238 



THE BRITISH NATURALIST. [November 



INSECTA.— COLEOPTER A. 



THE COLEOPTEREST in DELAMERE FOREST.^ 



BY W. E. SHARP. 



"O qui me in vallibus Hoemi 

 Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra." — Geo. II. 



Eastwards from Chester Cross, under the low arch of the Eastgate, 

 one comes out upon the old Watling Street, that great military way 

 which the Roman engineers stretched from London to Chester, and 

 which can still be traced in shreds and fragments, in old world name 

 of farm or meadow, or in actual macadamized highway — the great 

 north-western artery of the Roman conquest. And if you in fancy 

 follow the legionaries as they file through the Eastgate and form up 

 outside, and with that measured tread of theirs, tramp along the very 

 road our footsteps follow to-day, straight as a line if leads past Brough- 

 ton,and over the little river Gowey,and away by the flat marshy meadows 

 through the modern Tarven, then probably a district half swamp and 

 half forest, we come to the outlying hills of a low range, which drops 

 drops down from Runcorn aud Frodsham and are now called Overton. 

 Straight up the hill went the road, for those roadmakers disdained the 

 the long curve round the base of the hills which modern usage has 

 found more convenient, up over the hills and then through a desolate 

 tract, probably one of the wildest and dreariest which that company 

 would that Company would traverse between Deva and Thames - 

 now an intermittant forest of oaks and pine and birch, here and there 

 patches of cultivated land and wastes of heath and bog — this is the 

 forest of Delamere, Mara of old ; this hill whence we survey the 

 scene is the hill Eddisbury, and these crumbling stones beneath our 

 feet are the only vestiges of that old city which the Saxon built in the 

 Watling Street long centuries after the Roman name and the Roman 

 power had faded to a dim tradition. But to-day, in this bright 

 morning in early June the forest of Delamere is a fair spot enough in 

 the violet haze of its pine woods and the gold of the young foliage of 

 its oaks — and, dismissing from our mmds the dark memories of those 



*This paper must not be understood as anything like an exhaustive list of 

 Coleoptera of Delamere forest. It merely recapitulates the species actually taken 

 there on one day during last summer. 



