A bird-haunted pine-grove.

  • William Miller
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A bird-haunted pine-grove. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    all as quite common fowl, like the Gannet, the Northern Diver, and various kinds of Grebes ; while, among the rarer swans and geese, he has two of the very rare Polish Swans. But it is, perhaps, at the end of the region that lies around the death-site of the non-canonized king that the greatest interest would, by most visitors, be found. There an ancient forest remains a forest still, uncultivated, and fortunately, owing to the geological conditions of the soil, likely long to remain so. The unsaintliness of the slain monarch may be regarded as set off by the ruins of an ancient abbey, lying amidst the outlet into an estuary of streams that emanate from the forest. Here, then, we have a bit of genuine wild nature, which fitly closes in on this side a district full of such varied loveliness. But the whole region is, to the properly trained eye, full of a varied and well-nigh unsurpassable interest. For the worshipper of saints and churches there are shrines, minsters, and cathedrals all over the region ; such memories as those of a canonized bishop that names a headland, and of a saintly king that lingers round an ancient castle demolished in the Civil War by those iconoclasts, the Roundheads of Cromwell. And to those who may be con- tent with a moderate reverence for canonized kings, and who look to churches mainly for their beauty of situation or of architecture, there are spots that they may hold in reverence, and visit again and again, in much the same spirit that the pilgrims of old went to the shrine of Becket. There is one unsurpassed minster, the oldest church of all, situated in the loveliest of all lovely sites, on an estuary, and to the student of poetry consecrated by the cenotaph of one of our noblest poets, the lyrist who has sung rapturously of the soaring lark as something more than a mere bird, upon whom he has called to “ Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know, Such delightful madness from my lips would flow, The world should listen then, as I am listening now.” This minster presents its towers from many a broomy heath, and through many a gorse-clad glade. The student of antiquity may have his tastes gratified by visiting not far off an ancient and elevated earthwork, now quite deserted, but in earlier times crowded with buildings, religious, military, and domestic, then forming one of the most important cities in our land, and the seat of a bishop, long since transferred to a city close by, and in later times noteworthy as furnishing an admirable type of how best not to represent the people. In the upper reaches of the river whose estuary washes the poetic minster, lies the Nunnery founded by one queen to expiate the murder of her stepson ; where another hapless queen spent her last days, and where, hidden by her wealth of hair, she grovelled in the dust at the feet of her forgiving husband ; and where, in later times, was written a noteworthy poem of the last century. A little way off lies what has been called “ the noblest monument of Albion’s isle,” the finest of all those ancient works that are, to those not