The brilliant little Kingfisher (Alcedo ispida), the most gay in colour of all our birds, may still sometimes be seen, darting about the only rivulet which we can boast of at Woodhall, and which rejoices in the unattractive name of The Sewer, {46b} although its water, welling up at its source near Well Syke Wood, is beautifully clear and pure. The occurrence, however, of the bird here is rare. An old inhabitant of Kirkby assures me that it is not uncommon on the river Bain, in that parish; and of late years, partly through the writers influence, it may be seen on the rivers Bain or Waring, in the heart of Horncastle, unmolested, and even fed, by the people.

The Grey Fly Catcher (Muscicapa Grisola) is fairly common on our lawns, where it will sit quietly on a garden seat, or roller, and thence take its short jerky flight after the flies. I have known it to nest year after year, at the Vicarage, in a hole in the wall, where an iron ventilator was broken.

The Wryneck (Yunx Torquilla) is a somewhat uncommon bird at Woodhall, though a pretty one. For several years it also frequented the Vicarage garden, sometimes four or five of them, during the summer months. One year there were so many that I shot one and had it stuffed, and I found that at the same time a noble Marquis was having two stuffed, as being rather rare. It is called in some parts of the country the weet bird, from its peculiar note; other authorities say that the note is represented by the words, Peel, peel, or Peep-peep. I should myself say Snipe, snipe was nearer to the sound, and a writer compares it to the sound of Punch, in the old show of Punch and Judy, which I think comes nearer to my own interpretation. The body of this bird is in colour a mixture of grey and brown, but its tail and wings are most beautifully marked with dark zig-zag bars, which make it very handsome. In size it is between the blackbird and the lark. Like the woodpecker, it has a very long tongue, which is covered with a glutinous matter, and which it inserts into the grass roots or tree bark, in search of its food. {47}

I give here a list of birds which I have stuffed, all of which were killed in this neighbourhood:Night-jar (Caprimulgus Europus), wry neck (Yunx Torquilla), buff blackbird (Turdus merula), razorbill (Alca Torda), little auk (Mergulus Alia), ruff (Machetes Pugnax), green sand piper (Totanus Octaopus), snipe (Scolopax gallinago), water rail (Rallus Aquaticus), golden plover (Charadrius Pluvialis), woodcock (Scolopax Rusticola), large spotted wood pecker (Dendrocopus Major), hawfinch (Coccothraustes Vulgaris), cuckoo (Cuculus Canorus), jay (Garrulus Glandarius), French partridge (Cannabis Rufa), turtledove (Turtur Auritus), horned owl (Asio Otus), hen harrier (Circus Cyaneus), kestrel (Falco Tinnunculus), peregrine falcon (Falco Peregrinus), piebald pheasant (phasianus colchicus), buff pheasant, cormorant (phylacrocorax carbo), jay (corvus glandarius), heron (ardea cinerea), horned owl (asio otus).

In times gone by, never to return, the numbers and variety of wild fowls frequenting the Witham, with its sykes and meres, was something extraordinary. Charles Kingsley doubtless wrote, if not of his own knowledge, yet, at furthest, at second hand, when he gave the following description: Grand it was, while dark green alders and pale green reeds stretched for miles . . . where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the sedgebird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around . . . far off upon the silver mere would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skeins of terrified wildfowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings; while, clear above all, sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the wild swan. Prose Idylls, The Fens.

The living clouds on clouds arose, Infinite wing! Till all the plume-dart air And rude resounding shore was one wild cry.

Of the swans, we may observe that not only did this bird, in its wild state, frequent the Witham and the Fen waters, but the swannery was a valuable possession. The Abbots of Bardney and Kirkstead owned swanneries on the Witham. (Archæol. vol. xvi., p. 153). The swans of various owners were distinguished by marks on the upper mandible, and there were no less than 97 different swan marks on the Witham. A rhyming list of the birds of the Witham is given in Draytons Polyolbion (song 25), too long to quote here; suffice it to say that one parish alone, near Boston, some 60 years ago, sent 30,000 wild fowl in a year to London(Thompsons History, Boston). The birds captured by net were dunlins, knots, ruffs, reeves, red-shanks, lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, godwits, etc. One fowler stated that he had so taken 24 dozen lapwings in one day, and four dozen and nine at one time.Stevensons Birds of Norfolk, vol. i., p. 57. Other birds shot by the fowlers were mallard, teal, widgeon, whimbrells, grebes of several kinds, and the yelping avocet. A relative of the present writer owned a decoy, where some 20,000 wild ducks were taken, within his own recollection, in one season. {49}

