sometimes by pheasants; and the bogs produce many curious plants. * By a perambulation of Wolmer Forest and the Holt, made in 1635, and in the eleventh year of Charles the First, (which now lies before me,) it appears that the limits of the former are much circumscribed. For, to say nothing of the farther side, with which I am not so well acquainted, the bounds on this side, in old times, came into Binswood, and extended to the ditch of Ward-le-ham Park, in which stands the curious mount called King John's Hill and Lodge Hill, and to the verge of Hartley Mauduit, called Mauduit-hatch; comprehending also Shortheath, Oakhanger, and Oakwoods,—a large district, now private property, though once belonging to the royal domain. It is remarkable, that the term purlieu is never once mentioned in this long roll of parchment. It contains, besides the perambulation, a rough estimate of the value of the timbers, which were considerable, growing at that time in the district of the Holt; and enumerates the officers, superior and inferior, of those joint forests, for the time being, and their ostensible fees and perquisites. In those days, as at present, there were hardly any trees in Wolmer Forest. Within the present limits of the forest are three considerable lakes, Hogmer, Cranmer, and Wolmer; all of which are stocked with carp, tench, eels, and perch: but the fish do not thrive well, because the water is hungry, and the bottoms are a naked sand. A circumstance respecting these ponds, though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is, that instinct by which, in summer, all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to mid-leg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feeding. During this great proportion of the day, they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but for this contingency. Thus Nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another! Thomson, who was a nice observer of natural *For which consult Letter LXXXIV. to Mr Barrington. occurrences, did not let this pleasing circumstance escape him. He says, in his Summer,— A various group the herds and flocks compose: on the grassy bank Some, ruminating, lie; while others stand Wolmer Pond-so called, I suppose, for eminence sakeis a vast lake for this part of the world, containing, in its whole circumference, two thousand six hundred and forty-six yards, or very near a mile and a half. The length of the north-west and opposite side is about seven hundred and four yards, and the breadth of the south-west end, about four hundred and fifty-six yards. This measurement, which I caused to be made with good exactness, gives an area of about sixty-six acres, exclusive of a large irregular arm at the north-east corner, which we did not take into the reckoning. On the face of this expanse of waters, and perfectly secure from fowlers, lie all day long, in the winter season, vast flocks of ducks, teals, and widgeons, of various denominations; where they preen, and solace, and rest themselves, till towards sunset, when they issue forth in little parties (for, in their natural state, they are all birds of the night) to feed in the brooks and meadows; returning again with the dawn of the morning. Had this lake an arm or two more, and were it planted round with thick covert, (for now it is perfectly naked,) it might make a valuable decoy. Yet neither its extent, nor the clearness of its water,, nor the resort of various and curious fowls, nor its picturesque groups of cattle, can render this meer so remarkable, as the great quantity of coins that were found in its bed about forty years ago.* LETTER IX. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this subject, to inform you that Wolmer, with her sister forest, * These coins were all copper, as were also some medallions which were found at the same time, all of the lower Empire of Rome; some dozens of which fell to the share of Mr White. Part of these were of Marcus Aurelius, and his empress, Faustina. - ED. Ayles Holt, alias Alice Holt,* as it is called in old records, is held by grant from the crown for a term of years. The grantees that the author remembers are, BrigadierGeneral Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who was a natural daughter of Prince Rupert, by Margaret Hughs; a Mr Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who married a dowager Lady Pembroke; Henry Bilson Legge, and lady; and now Lord Stawel, their son. The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long surviving her husband; and, at her death, left behind her many curious pieces of mechanism of her father's constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as warrior; and, among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately in possession of Mr Elmer, the celebrated game painter, at Farnham, in the county of Surrey. Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks, that grow to be large timber, while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste. The former, being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east to west, and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the Great Lodge where the grantees reside, and a smaller lodge called Goose Green; and is abutted on by the parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and Bentley, all of which have right of common. One thing is remarkable, that, though the Holt has been of old well stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained by any pales or fences more than a common hedge, yet they are never seen within the limits of Wolmer; nor were the red deer of *In Rot. Inquisit. de statu forest. in Scaccar. 36 Ed. III, it is called Aisholt." In the same, "Tit. Woolmer and Aisholt Hantisc. Dominus Rex habet unam capellam in haia suâ de Kingesle." "Haia, sepes, sepimentum, parcus: a Gall. haie and haye."