130 
NATURE NOTES 
Away at our back rises the Muncaster Fell with its grey 
beacon-tower, its herd of deer, its wind-blown oaks, its primrose 
and bluebell haunted woods, that slope towards the Vale of 
Esk. Further inland, sheltered by its magnificent wall of 
forestry, stands rose-red one of the most interesting of our 
northern castles, with its long terrace-lawn of quite unequalled 
grace and loveliness. There in sheltered combe the rhodo- 
dendrons bloom from earliest spring, and the air will to-day 
be honeysweet from laurel-flower far and wide. 
But I was bent on seeing an older people than Cymri, 
Roman, Viking, or Castle-Lord, albeit the line of Pennington 
reached far into the past, and suited well his ancient castle hold.' 
I had come in the last week of April, by courteous invitation, 
to make the acquaintance of that fast-growing colony of black- 
headed gulls that make the dunes of Ravenglass famous. 
A boat was called, and leaving the pebbly beach that 
“ Stott of Oldham ” so delights to paint, we rowed across the 
flooding tide of the Ravenglass harbour to the sand-dunes of 
happy quietude where the oyster-catchers were sunning them- 
selves, and the sheldrake in her nesting season loves to hide. 
As one went forward over the dunes one felt back in the great 
desert of the Badiet-Tih, and expected to see Bedouins start 
from the ground, and camels come in single file with solemn 
sway round the sedge-tufted, wind-blown hillocks and hum- 
mocks of glaring sand. 
Then suddenly the silence of the waste was broken by a 
marvellous sound, and a huge cloud of palpitating wings, that 
changed from black to white and hovered and trembled against 
the grey sea or the blue inland hills, swept by overhead. The 
black-headed gulls had heard of our approach, and mightily 
disapproved of our trespass upon their sand-blown solitude. 
We sat down and the clamour died : the gulls had settled. 
Creeping warily to the crest of a great billow of sand, we peeped 
beyond. Below us lay a natural amphitheatre of grey-green 
grass that looked as if it were starred with white flowers innu- 
merable. We showed our heads and the flowers all took wing, 
and the air was filled again with sound and intricate maze of 
innumerable wings. 
We approached, and walking with care found the ground 
cup-marked with little baskets or basket-bottoms roughly woven 
of tussock grass or sea-bent. Each casket contained from two 
to three magnificent jewels. These were the eggs we had come 
so far to see. There they lay — deep brown blotched with 
purple, light bronze marked with brown, pale green dashed 
with umber, white shading into blue. All colours and all sizes; 
some as small as a pigeon’s, others as large as a bantam’s. 
Three seemed to be the general complement. In one nest I 
found four. The nests were so close to one another that I 
counted twenty-six within a radius of ten yards ; and what 
struck one most was the way in which, instead of seeking shelter, 
