Charcoal Was
Still Used In Houses For Heating Plates.
But the principal demand seemed
to be for hop-drying purposes - the charcoal burned in the kiln where I
had been resting was made on the spot.
This heap he was now burning was
all of birch poles, and would be four days and four nights completing. On
the fourth morning it was drawn, and about seventy sacks were filled, the
charcoal being roughly sorted.
The ancient forest land is still wild enough, there is no seeming end to
the heath and fern on the ridges or to the woods in the valleys. These
moor-like stretches bear a resemblance to parts of Exmoor. The oaks that
once reached from here to the sea-shore were burned to smelt the iron in
the days when Sussex was the great iron land. For charcoal the vast
forests were cut down; it seems strange to think that cannon were once
cast - the cannon that won India for us - where now the hops grow and the
plough travels slowly, so opposite as they are to the roaring furnace and
the ringing hammer. Burned and blasted by the heat, the ground where the
furnaces were still retains the marks of the fire. But to-day there is
silence; the sunshine lights up the purple heather and the already
yellowing fern; the tall and beautiful larches stand graceful in the
stillness. Their lines always flow in pleasant curves; they need no wind
to bend them into loveliness of form: so quiet and deserted is the place
that the wide highway road is green with vegetation, and the impression
of our wheels is the only trace upon them. Looking up, the road - up the
hill - it appears green almost from side to side. It is well made and
firm, and fit for any traffic; but a growth of minute weeds has sprung
up, and upon these our wheels leave their marks. Of roads that have
become grass - grown in war - desolated countries we have all read, but
this is our own unscathed England.
The nature of the ancient forest, its quiet and untrodden silence,
adheres to the site. Far down in the valley there is more stirring, and
the way is well pulverised. In the hollow there is an open space, backed
by the old beech trees of the park, dotted with ashes, and in the midst a
farmhouse partly timbered. Here by the road-side they point out to you a
low mound, at the very edge of the road, which could easily be passed
unnoticed as a mere heap of scrapings overgrown with weeds and thistles.
On looking closer it appears more regularly shaped; it is indeed a grave.
Of old time an unfortunate woman committed suicide, and according to the
barbarous law of those days her body was buried at the cross-roads and a
stake driven through it. That was the end so far as the brutal law of the
land went. But the road-menders, with better hearts, from that day to
this have always kept up the mound. However beautiful the day, however
beautiful the beech trees and the ashes that stand apart, there is always
a melancholy feeling in passing the place. This thistle-grown mound
saddens the whole; it is impossible to forget it; it lies, as it were,
under everything, under the beeches, the sunlit sward and fern. The mark
of death is there. The dogs and the driven cattle tread the spot; a human
being has passed into dust. The circumstance of the mound having been
kept up so many years bears curious testimony to the force of tradition.
Many writers altogether deny the value of tradition. Dr. Schliemann's
spade, however, found Troy. Perhaps tradition is like the fool of the
saying, and is sometimes right.
SWALLOW-TIME
The cave-swallows have come at last with the midsummer-time, and the hay
and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has
been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so
delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human
fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical
circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the
compasses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green
cones of fir, and boom of distant thunder, and all things that say, 'It
is summer.' Not many of them even now, sometimes only two in the air
together, sometimes three or four, and one day eight, the very greatest
number - a mere handful, for these cave-swallows at such times should
crowd the sky. The white bars across their backs should be seen gliding
beside the dark fir copse a quarter of a mile away. They should be seen
everywhere, over the house, and to and fro the eaves, where half last
year's nest remains; over the meadows and high up in the blue ether.
White breasts should gleam in the azure height, appearing and
disappearing as they climb or sink, and wheel and slide through those
long boomerang-like flights that suddenly take them a hundred yards
aside. They should crowd the sky together with the ruddy-throated
chimney-swallows, and the great swifts; but though it is hay-time and the
apples are set, yet eight eave-swallows is the largest number I have
counted in one afternoon. They did not come at all in the spring. After
the heavy winter cleared away, the delicate willow-wrens soon sang in the
tops of the beautiful green larches, the nightingale came, and the
cuckoo, the chimney-swallow, the doves softly cooing as the oaks came
into leaf, and the black swifts. Up to May 26 there were no eave-swallows
at the Sussex hill-side where these notes were taken; that is more than a
month later than the date of their usual arrival, which would be about
the middle of April.
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