the bottom, buoyed up by multitudinous little floats of air, lifted its exquisite spike above the surface.
The busy life that in the summer filled these interminable ditches has ebbed away. The green jungle of flags and water plants where the sedge warbler sang--not from dawn till nightfall only, but from sundown till the east was grey--is gone. The reeds among whose slender stems the warbler wove her exquisite nest are beaten down. The peewits who reared their scanty broods among these open meadows are here still. Even the quails that hid their beautiful eggs among the summer clover may still be couching in the withered grass; and water-rails find shelter still among the brown and broken reeds.
The banks are honeycombed with the burrows of water-rats--as most people call them. Beautiful creatures, not really rats at all, and having little in common with their evil-minded, mischievous, objectionable namesakes. Their habit of burrowing is perhaps their one fault, and has more than once helped to break down the bank of a river here, and so deluge the moors with miles of tawny water. Water-rats are out at all times, all the year, except in the very coldest weather. But twilight is their favourite hour. Then as you steal quietly along by the bank you may watch the soft brown balls of fur crouched on the narrow fringe of shore; may envy their incomparable feats of diving; may follow their course by a slight ripple on the surface as they swim to some secret hiding place. The owls know their habits well. This very month a barn owl was seen in the twilight, flying over the moor on its soft and soundless wings. Suddenly it swooped below the bank of a rhine, reappearing a moment later with a water-rat in its claws. Scared by a shout, it dropped its prey, but the rat, though warm, was stone dead.
Much less often seen are the water-shrews, whose frolics you may watch in broad daylight if you are so very fortunate as to come upon a party of them at play, swimming round and round like the tiny beetles that spin in mazy circles on the surface. The water itself is, in the summer-time, crowded with life. Over the surface skim rowing-flies and water-spiders. Under it a countless crowd of creatures live out their little day--beetles and water-scorpions, active little boatmen that paddle up and down with dexterous oars, caddis larvæ carrying about with them their houses built of grains of sand, or scraps of reed, or of a multitude of tiny shells. Shells there are everywhere, small some of them, but even the very smallest revealing under the microscope forms as marvellous as that of the nautilus itself. Slender newts, too, swarm in the still water, and great black tritons, the terror of the moorfolk, in whose eyes even the viper is hardly more venomous.
Not to every one is it given to appreciate the beauty and the wonder of the inhabitants of this happy hunting-ground. In such a paradise two naturalists had been hard at work through a hot summer afternoon. They were stretched contentedly by the roadside, when a burly, red-faced farmer driving by drew rein, and seeing their nets upon the grass asked them what sport they had had, and if it was eels or flounders they had been catching. They proceeded to explain. "Oh, bitles," said the farmer, somewhat contemptuously. "And what be they vur, then?" This was a more difficult point. It was not at all easy to make him see that there could be any use in hoarding up such "common ornery rubbish" as that. Butterflies, now, he could understand, or "bird eggs." He himself had collected "bird eggs" when he was a boy. But "bitles! Well," said he at last, "good day. I must be gwine"; and he drove slowly off. He had not got more than fifty yards along the road, however, when he pulled up again, and turning half round in his seat, called out, "Hi! but I can't think what ee can want they bitles vur!"
TURF MOOR: THE FROZEN MARSHES.
It is now some years since, through the giving way of the bank of one of the moorland rivers, a large part of the low-lying land in the heart of Somersetshire was under water all through the autumn. Many tenants of cottages on the moor were, as they would put it, "drownded out," and there were outlying villages that for a long while could only be reached by means of boats. During a recent autumn another wide area in the same county was flooded. Frost set in while a vast tract of land was still inundated. Miles of flooded marshland were entirely frozen over, and many cottages, after standing in the water for months past, were surrounded by the ice. So sharp was the cold that, on the second day of the frost, the fortunate few who were able to avail themselves of the opportunity had a perfect skating-ground, which must have measured thousands of acres.
A heavy snowfall, however, has changed the face of things altogether. Some of the moor men, whose ordinary avocations have long been at a standstill, have cleared a pretty fair piece of ice. But the rest is covered with snow. Much of it has sunk and broken, owing to the draining away of the water from beneath it; so that, vast as is still the frozen area, comparatively little of it is good enough to satisfy a fastidious performer.
But it is a wonderful landscape that, on every side of the little house which skaters on this part of the marshes use as their headquarters, lies glistening in the sunshine. A few old alder trees and storm-beaten Scotch firs shelter the cottage a little from the wind. And its all too scanty stacks and its picturesque sheds and outbuildings, whose roof of tiles are weathered to every imaginable shade of red and brown, help to give an air of warmth and comfort. A primitive place. A place such as might have given shelter to King Alfred before that desperate fight yonder on the hills of Ethandune. The master of the house is a neatherd too, as it happens, and his heifers are at this moment all huddled in the byres about the cottage, only too glad to make the acquaintance of a sympathetic stranger. There is no entrance at the front. The frozen ground has "lifted" and has jammed the door. You must make your way in through the hospitable-looking brick-floored kitchen at the back.