A DEVONIAN HEADLAND. 
147 
-osprey or fish-hawk, and a hooded crow, have been seen ; on the 
rocks or the sea below, a goosander, an eider-duck, a great 
northern diver, and a solan goose or gannet ; while shearwaters 
have been often seen off the Head a little way out at sea, and the 
commoner shore birds might have been noticed about here at 
almost any time. 
The red-legged and red-beaked chough has been rarely seen 
here, and of late years not at all. Since the rifle period it has, 
in fact, become scarce everywhere, having been shot for private 
collections or museums. Very interesting was the sight — which 
used to be a nowise uncommon one upon the Head — to witness 
the mobbing, by a mingled flock of rooks and jackdaws, of an 
ancient pair of ravens, which had built for ages in the neigh- 
bouring cliff. The smaller and more agile birds would swoop 
down again and again upon the ravens, often missing their 
aim, but, by numbers, tiring out the ravens, who were unable 
to retaliate ; till at length, the din of notes in croaks of varying 
pitch — raven, rook, jackdaw — would, by degrees, die away in 
the distance, and the ravens would at last find shelter from 
their tormentors in some wood, or cleft, or cave. According 
to popular belief, the raven lives to the age of a hundred 
years or more, and a story is told of a farmer from Somerset 
— where, it used to be added, the wits are sometimes dull — 
who once got a pair to keep, in order to ascertain whether the 
legend was true ! The legend seems to have been accepted by 
the poets, for a famous jilted lover tells the world the oft- 
repeated tale that {cvow being the accepted generic name for 
any black bird of the rook type) he should forget the dear one 
“ Never, though his mortal summers to such length of years should come, 
As the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home 1 ” 
The little combes that lie east and west of the Head are 
delightful abodes for land-birds, as, indeed, they are for many 
other kinds of residents or visitors. Since the railway pene- 
trated into the region, a lady novelist spent her summer holi- 
days in a cottage in one of the combes. She laid in the combe 
the chief scenes in one of her novels, written on the spot ; and 
in it she describes scenery, characters, and incidents clearly re- 
cognisable to those who know the district well, her only error 
being that when she wished to introduce a little local dialect 
she put into the mouths of the peasantry, who spoke the soft, 
poetic language that had descended to them from the Wessex 
English of King Alfred’s days, the broad northern dialect of 
the Bronte region of Yorkshire. The birds delighted her, as 
well they might, though she did not stay long enough to see 
the whole bird-life of the year ; and, alas ! the days of guns 
and rifles and general massacre had arrived, and had destroyed 
much of its poetic charm before she came to describe it in her 
novel. The Philistine period of death and destruction had set 
in, and the poetry of the birds had, it might be feared, well-nigh 
gone for ever. 
