CHAPTER XXV 



The Temples of the Hills 



" The groves were God's first temples," says the poet ; 

 and viewed from the outside no groves are so like the 

 temples made with hands, Christian or pagan, as the 

 " clumps," as they are commonly called, growing on the 

 chalk hills in Sussex, Hampshire, Wilts, and Dorset. 

 Nature's way is to grow her larger trees on the lower 

 levels, and it is doubtful that the downs have ever had a 

 forest growth other than the kind which we find on them 

 now, composed mainly of the lesser native trees — haw- 

 thorn, blackthorn, holly, juniper, and yews of no great 

 size, mixed with furze, bramble, and wild clematis. 

 All these plants are perpetually springing into existence 

 everywhere on the downs, and are persistently fed 

 down and killed by the sheep ; take the sheep away 

 from any down, and in a few years, as I have seen, it 

 becomes an almost continuous thicket, and that, one 

 imagines, must have been its original condition. We 

 must suppose that man in early times, or during the 

 Neolithic period when he had domestic animals and 

 agriculture, found the chalk hills a better place than 

 the lowlands, covered as they must then have been 

 with a dense forest growth, the habitation of wolves 



260 



