120 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



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 limestone, settled in 

 one of the poor little stony farmhouses 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 beginnings 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 table- 

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

 grit-stone 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-look- 

 ing, most unhomelike farms you will find in England, 



