24 Wild Life in a Southern County 



linger some stunted oaks interspersed among the ash copses 

 which to this day are called ' the Chace ' and are proved by 

 documentary evidence to stand on the site of an ancient 

 deer forest. A deer forest, too, there is (though seven or 

 eight miles distant, yet on the same range of hills), to this 

 very day tenanted by the antlered stag. Such evidence 

 could be multiplied ; but this is enough to establish the 

 fact that for the whole breadth of the hills to have been 

 covered with wood is well within possibility. 



I may even go further, and say that, if left to itself, it 

 would in a few generations revert to that condition ; for 

 this reason : that when a clump of trees is planted here, 

 experience has shown that it is not so much the wind or 

 the soil which hinders their growth as the attacks of 

 animals wild and tame. Eabbits in cold, frosty weather 

 have a remarkable 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 cen- 

 tury, 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 obtained over the tops 