We now come to the last bird which I shall name in this somewhat lengthy list; a goddess among birds, as someone has almost literally called her, mula divini suavissima carminis ales; and the old Scotch poet, William Drummond, of Hawthornden, says:

Sweet artless songster! thou my mind dost raise To airs of spheresyes, and to angels lays.

while quaint old Isaac Walton says: She breathes such sweet music from her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think that miracles are not yet ceased. The nightingale was first heard in my own garden, at the vicarage, Woodhall Spa, in the spring of 1876. Having heard it at Cambridge, in the South of England, and also in Italy, I immediately recognised the note, and at first was delighted at the arrival of this new visitor to Woodhall Spa, who did not come needing the water, and complaining of aches and pains, but to delight everyone with its rich flood of song. And having thus found its way here, it has further found the attractions of Woodhall so great that, although favouring no other place in the neighbourhood, it has continued its annual visits ever since, and has brought its kindred in increasing numbers. But, although charmed at first with its melody, the novelty wore off; and when, night after night, there were three or four of these birds waking the echoes beneath my bedroom window, trying in jealous rivalry each to outdo the other in compassing the whole gamut, in the rich mazes of sound, my admiration considerably abated, and I became rather disposed to vote the performance a veritable surfeit of song, to the utter banishment of much-needed slumber. Before, however, I had arrived at this prosaic way of viewing the Queen of Song, I composed in its honour the following lines, with which I shall close this chapter on the Birds of Woodhall:



TO THE NIGHTINGALE. 2 a.m., April 27.

How from that tiny throat, Songster of night! Flows such a wealth of note, Full of delight; Trembling with resonance, Rapid and racy, Sinking in soft cadence, Gushing with ecstasy, Dying away, All in their turns; Plaintive and gay, Thrilling with tones aglow, Melting in murmurs low, Till ones heart burns?

Once in the wilderness, By desert well, Hagar in loneliness, With Ishmael, Sighed to the silent air, Tears on her glistening; Yet to her, even there, Angels were listening, Noting her prayer.

Even so singest thou, Not to thyself, Maynt there be listning now Some fairy elf, Silently sitting near Thy dark retreat, Drinking with grateful ear Thy music sweet, Ringing so clear?

No! not alone art thou; One theres above, een now, Whose mercys over all, Who sees the sparrow fall; To Him the night is day, He hears thy matin lay, High oer us all.

Through the hushed, slumbring air, Thy accents raise, For all his loving care Incense of praise; Thrilling with happiness, Full with content, Still asking His goodness, Prayer with praise blent.

Little thou mayest be, Yet art His care; He, too, has given thee Gifts rich and rare. Still, then, thy voice upraise, Still chant thy Makers praise While we are rapt in sleep, Still thou thy vigil keep; Still let some earthly cry Go to our God on high; Humbly, yet fervently, piercingly call, Call for His watchfulness over us all.



CHAPTER V. DENIZENS OF THE WOODS, &c. QUADRUPEDS.

It is the inevitable, if regretful, duty of the recorder of the past to have to inscribe Obiit over the mention of many an individual who comes under his notice, and this applies to the four-footed animals, as well as to the birds and the wild flowers, of Woodhall. Of some of the most interesting, it must be said that they are gone, and their place knoweth them no more.

The first I may mention is the Badger. This animal used to be fairly common in these parts; whether it is now quite extinct is difficult to say, because its nocturnal habits, and very retiring disposition, prevent it coming much under the observation of man. It is supposed still to harbour in the rocks at Holbeck, some nine miles from Woodhall. A specimen was captured at Woodhall about the year 1885, frequenting some rabbit holes in a bank, at that time belonging to myself, and within 100 yards of the present blacksmiths shop on the Stixwould-road. Another was captured a few years before in the adjoining parish of Martin, which I have stuffed. At an earlier date one was taken by a man named Thomas Norris, at Well Syke Wood, some two miles from Woodhall Spa.

