4 THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 



Maid Marian, and the jovial Friar Tuck, are personages 

 with whose doings in the glades of " Merrie Sherwood," 

 ballad and song have made all familiar. It would 

 require but little play of the fancy to bring them back 

 to their former haunts, for a large portion of the forest 

 is comparatively little changed from what it was in the 

 days of the renowned freebooter ; the same huge oaks, 

 whose gnarled and rifted trunks bear witness to their 

 antiquity, still lift their giant arms aloft in sturdy gran- 

 deur. Furze, and bracken, and heather, cover the 

 ground, and with the young self-sown trees, form dense 

 thickets, where the red deer might hide securely, and it 

 needs but to add the ring of the bugle, with the twang 

 of the bowstring, and the stalwart figures in Lincoln 

 green, to complete the picture of the past. 



Geologically, the greater part of the forest lies in the 

 New Red Sandstone ; the northern extremity, however, is 

 included in the Magnesian Limestone, which, com- 

 mencing at Worksop, runs by Welbeck to Warsop, near 

 Mansfield, and then taking a more northerly course, it 

 joins the coal measures at Radford, near Nottingham. 



The whole of the district, from Ollerton to Worksop 

 on the one side, and to near Mansfield on the other, is 

 closely wooded, parts of this area being unenclosed and 

 covered with aged oaks, whilst here and there woods of 

 more recent growth, and still younger plantations, are 

 interspersed. Underneath the trees is a dense growth 

 of the Common Ling, or heather (Erica vulgaris), 

 mingled with patches of the Cross-leaved Heath (E. te- 

 tralix), and large tracts of furze, while here and there 

 the common Broom reminds us of the origin of the 

 surname Plantagenet, planta-genista. Over the whole 

 district the Bracken (Pteris aquilina) grows abun- 



