COUNTRY LIFE
THERE is one very spacious common, long since named No Man's Land, which was covered with gorse not so long ago. Foxes used it as a covert, and gipsies were fond of the place as a camping ground. Fires were of frequent occurrence, lit, it was alleged, by campers, who used the dry relics for their home fires. Today a very large acreage of the gorse covert is the loveliest spectacle of harvest in the neighbourhood. The broad slope is golden and pillared with sheaves. The area will yield well over four quarters to the acre of really first-class grain. The common is not worsened as common. One little piece remains an excellent village cricket pitch. An extensive pit still supplies commoners and some privileged neighbours with good cheap gravel. I describe the scene not to suggest that commons and their common rights should be abolished ; but to urge that if such a stout plant as furze can be successfully grubbed and the land restored to high fertility, why is not the same thing done with the vast number of acres eaten up by bracken, a much more amenable weed ? I think of a particular hillside in the West where the fern continues to spread, continues to foster the very worst enemy of the sheep whose grazing grounds are being yearly restricted. There is scope all oyes the West and North for an immense scheme of national reclamation.
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