THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 
Maid Marian, and the jovial Friar Tuck, are personages 
with whose doings in the glades of “ Merrie Sherwood,” 
ballad and song have made all familiar. It would 
require but little play of the fancy to bring them back 
to their former haunts, for a large portion of the forest 
is comparatively little changed from what it was in the 
days of the renowned freebooter ; the same huge oaks, 
whose gnarled and rifted trunks bear witness to their 
antiquity, still lift their giant arms aloft in sturdy gran- 
deur. Furze, and bracken, and heather, cover the 
ground, and with the young self-sown trees, form dense 
thickets, where the red deer might hide securely, and it 
needs but to add the ring of the bugle, with the twang 
of the bowstring, and the stalwart figures in Lincoln 
green, to complete the picture of the past. 
Geologically, the greater part of the forest lies in the 
New Red Sandstone ; the northern extremity, however, is 
included in the Magnesian Limestone, which, com- 
mencing at Worksop, runs by Welbeck to Warsop, near 
Mansfield, and then taking a more northerly course, it 
joins the coal measures at Radford, near Nottingham. 
The whole of the district, from Ollerton to Worksop 
on the one side, and to near Mansfield on the other, is 
closely wooded, parts of this area being unenclosed and 
covered with aged oaks, whilst bere and there woods of 
more recent growth, and still younger plantations, are 
interspersed. Underneath the trees is a dense growth 
of the Common Ling, or heather (Erica vulgaris), 
mingled with patches of the Cross-leaved Heath (£. te- 
tralix), and large tracts of furze, while here and there 
the common Broom reminds us of the origin of the 
surname Plantagenet, planta-genista. Over the whole 
district the Bracken (Pteris aquilina) grows abun- 
