144 
NATURE NOTES. 
and followed that are needed to circumvent the visiting sea- 
fowl. And so great is the ordinary Englishman’s love of sport 
in slaughter, that, save by one’s own observation, almost the 
only thing you can learn about these interesting visitors is how 
best to entrap them, or how most successfully to shoot them. 
But it is, perhaps, at the end of the region that lies around 
the death-site of the non-canonized king that the greatest 
interest would, by most visitors, be found. There an ancient 
forest remains a forest still, uncultivated, and fortunatelj^ owing 
to the geological conditions of the soil, likely long to remain so. 
The unsaintliness of the slain monarch may be regarded as set 
off by the ruins of an ancient abbey, lying amidst the outlet 
into an estuary of streams that emanate from the forest. Here, 
then, we have a bit of genuine wild nature, which fitly closes in 
on this side a district full of such varied loveliness. But the 
whole region is, to the properly trained eye, full of a varied and 
well-nigh unsurpassable interest. For the worshipper of saints 
and churches there are shrines, minsters and cathedrals all over 
the region ; such memories as those of a canonized bishop that 
names a headland, and of a saintly king that lingers round an 
ancient castle demolished in the Civil War by those iconoclasts, 
the Roundheads of Cromwell. And to those who may be con- 
tent with a moderate reverence for mediaeval saints, and who 
look to churches mainly for their beauty of situation or of 
architecture, there are spots that they may hold in reverence, 
and visit again and again, in much the same spirit that the 
pilgrims of old went to the shrine of Becket. There is one 
unsurpassed minster, the oldest church of all, situated in the 
loveliest of all lovely sites, on an estuary, and to the student of 
poetry consecrated by the cenotaph of one of our noblest poets, 
the lyrist who has sung rapturously of the soaring lark as 
something more than a mere bird, upon whom he has called to 
“ Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know, 
Such delightful madness from my lips would flow, 
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.” 
This minster presents its towers from many a broomy heath, 
and through many a gorse-clad glade. The student of antiquity 
may have his tastes gratified by visiting not far off an ancient 
and elevated earthwork, now quite deserted, but in earlier times 
crowded with buildings, religious, military, and domestic, then 
forming one of the most important cities in our land, and the 
seat of a bishop, long since transferred to a city close by, and 
in later times noteworthy as furnishing an admirable type of 
how best not to represent the people. In the upper reaches 
of the river whose estuary washes the poetic minster, lies the 
nunnery where a hapless queen spent her last days, and where, 
hidden by her wealth of hair, she grovelled in the dust at the 
feet of her forgiving husband ; while, a little way off, is the finest 
of all those ancient works that are, to those not over-particular 