About the year 1889 one was seen for some months in the Northern Dar Wood, in Woodhall. The keeper, doubtless with murderous intent, tried to find its burrow, but did not succeed. It was not killed so far as is known, but disappeared. Another was killed in June, 1898, at Mavis Enderby. In 1903, two badgers were killed at Asgarby, and one at Asterby in 1904. In 1899 our local pack of hounds, the South Wold, ran a badger, instead of a fox, over several fields, until he took to ground, and was afterwards killed by one of the party, as he kept his head out of the hole. It should hardly be a moot point whether the extermination of the badger is an advantage or not, although a good deal has been written on both sides of the subject. Its skin makes the sporran of the kilted Highlander, and its hair makes our shaving brushes. Though it may be found occasionally in an enlarged rabbit burrow, it is not there to prey on the rabbit; for (as Major Fisher assures us in his interesting work, Out-door Life in England, 1896) its diet is mainly vegetarian, and what animal food it indulges in is mice, frogs, an occasional hedgehog, with beetles, snails, and worms; and especially it is very partial to the grubs of the wasp. It is very cleanly in its habits; sometimes occupying the same earth with the fox, to the great advantage of the latter, as it clears away the putrid matter brought in by Reynard, and so prevents his contracting the mange, to which he is very liable, from his own untidy propensities. {53a} Being thus not only comparatively harmless, but also serviceable to the sportsman, it is much to be regretted that continued war should be waged against these creatures. {53b} Unfortunately, old prejudices are but slowly overcome. By a statute enacted in the 8th year of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 15, and confirmed by subsequent statutes, provision was made for the destruction of what were then deemed noysome foule and vermine, and the price of 1s. was set on the head of every fox and grey, i.e., badger. This act continued in force down to 1863. But the old ideas concerning the badger have been long exploded among those who know anything of its habits. The badger, further, is the only representative of the bear family in this country. A scion of that race, whose bones are found in our fossiliferous caverns, co-eval with the mammoth and prehistoric man, he, if any of our existing animals, may boast of blue blood in his veins. The nobleman, whose ancestry came over with the conqueror, is a parvenu in comparison with him. Surely the principle of Noblesse oblige alone should ensure for him a shelter in our woods and wastes. {54a}

The next to be mentioned of our fer næturæ, also the object of constant persecution, and growing, consequently, rarer every year, is the Otter. The parish of Thimbleby adjoins Woodhall Spa on the north, indeed, a large slice of it is now included in the recently created civil parish of Woodhall Spa. At the further end of Thimbleby an otter was killed in the year 1898, at a water mill on the river Bain, the miller erroneously supposing that it would kill his ducks. Shortly before, another specimen had been shot by a keeper on the same river, at Goulceby, its mate fortunately escaping. Soon after, a young specimen was seen several times disporting itself in the Horncastle Canal. It there escaped the vigilance of many would-be assassins, and gradually worked its way towards our neighbouring river, the Witham; but there it fell a victim to a gunner, who descried it in a drain near Tattershall Bridge, in Billinghay Fen. Another specimen was afterwards shot among the dykes of Walcot Dales, near the Witham, and still another in the neighbouring parish of Martin, a few years ago. Here again this persistent slaughter is much to be regretted. The otter is not the enemy to the fisherman which it is too commonly supposed to be. In the Badminton Library, the Honourable Geoffrey Hill says: People are beginning to find that the otters kill and keep down the coarser fish, especially the eels, which live on the spawn and fry of the better sorts. Mr. E. Daubney, writing from the banks of the Dart, says: They eat frogs, rats, birds, fish, et id genus omne, but of nothing are they more fond than the eel; for this they will give up the finest and most fresh-run salmon. {54b} In our own neighbourhood, in 1901, two young otters were shot on a farm at Sturton; they were at a pond which abounded in eels, and had doubtless by the eels been attracted from the river Bain, a mile distant, where they could only get trout. A naturalist, who watched some otters at their home, night and day, for more than two months, says that he only saw them take three trout; the first fish taken was an eel, the second a chub, or roach. (Country Life, illustrated, Vol. VI., No. 134, July, 1899.) Another authority {55a} states that the stomach of one specimen examined was full of larvæ and earthworms; while a fourth writer {55b} says, Otters will eat celery, potatoes, young shoots from the hedges; and especially have they a liking for the two first. The writer has seen a dead salmon lying on a Highland river bank with the shoulder eaten away by the otter, their peculiar habit being to take only this part, and never to return to the body again. {55c} But even their attacks on the salmon have indirectly a useful effect, for, as one of the authorities already quoted (Mr. E. Daubney) observes: If a salmon pool is visited by otters, the salmon are hustled, and so made to bestir themselves (often when sickly, and reluctant to move), and so make the effort to get down to the sea, to return again enormously increased in size and condition, and in this way the otter does the sportsman a service in sending the salmon down to recruit in the sea; just as, in turn, the sea-lice which fix upon the salmon when recruited in the salt water, so harass the fish, as to drive it once more up the river again into the fresh water, when it may afford sport to the angler. {55d} It is not generally known, and it has even escaped the notice of our greatest naturalists, that the otter utters a shrill whistle when calling to its mate or young, which might be easily mistaken for the note of the kingfisher or sand-piper. This has been noticed by Mr. F. B. Whitlock, in the Naturalist for 1895, p. 381. The great stronghold of the otter is the broads of Norfolk, where, in the sluggish, reedy water, he can get plenty of eels, snails, and so forth. In our own neighbourhood, if the war and extirpation goes on, he will soon be a memory only.

