WINTER NOTES FROM LLEYN. 43 



the green of the herbage patches, and the yellow lichen-covered 

 surfaces were all lighted up in the afternoon sunlight. But its 

 windy ledges were deserted by their teeming summer population. 

 A male Peregrine Falcon seemed like a caretaker left in posses- 

 sion, and remained flying about in front of the rock, crying 

 " quayk, quayk, quayk," as if it were spring, and occasionally 

 settling on a point of rock. Two or three Cormorants and 

 Shags were flying over the sea down below, and these and a few 

 Kittiwakes, one or two Herring-Gulls, and one adult Lesser 

 Black-backed Gull were the only representatives of the swarming 

 numbers of sea-birds which throng the rock in summer. A pair 

 of Crows and some Kock-Pipits (a bird which is far less common 

 in Lleyn in winter than in summer) were the only other birds I 

 saw there. Cliffe, in 1851, mentions the Bird Rock as " tenanted 

 in summer by countless sea-birds." It would be interesting to 

 trace the published history of some of our great breeding stations 

 of sea-fowl. 



But notwithstanding the prevalence of mist and cloud there 

 were one or two days when it was a delight to be alive, and in 

 the open air — days of grey sky with dapples of blue, and a soft 

 sweet air ; when one breakfasted with the windows facing the 

 sea wide open in an early morning temperature of 56°, mists and 

 clouds wreathing round the earns and hills, but the sun overhead 

 coming out warm. The soft air fragrant inland with starting 

 grass, fir-woods, and dead bracken, or with heather and ferns. 

 On Feb. 3rd, in the sheltered and beautifully planted grounds at 

 Llanbedrog, a bush of tree-heath (Erica lusitanica), seven feet 

 high, in full bloom, filled the air with a delicate woodruffy scent, 

 not strong, but far-reaching ; and there was a rhododendron- 

 bush, a foot or more higher, with big white blossom-trusses fully 

 out, as big as two fists. In this garden there are camellia-trees 

 of ten and twelve to fifteen feet high, and some most perfect Irish 

 junipers of great size, now all silvery with young shoots. 



The aspect of the country denoted an extremely mild winter 

 climate. At the end of January the grass-marshes near the sea 

 were quite a fresh green, and, though the inland pastures were 

 tinged with yellow, the gorse was already golden in sheltered 

 spots, and generally showed some bloom even when growing on 

 exposed banks. The bracken still kept the bright unsodden 



e 2 



