68 A KENTISH PARISH 



fauns as those asphodel beds to English-bred fairies, 

 and groves of oak trees festooned in mistletoe, where 

 Druids might have celebrated their mystic rites, it is 

 the charts that are the speciality of the parish, and 

 indeed of that side of the county. The Kentish chart 

 is a thing per se ; it is something between the Highland 

 moor and the common, with a dash of such scenery 

 betwixt Highland and Lowland as you come upon in 

 the middle course of the Spey. Oakenhurst chart 

 forms a bare plateau on the brow of the southern range 

 of wooded hills ; but bare only in the single sense that, 

 looking up to it and across it, you see the daylight 

 lying lower there than everywhere else upon the sky- 

 line, between a broken and jagged palisade of firs. In 

 reality, although it stands high and exposed, though it 

 is swept by the winds from every quarter, it grows the 

 more hardy forms of vegetation in the very richest 

 luxuriance. The seedling firs are shooting up thickly 

 around its borders, growing sparser and still more 

 sparse as they push forward their unprotected outposts. 

 And in the midst there are sheets of the purple 

 heather, broken here and there by patches of bracken, 

 and by thickets of bramble that are loaded with black- 

 berries when the summer has been followed by a warm 

 autumn. 



The chart is common land and public property, so 

 far as pasturing, fuel-cutting, and the other servitudes 

 are concerned ; though the lord of the manor has the 

 right of sport, with some minor privileges that are very 

 generally ignored. We presume that, properly speak- 