The next wild animal to be named as fairly common at Woodhall is the Fox. The locality, indeed, has been for many years a stronghold {56} of Reynard, as was to be expected, in a district where the woods are so extensive, although by no means so extensive as they were within the writers recollection. On one occasion, some 14 or 15 years ago, we had the Burton hounds, and the South Wold, over the same ground, in the same morning, within hearing, if not within sight, of each other. The Ostler Ground, especially from the thick and warm cover afforded by the heather, may be said to be a nursery for foxes for the supply of the neighbourhood. Not long ago there were six earths; and there are still three, which are carefully preserved; and the bark of the dog-fox or the answering scream of the vixen may be heard almost any night, in different directions, while out foraging. So thick is the cover, in parts, that the hounds frequently fail to penetrate it; and, after the pack have gone away without a find, I have almost trodden upon a fox, on one occasion upon a brace of them, still lying snugly among the ling in security. The fox does much less harm than is commonly supposed. It will not disturb other game if it can get rabbits, and it will not take rabbits if it can get rats. A very old sporting farmer has repeatedly assured me that although he had a rabbit warren near his farmstead, the rabbits were left undisturbed, and even his chickens were safe, so long as there were rats to be captured in his corn-stacks, or in the banks about his farm-buildings. {57} The first fox which the writer ever saw, was brought by a Woodhall man, named Hare, to his father. It had been caught in a trap by the leg, and had attempted to bite its own foot off, in order to effect its escape. It was kept until the injured limb had recovered, and was then sent to his friend, the M.F.H. The writers own recollections of fox-hunting go back to the days of the famous Jack Musters, the Squire of Colwick and Annesley, who married Mary Chaworth, the object of Lord Byrons passionate admiration. Sometime in the forties he hunted our own South Wold country. He was indeed a character. Though said by the Prince Regent to be the most perfect gentleman he had ever met, yet, in the hunting field, his language and his actions were most violent. The writer has still clearly impressed on his memory an occasion at Woodhall, when, as a boy of 12 years old, mounted on a small pony, and with the hounds running hard, he endeavoured to open a gate for the impatient M.F.H., and, on his not being able to accomplish this quickly enough, he was assailed with such a flood of invective, and torrent of oaths, that he was forced to withdraw from the attempt in confusion and bewilderment. But, if the sportsman who crossed his path was not spared by Jack, as he was familiarly called, neither was any unfortunate hound which offended him. On one occasion, a young hound, at High-hall Wood, near Woodhall, was guilty of chasing a hare. The whole field was in consequence pulled up; one of the whips was ordered to bring the delinquent forward. The thong of his hunting crop was twisted round the hounds neck, and while he on foot held the poor brute in this way, the other whip dismounted and belaboured it with his whip until he was himself too exhausted to flog any more. The whole field were kept looking on at this display of wholesome (?) discipline, and when it was over the hound was left lying on the ground, almost strangled and a mass of contused weals, to recover its consciousness and limp after the departing pack, as best it could. The painful impression made upon the young mind of one devoted to animals, and tender of their feelings, remains still as an unpleasant memory, from which it recoils.

