BIEDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



CHAPTER I 



THE COAST OF SOUTH WALES 



I 



COMMUNITY 



THE coast of Pembrokeshire presses rocks "and- stone's 

 and farm-houses into the service of crc-es and 

 hedges for its landscape, and one can climb upon one of 

 the rock-cairns, natural cromlechs studding the land and 

 patterned with orange lichens like ritualist carvings, and 

 look over a valley void of tree, void of hedge, over an 

 ambit of forty miles, and humanized only by the little 

 white farm-houses dotted over the expanse as herring 

 gulls scatter themselves over a field. The coastline is 

 deeply indented, forming here a broad sandy bay horned 

 by scarred headlands, with their snouts thrust far into 

 the sea ; here a grim little cove draped with bladder- 

 wrack, bronze in the rays of the westering sun and with 

 perhaps a huge monolith uplifted from its arms and darkly 

 sacrificial in appearance ; here narrow fissures and caves 

 tunnelling far into the land ; here masses of plutonic 

 rock like dismantled fortresses, and here friable composites 

 so terrassed, frilled away and gnawed by the chisels and 

 hammers and awls and rams of breakers, winds, rains, 

 and frosts, that they look like the angular diagrams of 

 citadels. Out at sea lie rocky islets whose irregular 

 contours seem the petrified forms of scaled and warted 

 amphibians, recumbent in the shallow Permian floods. 

 For this is an ancient land, and for the shadowed brakes 

 and leafy shelters of newer ages one goes to the lower 

 rock-pools, where great bladed Laminarians, wavy sea- 



11 