- SPELMAN'S Glossary. This prince was the inventor of mezzotinto. The invention of mezzotinto engraving is generally ascribed to Prince Rupert ; but, in Elme's Life of Sir Christopher Wren, it is given to that eminent architect. The journals of the Royal Society, for October 1, 1662, record that Dr Wren presented some cuts, done by himself, in a new way; whereby he could almost as soon do a subject on a plate of brass or copper, as another could draw it with a crayon on paper. On this subject, the editor of Parentalia speaks with decision, that he was the first inventor of the art of engraving in mezzotinto; which was afterwards prosecuted and improved by his Royal Highness Prince Rupert, in a manner somewhat different, upon the suggestion, as it is said, of the learned John Evelyn, Esq."-ED. Wolmer ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of the Holt.* At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and reduced by the night-hunters, who perpetually harass them in spite of the efforts of numerous keepers, and the severe penalties that have been put in force against them as often as they have been detected, and rendered liable to the lash of the law. Neither fines nor imprisonments can deter them; so impossible is it to extinguish the spirit of sporting, which seems to be inherent in human nature. General Howe turned out some German wild boars and sows in his forests, to the great terror of the neighbourhood; and, at one time, a wild bull or buffalo: but the country rose upon them, and destroyed them. A very large fall of timber, consisting of about one thousand oaks, has been cut this spring (viz. 1784) in the Holt Forest ; one-fifth of which, it is said, belongs to the grantee, Lord Stawel. He lays claim also to the lop and top; but the poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it belongs to them; and, assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. One man, who keeps a team, has carried home, for his share, forty stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his lordship has served with actions. These trees, which were very sound, and in high perfection, were winter-cut, viz. in February and March, before the bark would run. In old times, the Holt was estimated to be eighteen miles, computed measure, from water carriage, viz. from the town of Chertsey, on the Thames but now it is not half that distance, since the Wey is made navigable up to the town of Godalming, in the county of Surrey. *There is a curious fact, not generally known, which is, that at one period the horns of stags grew into a much greater number of ramifications than at the present day. Some have supposed this to have arisen from the greater abundance of food, and from the animal having more repose, before population became so dense. In some individuals these multiplied to an extraordinary extent. There is one in the museum of Hesse Cassel with twenty-eight antlers. Baron Cuvier mentions one with sixty-six, or thirty-three on each horn. ED. †The superiority of wood cut in winter arises from its being divested of sap at that season of the year. Timber felled in summer is liable to crack, and is very subject to the dry-rot; both of which are caused by the sap not having properly escaped in the process of drying. The sap rises only in the spring, and descends at the fall of the year.—ED, LETTER X. TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. August 4, 1767. IT has been my misfortune never to have had any neighpours whose studies have led them towards the pursuit of natural knowledge; so that, for want of a companion to quicken my industry and sharpen my attention, I have made but slender progress in a kind of information to which I have been attached from my childhood. As to swallows (hirundines rustica) being found in a torpid state during the winter in the Isle of Wight, or any part of this country, I never heard any such account worth attending to. But a clergyman, of an inquisitive turn, assures me that, when he was a great boy, some workmen, in pulling down the battlements of a church tower early in the spring, found two or three swifts (hirundines apodes) among the rubbish, which were, at first appearance, dead; but, on being carried towards the fire, revived. He told me that, out of his great care to preserve them, he put them in a paper bag, and hung them by the kitchen fire, where they were suffocated. Another intelligent person has informed me that, while he was a schoolboy at Brighthelmstone, in Sussex, a great fragment of the chalk cliff fell down one stormy winter on the beach, and that many people found swallows among the rubbish; but, on my questioning him whether he saw any of those birds himself, to my no small disappointment he answered me in the negative, but that others assured him they did.* Young broods of swallows began to appear this year on July the 11th, and young martens (hirundines urbica) were *That a few solitary instances of swallows remaining in this country, in a state of torpidity, have occurred, there can be little doubt; but that they generally hybernate is out of the question. Charles Lucian Bonaparte, in a letter to the Secretary of the Linnæn Society, dated from on board the Delaware, near Gibraltar, March 20, 1828, says, -"A few days ago, being five hundred miles from the coasts of Portugal, four hundred from those of Africa, we were agreeably surprised by the appearance of a few swallows, (hirundo urbica and rustica.) This, however extraordinary, might have been explained by an easterly gale, which might have cut off the swallows migrating from the main to Madeira, only two hundred miles distant from us; but what was my surprise in observing several small warblers popping about the deck and rigging. These poor little strangers were soon caught and brought to These warblers were the sylvia trochilus, or hay bird, &c.—ED. me. |