At one of our meets, a fox was found in Bracken Wood, which, after giving us a good run round the neighbourhood, eventually took refuge in a cottage near High-hall Wood. Entering by the open door, it mounted the ladder which formed the staircase to the one bedroom above; there it crept under the bed. The hounds hunted all round the premises, but the door having been shut by the occupier, an aged, retired keeper, and there being a strong wind which blew the scent from the door, his retreat was not discovered. He remained in this place of concealment until the hounds had gone to a safe distance, and then, descending by the ladder, bolted out of the door and made off, verifying the adage of Erasmus (older than Hudibras),

That same that runnith a awaie Againe maie fighte ane other daie.

The well-known cunning of the fox is shewn in the following:A favourite find for many yeans has been Thornton Wood, some three miles from Woodhall Spa; and a frequent line for the fox to take was (and is) from that covert to Holme Wood, near Scrivelsby. To accomplish this the Horncastle Canal and the small river Bain have to be crossed. The writer, as a boy, has swum the canal on his pony, at the tail of the pack; but usually riders have to make a detour by a bridge, between the first and second locks on the canal. During the intervals of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour required for this, the hounds are left to themselves. It happened on two or three occasions that in this interval the scent suddenly failed, and the fox was lost; casts were made up and down the river, but without success. On one occasion, a labourer, working in the grass field between the canal and the Bain, saw the fox cross the canal by the lock doors, over which there was a narrow plank-bridge for foot-passengers. It then made across the field for the Bain. He saw it pass out of sight down the banks of the river, close by a willow tree, overhanging the water; but it did not emerge on the other side. With the lack of quick wit, characteristic of the clod-hopper, it did not occur to him to mention this at the time. He told it, however, afterwards to his master, a hunting man; and, on a subsequent occasion, when the same incident occurred again, one of the whips dismounted and went into the water, and, poking about the roots of the willows, dislodged Reynard, concealed under the hollow bank, and immersed under water, except his nose and mouth, by which he was hanging suspended from a fang of the tree roots. Surely Reynards clever ruse deserved a better fate than the death which speedily followed.

The following incident occurred under my own observation. I was out shooting in Woodhall. In a certain field I had put up a hare, which went away, without a shot. Passing, in due course, to the next field, I observed an object sitting, so far as I could make out, in a crouching position, in the middle of the field, and it looked in the distance like a man. I proceeded towards it, and soon perceived that it was a fox, sitting up on his hindquarters. At this moment a hare, presumably that which I had put up just before, entered the field and cantered leisurely in the direction of the fox. As sportsmen are aware, the hare, though able to see behind it, or on either side, does not, from the peculiar position of the eyes, see so well straight in front. In this case, the hare never perceived the fox until it was within a few feet of it; whereupon it stopped short, and the two sat up facing each other, evidently mutually fascinated, as the bird is said to be by the snake. They thus remained motionless, or powerless to move, for some minutes, until my nearer approach attracted their attention and broke the spell, whereupon they both bounded off in different directions. This, I am told by an authority, was a case of neurasthenia, or nerve-paralysis. A not quite similar occurrence was recorded some little time ago. A farmer saw a pheasant go to roost in a tree, standing alone in the field. Presently he saw a fox approach, go to the tree, and look up at the pheasant. After pausing for a moment, regarding the bird, he proceeded to run rapidly round the tree in a narrow circle. This he did for some time, continuing his circuit without intermission; when, to the farmers astonishment, the pheasant fell from its roost, and before it reached the ground was seized by the fox, who went off with his prey to a neighbouring plantation. This would seem to have been a case of hypnotism, rather than neurasthenia. The bird was mesmerised, or made giddy, by the foxs circular motion, and literally fell into the operators arms.(Spectator, January, 1898). The writer, when travelling in Germany, once met a German gentleman, who had visited country houses in England, and had conceived a great admiration for the English sport of fox-hunting. Ah, he said, we have nothing like it in Germany. It is a grand institution. It makes you good horsemen, good soldiers, good judges of country and distance. To those who would object to fox-hunting on the score of its cruelty, I would quote words used at a church congress, by Colonel Hornby, master of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. Speaking on The Ethics of Amusements, he said: The exercise of hunting is productive of the most beneficial effects on both mind and body. There could be no hunting without suffering to the animal hunted, but this was greatly exaggerated. These animals were born to be hunted by other wild animals; we had destroyed the latter, and our hunting was more merciful. The pain inflicted was no equivalent to the pleasure afforded to hounds and horses, leaving men out of the question. The true lover of sport was a lover of mercy as well. Every sportsman, in the true sense of the word, did all in his power to lessen the suffering.Quoted, Guardian, Oct. 17, 1894, p. 1,620.

