30 Wild Life in a Southern County. 
taste for the bark of the young ash-saplings: they 
nibble it off as clean as if stripped with a knife, of 
course frequently killing the plant. Cattle—of which 
a few wander on the hills—are equally destructive to 
the young green shoots or ‘tops’ of many trees. 
Young horses especially will bark almost any smooth- 
barked tree, not to eat, but as if to relieve their teeth 
by tearing it off. In the meadows all the young 
oaks that spring up from dropped acorns out in the 
grass are invariably torn up by cattle and the still 
closer-cropping sheep. If the sheep and cattle were 
removed, and the plough stood still for a century, ash 
and beech and oak and hawthorn would reassert 
themselves, and these wide, open downs become 
again a vast forest, as doubtless they were when the 
beaver and the marten, the wild boar and the wolf, 
roamed over the country. 
This great earthwork, crowning a ridge from 
whence a view for many miles could have been ob- 
tained over the tops of the primeval trees, must then 
have had a strangely different strategical position to 
what it now seemingly occupies in the midst of 
almost treeless hills. Possibly, too, the powerful 
effect of so many square miles of vegetation in con- 
densing vapour may have had a distinct influence 
upon the rainfall, and have rendered water more 
plentiful than now: a consideration which may help 
to explain the manner in which these ancient forts 
were held. 
