Wild Life at the Land's End Observations of the Habits and Haunts of the Fox, Badger, Otter, Seal, Hare and of Their Pursuers in Cornwall

SNOW had fallen heavily during the night, for at daybreak it lay to a depth of several inches on the grass under my window, and weighed down the laurel-bushes that skirted it. I...

THE wildest of British wild sports is the pursuit of the seal in the almost inaccessible cliff-caves to which it at times resorts. Of its haunts along the north coast of Cornwal...

BEYOND the memory of Dick Hal, who remembered the home-bringing of two wounded “Church-Town” men after Waterloo, the hounds had met on Feast Days at the Castle. The grounds with...

“He’s theere, sir,” says Andrew. By way of response the Squire winks his right eye as though to say “I can hear him.” A sharp struggle succeeds, and the yell of the dog echoes a...

THE sun had gone down over the cairn and night had drawn its curtain across the lingering afterglow, when the Earthstopper, with a lantern in each hand and the hunting-horn in h...

IT is difficult to imagine a wild creature making a harder struggle for existence than a hare in West Penwith. From beginning to end its life is one of persecution. As a leveret...

TWO fishermen strained at the creaking oars, and held the boat in the tide-race close under the Longships lighthouse, whilst I grasped the taut line, at the end of which a sand-...

IT is with some misgiving that I venture to insert this tale, inasmuch as the telling involves mention of a place so weird that readers strange to the Land’s End district may be...

We had been fishing the trout-stream that empties itself into the cove, and were resting on the boulders near the bridge before turning homewards. Ned is a good all-round sports...

AT last the looked-for day—the third of November—arrived, and fortunately it broke fine, without sign of mist or fog. Not that any weather, however bad, would have kept away the...

THE Earthstopper, having snatched a little sleep in his arm-chair, has returned to the lake to await the hounds. There he is, sitting on the fallen tree over which the otter pas...

IT was an hour after midnight when the Earthstopper of the Penwith Hunt left his cottage on the outskirts of Madron. He carried a lantern and a rough terrier followed at his hee...

MOST of Andrew’s deep thinking was done in the wooden arm-chair by his own fireside. There he is seated, the evening after his interview with Sir Bevil by the cover, considering...

WITH the putting aside of the lantern that had lit his way through the winter’s night Andrew’s thoughts turned to the otter. The mystery surrounding the ways of this wild creatu...

ABOUT this time there returned to St Just a native of the parish who had made his fortune in the Far West of America. He was brought up as a miner, but the discovery that enrich...

THE otter had just landed on the island to eat his last trout before returning to the cliffs, when the first blast of the horn fell on his ears. Instantly the fish dropped from...

“BEASTS of venerie, persecuted for their cases, or ‘dommage feasance’ are martens, squirrels, foxes, badgers and otters. . . . The fox planteth his dwelling in the steep cliffs...