The days are gone by when gentlemen of the cloth were common in the hunting field. Yet I have known some of the hardest working clergymen, and the most sincere, earnest Christians, who saw no excessive cruelty in the chase. We have no Jack Russels among us now; the last of the type who lived in our neighbourhood found a dead fox in his pulpit, when he ascended it to preach his sermon one Sunday morning; and though he did not deliver a funeral oration over it, it was said that he buried it with as much loving reverence and genuine grief, as if it had been a Christian parishioner.

A meet of the foxhounds at that favourite tryst, the Tower on the Moor, near to Woodhall Spa, presents a pretty and lively scene. Besides the red-coated sportsman, there are riders, with horses of every degree, from the barebacked, or rudely saddled screw, to the 100 guinea or 200 guinea hunter; and from the weedy hack to the long, elastic-legged animal of racing blood. There are numerous vehicles, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, with their varied occupants, from the butchers light cart to the phaeton or the drag. There are numbers on foot, of both sexes; some of the men, staid of mein and beyond middle life, have already walked their miles; townsmen, for once, breaking away from their trade, or their business, and bent once more on breathing the fresh air on the heather, and listening again to the echoing horn, as it vibrates through the woods. There are ladies, on horseback, eager for the burst across country in the first flight; there are ladies on cycles, not yet arrived at the degree of perfection to enable the fair riders to take a bee-line, but yet, from the speed attainable, able to make rapid detours, and if they study the wind, and are familiar with the lay of the country, likely to see almost as much of the sport as the best-mounted. All are bent on the healthy enjoyment of this thoroughly English pastime. Their thoughts might find echo in the old hunting song,

Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Let the foreigner know We are Englishmen: so, Tally-ho! Tally-ho!

And who shall say that the pleasure is confined to them? Someone has said: The horses enjoy it, the hounds enjoy it, and no one can say from experience that the fox does not enjoy it as well. Then comes the M.F.H., with his beauties, all in the pink of condition. A moments delay for pleasant greetings between all and sundry, and the hounds are quickly thrown in for business; their tails, and little more, wave above the long ling and the tall bracken. The whips gallop to their points of observation. Presently a whimper or two is heard; then the deeper tone of an old hound takes it up; the rest rally about him, and soon the whole pack join in full chorus. A halloo is heard from a ride, as the fox crosses it; a distant hat is held up to show the line he is taking in the cover, and then a more distant shout of gone away, and the whole field are off, helter skelter, as though riding for their lives, sauve qui peut. Such are the pleasures of the chase, for which we are indebted to the Little Red Rover: The sport of kings, the image of war, without its guilt. (Somerville, The Chase, Book I.)

