COUNTRY LIFE
Sussex Woods
Some of the most beautiful and, indeed, most English walks within Britain, especially at Eastertide, are to be found along the northern edge of the South Downs in West Sussex and Hampshire, and at present they reveal some eccentricities as well as beauties. The scene changes, and is often eloquent of social change. In Gilbert White's time the shepherds used to make quite a fair income by trapping the wheatears, those earliest migrants, for they were regarded as a great luxury. Today you may watch them scuttle, almost like groundlings, in and about any cover that the open Downs may offer. They are safe, not only because our people are more humane, and the gourmet who desires larks or wheatears for his consump- tion has become unpopular. The wheatear is also safe from the shepherd because the shepherd is a rarer bird. Farmers do not find it worth their while to send their flocks to the sweet but scanty grass of the topmost down, as the walker may infer. He will come upon acre after acre of thorn scrub flourishing where once the surface was bare and the outline of the sheer down unbroken. The sheep were death to seedlings, which now find themselves as free from enemies as the wheatears. They are saved by the absence of sheep, as the birds by the absence of shepherds. The account of the Garden of Eden after the fall is botanically applicable to wide areas of England ; thorns and briars take charge as the farmer retires.
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