AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE 119 



level ground. And here I found what I wanted — the 

 bird life peculiar to the district — grouse, curlew, 

 golden plover, snipe and summer snipe, water- and 

 ring-ouzel. The unlovely town of Buxton is close by, 

 set in a hollow in the midst of monstrously ugly lime 

 works. The little town is also much tortured with 

 motor-cars and is blown on with stinging, suffocating 

 white dust. Happily I was soon off the hated lime- 

 stone, settled in one of the poor little stony farm- 

 houses in a hollow or valley-head on the adjacent 

 hill, the whole central part of which forms a vast 

 moor or tableland, broken at the borders and cut 

 through with ravine-like valleys, or cloughs, with 

 steep rocky sides and rushing burns below, the be- 

 ginnings of the Wye, the Dove, the Dane, and the 

 Goyt rivers. From Axe Edge on one side you look 

 down on Buxton and the hilly limestone country 

 beyond — a naked ugly land with white patches show- 

 ing everywhere through the scanty grass covering. 

 From this prospect of scabby or leprous-looking hills 

 one turns with unspeakable relief to the immense 

 tableland of Axe Edge, where you are off the lime on 

 the gritstone formation, harsh and desolate in aspect, 

 but covered with a dense growth of heather, bilberry, 

 and coarse bog grasses — a habitation of birds. 



Few persons live on this high moor; the farms are 

 not visible until you get to the edge of it and can look 

 down on the slopes below and the valleys, where the 

 small cottage-like stone farmhouses are seen sprinkled 

 over the earth, each with its few little green fields 

 walled round with stone. They are the meanest- 