The neighbourhood of Woodhall combines lands of a wild unreclaimed nature, such as the Ostler Ground and other moorlands, in the parishes of Thornton, Martin, Roughton, Kirkby and Tattershall, and closely contiguous, and even mixed up with these, lands which are in an advanced state of cultivation. I have already mentioned a tract of waste, boggy ground, lying between the Tower on the Moor and Bracken Wood, formerly the haunt of wild fowl, and still called The Bogs Neuk. The origin of this ground was probably the following:The old antiquary, Leland, writing of The Tower, {61} says, one of the Cromwelles builded a pretty turret, caullid the Tower on the Moore, and thereby he made a faire greate pond or lake, bricked about. The lake is commonly called the Synkker. This lake, and all trace of it, have entirely disappeared; but it is probable that the decay of its bricked walls, or of whatever the environment may really have been, led to the escape of the water, and the creation of the tract of swamp, which remained until recent years. Similarly the Ostler Ground was, within the writers recollection, a much wilder tract, and its woods more extensive than at present. Some 300 acres of wood were destroyed by fire, through accident, about the year 1847. This happened at night, and, seen from a distance, it looked like a vast American prairie conflagration, the heavens being tinged with a lurid light far and wide. At that time the plantations opposite the Tower were of Scotch fir, so dense that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate. The roads, as I have previously stated, were little more than cart tracts, often shifting; and the whole tract was almost as little frequented, or disturbed, as if it had been in the heart of the Black Forest of Germany. In the centre of this wild were two or three fields belonging to another property, {62a} where roamed a herd of small, shaggy cattle, which, shut out as they were from the rest of the world, became almost wild; and when, on occasions, the foxhounds penetrated to their haunts, they frantically broke through all bounds, and for some days afterwards would be found scattered about the open country around. This tract of wood and moor has been for many years the prettiest bit of wild shooting anywhere in this neighbourhood for many miles round. There is not, at the present time, anything like the amount of game upon it which was to be found only a few years ago; drainage and several very dry seasons, as also two or three accidental fires, having killed much of the ling, and reduced very considerably the amount of cover. Still, to the genuine sportsman who thinks more of a varied bag than of the slaughter of numbers, it affords great attractions, and the writer has enjoyed many a happy day of healthy relaxation, with dog and gun, upon it. {62b} The variety of birds now, or formerly, to be seen, have been described already. The ground game upon it now, apart from the fox, are the hares and rabbits; of these I shall speak more at length presently. If the Moor ground has afforded fair sport of a wild and varied character, the shooting in the adjoining domain of Kirkstead, in hares and partridges, has been also much superior to the rest of the neighbourhood, with the one exception of Tattershall, which has been nearly as good. On one occasion, being one of a party of five, the writer was stationed at the north-east corner of The Arbours Wood, in Kirkstead, to shoot the hares which passed that point, while the rest of the sportsmen walked the wood with the beaters. In the space of about one hour and a quarter, without moving from his position, he shot 56 hares. At one moment he had 16 hares lying dead before him; and he could have shot many more, but that, from the rapid firing, his gun barrels became, at times, so hot that he was afraid to load, and the hares were allowed to pass him, and escape unmolested. {63}

We occasionally find on the Ostler Ground an unusual hybrid between hare and rabbit, a notice of which may be of some interest to the naturalist. As its occurrence has led to a good deal of correspondence, I will give here a summary of the observations made upon it as they were stated by me at a meeting of the Lincolnshire Naturalists Union. Among other persons who made enquiry about it was Mr. Walter Heape, of Cambridge, who has made the subject of hybrids a special study. He asked my reasons for supposing the animal to be such a cross. My reply was as follows:

(1) The animal is the size of a hare.

(2) Its fur is the rabbit grey.

(3) The head is the shorter, and the ears the more pricked and shorter, of the rabbit.

(4) One which I shot at, and missed in the ling, bolted straight for a hole, as though accustomed to it, and I never knew a hare to go to ground in that ready way.

(5) A tradition has long attached to the Moor that the hare and rabbit do occasionally inter-breed.

Mr. Heape replied:I am aware that many naturalists deny that hares and rabbits will breed together. I am not, however, myself of that opinion, but I never had satisfactory proof of such a cross occurring. Further enquiry led to the following facts:In the year 1773 the Abbe Domenico Gagliari got two litters from a female hare by a male rabbit. Richard Thursfield also got hybrids of these two species. M. Roux, in 1847, established a breed of Leporides in Angonleme, where he bred largely hybrids of hares and rabbits, and these hybrids were fertile with both parent species and among themselves. Baron de Gleichen states that at Hoching, Canton de la Prusse, Polonaise, hybrids of hare (female), and rabbits (male) are generally known. He says, however, that M. Brocca, the French savant, states that there are anatomical differences between hare and rabbit which make it, antecedently, improbable that they should inter-breed. I have myself shot three of these hybrids on the Ostler Ground, and have one of them stuffed. In the year 1897 Sir Henry Hawley shot a similar specimen in Haltham Wood, some five miles from Woodhall; more recently (Oct. 4th, 1898), the Rev. C. E. Chapman, then rector of Scrivelsby, shot another in New York Fen; one was occasionally seen on the Ostler Ground in 1898, and one was mentioned in Land and Water, March 5, 1892, as having been shot on the Moors, at Parkend, in Northumberland. I may add that a cross between a rabbit and guinea pig is in the possession of a person at Horncastle; and I have lately heard of a cross between black game and the capercailzie in Scotland. But the following somewhat analogous cases have created special interest. Professor Ewart, of Edinburgh, has bred a cross between a male Berchells zebra and a mare pony, of the Isle of Rum breed, half wild, lent for the experiment by Lord Arthur Cecil. The pony was jet black; the foal resulting, except over the hind quarters, had as many stripes as the zebra sire, the stripes being fawn colour, with background nearly black. In form it closely resembled a well-bred foal. As another interesting case of a similar kind, Lord Morton has bred a cross between a male quagga and a nearly pure-bred Arab mare; and Lord Tankerville has, more than once, bred a cross between the famous wild Chillingham bull (Bos Urus Primigenius) and a shorthorn cow.

