48 THE LAND'S END 



It struck me as curious that the woody ivy should 

 have this aspect, since the wall itself in some parts 

 distinctly suggested the serpentine form and appear- 

 ance. Here again I was reminded of some of the 

 long earthworks or walls on the Wiltshire and Dorset- 

 shire downs the rounded, thickly turfed bank which 

 winds serpent-like over the hills and across the valleys, 

 and which often has a green colour differing slightly 

 from that of the earth it lies across. 



The old Cornish hedge had this aspect in places 

 where it was clothed with turf, and, viewed from a 

 distance and seen winding about in great curves 

 across the rough brown heath and furze-grown earth, 

 the serpentine appearance was very marked. 



Whether or not the Cornish antiquaries have paid 

 any attention to these ancient hedges I do not know. 

 The only native I came across who had anything to say 

 about them was a peasant farmer whose acquaintance 

 1 made at his cottage-like farm, a few miles from the 

 hedge I have described. He was a man of seventy- 

 nine but vigorous still and of a lively mind. When 

 I spoke to him about the old hedge and its ancient 

 appearance, he said he had known it all his life ; that 

 he was a native of a small hamlet close to the hedge, 

 and at the age of seven, when he first took to birds'- 

 nesting, he used to hunt along it on every summer 

 day and came to know it as well as he knew the fence 

 round his garden and the walls of the cottage he lived 

 in. It had not, he assured me, changed in the least 

 during the last seventy or seventy-two years : it was 

 to-day exactly what it was in his early boyhood, with 



