44 THE LAND'S END 



calves you occasionally come across follow you about 

 as if only too pleased to have a visitor. Climbing 

 over the next hedge into the next field you find 

 nobody there but a pig who stares at you, then wel- 

 comes you with a good-humoured grunt ; or an old 

 solitary plough-horse ; or no semi-human domestic 

 creature at all, only a crowd of busy starlings ; or 

 starlings mixed with daws, field-fares, missel-thrushes 

 and a few wagtails ; or a couple of magpies, or a 

 small flock of wintering curlews to be found day after 

 day on the same spot. After crossing two or three 

 such fields you come upon an unreclaimed patch, or 

 belt, where grey-lichened rocks are mixed with masses 

 of old furze bushes, and heath and tussocks of pale 

 brome-grass. A lonely, silent, peaceful place, where, 

 albeit a habitation of man for untold centuries, it is 

 wild Nature still. 



Here, with eyes and mind occupied with the bird, 

 I did not at first pay much attention to the hedges : I 

 simply got over them, or, in thorny and boggy places, 

 walked on them, but eventually they began to exercise 

 an attraction, and I began to recognise that these, too, 

 like the planted hedges of other districts, were man's 

 creation but in part, since Nature had added much 

 to make them what they are. Human hands first 

 raised them : the process is going on all the time ; 

 the labourer, the cow-boy, the farmer himself, when 

 there is nothing else to do, goes out and piles up 

 stones to stop a gap the cattle have made, to add to 

 the height or length of an old hedge, and so on, but 

 the wall once made is taken over by Nature as in the 



