52 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



Then suddenly round a comer towers a third, which 

 will remain when these showy little fellows have passed 

 away, and stood there, impregnable and lofty, aeons 

 before the worthy of river-bed type, whose skull reposes 

 in a glass-case, making money for a more up-to-date 

 society, chiselled and polished his flints on the floor of 

 the cave, that knew not, as it does now, electric light. 

 Here were absolute solitude and a kind of keyed-up, 

 concentrated silence, broken only by the bright voices 

 of the daws, whose cries, made metallic and almost 

 shrill in the hollow between the cliffs, went spinning 

 and leaping from crag to crag. The contrast between the 

 one scene and the other was theatrical, the imperious, 

 precipitous rocks seeming to frown down upon the dwarfed 

 face of our mean, gimcrack, competitive modernism and to 

 make it piteous, like a slum-child with a cross-grained leer. 



When I walked up the gorge in spring, the shrubs 

 and ivy and minute trees were clothed in their first 

 tender leaf, as if the solid cliff had blossomed, and their 

 fragility and delicacy of form and colour against the 

 gaunt walls of grey, primeval rock were so beautiful that 

 " the sense faints picturing " them. Gazing upon this 

 miracle and thinking of the huckstering going on fifty 

 yards away, a portrait in little of man's general defile- 

 ment of the world, one could not but be tranquillized by 

 the assurance that treasures of loveliness lie dormant in 

 the hard heart of man, and that they will one day sprout 

 like the "glad light grene" from the face of this bare rock. 



I was disturbed from these sentimental flights by a 

 more material one — ^the flight of an old friend of Neolithic 

 man, the hero of so many dark legends, and doomed very 

 soon now to reside like him in a glass case. The rock- 

 churches of nature are now almost everywhere sacked of 

 their ecclesiastics — raven, kite, buzzard and eagle — and 

 one has to be content with the choir-boys — kestrel, daw 

 and pie. Yet this cathedral had its attendant priest, 

 for the raven was nesting not a hundred yards from 

 his human prehistoric contemporary. The nest was 

 two hundred feet up the rock in a natural cleavage, 

 sheltered above by overhanging boulders, and projecting 

 over the platform — inaccessible, one would have thought, 



