40 WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. 



or eight miles distant, yet on the same range of hills), 

 to this very day tenanted by the antlered stag. Such 

 evidence could be multiplied ; but this is enough to 

 establish the fact that for the whole breadth of the 

 hills to have been covered with wood is well within 

 possibility. 



I may even go further and say that, if left to itself, 

 it would in a few generations revert to that condition ; 

 for this reason, that when a clump of trees is planted 

 here, experience has shown that it is not so much the 

 wind or the soil which hinders their growth as the 

 attacks of animals wild and tame. Rabbits in cold, 

 frosty weather have a remarkable taste for the bark 

 of the young ash saplings : they nibble it off as clean 

 as if stripped with a knife, of course frequently killing 

 the plant. Cattle of which a few wander on the 

 hills are equally destructive to the young green 

 shoots or " tops " of many trees. Young horses 

 especially will bark almost any smooth-barked tree 

 not to eat, but as if to relieve their teeth by tearing 

 it off. In the meadows all the young oaks that spring 

 up from dropped acorns out in the grass are invari- 

 ably torn up by cattle and the still closer-cropping 

 sneep. If the sheep and cattle were removed, and 

 the plough stood still for a century, ash and beech and 

 oak and hawthorn would reassert themselves, and 

 these wide, open downs become again a vast forest, as 

 doubtless they were when the beaver and the marten, 

 the wild boar and the wolf, roamed over the country. 



This great earthwork, crowning a ridge from whence 



