1 66 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



old time buried their dead, the poppied corn, the white 

 gulls and their black shadows wheeling over sunny turf. 

 The file of lean woods seen between Perranporth and 

 St. Agnes inland. The sycamores above the farm near 

 Towan cross where the road dips and the deep furrow of 

 a little valley winds, with hay upon its slopes, out to sea. 

 The green wood, long and beautiful, below the gentle 

 brown slopes of Hudder Down. The several companies 

 of trees in the valley by the Red River, and the white 

 farm of Reskajeage near by, under ash and elm, sycamore 

 and wych-elm and lime, a rough orchard of apples and a 

 gnarled squat medlar to one side — the trees grouped as 

 human figures are when they begin to move after some 

 tense episode. The wych-elm, sycamore and ash round 

 the tower of Gwithian church and in amongst the few 

 thatched cottages alongside the yellow towans and violet 

 sea. In a land of deserted roofless houses with solid 

 chimneys that no man wants, the narrow copse of small 

 spindly oaks upholding with bare crooked stems as of 

 stone a screen of leaves, above a brooklet that runs to 

 the sea through dense rush and foxglove and thistle where 

 the sedge-warbler sings. The long low mound of green 

 wood nearest to Land's End. Between Tregothal and 

 Bosfranken, the wet copse in a narrow valley, where red 

 campion and bracken and bramble are unpenetrated among 

 flowery elders, sallows, thorns and sycamores. A farm 

 that has a water-mill and water gloomy and crystal under 

 sycamore and ash. The thin halting procession of almost 

 branchless trees on the ridge of the Beacon above Sancreed 

 — a procession that seems even at mid-day to move in 

 another world, in the world and in the age of the stone 

 circles and cairns and cromlechs of the moor beyond. 



