28 WILD BIRDS 



and found it sitting sluggishly on the dusty heather 

 tufts and the clods among building sites and roughly 

 planned gardens. In such places, within a few miles 

 of the sea, the corn bunting is often as much at home 

 as the house sparrow. It is a bird not of the town 

 and not of the tidied-up and fmished-off suburb, 

 but of that unspeakable fringe between suburb and 

 country ; a woful place of hoardings and lime and 

 mortar heaps, which surely smells of yellow bricks. 



I left the corn buntings at the last rubbish garden. 

 A mile's walk through heather and gorse took me 

 down into the swampy parts of the moor and com- 

 mon, clear of all sight and sound of human work. 

 The whole of the high, firm part of the moor will 

 some day be brick and mortar if the town by the sea 

 continues to stretch inland ; and the barrows of 

 the bronze age be enclosed in back gardens ! But 

 it is hard to believe that the wet hollows and levels 

 on the east will be spoilt even a century hence. They 

 look inviolate. A moor stream runs north across 

 this common, away from the sea, and is fed by iron- 

 tinted springs that ooze up in the hollows. Besides 

 this regular water, there is casual water in hundreds 

 of places after a rainfall, water which makes swamps 

 and little bogs throughout the peaty ground, and 

 will lie for weeks in shallow pools as though the 

 soil were puddled clay. 



To drain such a stretch of ground would be a huge 

 task, and a task not worth attempting whilst dry, 

 breezy heights near by promise the reclaimer a far 

 better return. At present the place is only tamed 