An interesting variety of the hare is also found in Woodhall and the neighbourhood. This is the albino or white hare. Some 30 or more years ago one was frequently seen in the parishes of Langton and Woodhall, and eventually was shot in Thimbleby. They were then, so far as the writer knows, in abeyance for some years. But within the last decade heredity has asserted itself, and they have reappeared in increased numbers, and would doubtless become an established variety if allowed to multiply. In September, 1894, one of the Woodhall tenants killed, in the harvest field, a three-quarter-grown white leveret. In 1896 the writer presented to the Natural History Museum, at Lincoln, a fine albino specimen, also shot in Woodhall, with two small white leverets, accidentally killed in the harvest field at Langton. Since then, attention having been drawn to their existence, a number of instances occurring in the neighbourhood have been recorded. One was shot at Ranby as far back as Oct. 19, 1860; two were seen in Clayworth in 1896; one was shot in Baumber, Sept. 17, 1896; one shot at Thorpe Tilney, in Timberland parish, with slight tinge of brown on the ears, October, 1897; one shot in Timberland in 1895; one being seen still at large in Thorne Tilney in May, 1898; one shot in Branston, September, 1895, half grown; two shot at Bracebridge in 1893 or 1894; one shot in Wispington in 1896. {65} On one occasion, when shooting in Kirkstead, the writer shot (right and left) a couple of hares with white face and forelegs, one of which he has stuffed.

We commonly speak of the cunning of the fox, but Mr. E. A. Pease, M.P., in his recent book, Hunting Reminiscences (Thacker & Co., 1895, p. 119), says: The hare is really a much more rusé animal than the fox; can steal better away, and, once started, there is no end to her wiles and dodges. Of this cunning, with a view to self-preservation, I can give instances. It has been maintained that hares never take to water, but a correspondence was carried on in the newspaper a few years ago (see Morning Post, Nov. 14, 1892), in which instances were given of their doing so. I have myself seen a hare, which has eluded the greyhounds, swim across a moat, almost surrounding the house in which I am writing; and then steal away to the cover of some large ferns in a sheltered nook in the garden. Some years ago a baronet visited a relative of mine in this neighborhood, and brought with him a pack of beagles. We used to run on foot after these in pursuit of hares. It is known that a hare, when getting exhausted, has not the strong scent of one just started. As we ran over a rough ploughed field, I have seen a hare, when nearly tired out, thrust another sitting hare out of her form, and take her place. The pack of beagles passed over the worn-out hare squatting in the furrow, and rushed forward with a fresh burst of music in their rich deep tones, on the strong scent of the hare just set on foot. I passed the squatting hare, but had not the heart to betray her, feeling that she deserved to reap the reward of her cleverness. When hunted by harriers, hares often double on their track, and so throw the hounds out. I here give a very clever instance of this, which I myself once witnessed. On one occasion, sitting on the South Downs, watching the movements of a pack of harriers in the distance, I saw puss gradually approaching me. In a hilly country like the Downs, a hare, from the great length and propelling power of her hind legs, gains considerably upon the pack in running up hill, and loses ground in a descent. The hare in question had just descended a steep Down side, the hounds gaining rapidly upon her. It was what may be termed a squeak for her life, when, in the dean below, {67} she reached, just in time, the shelter of a clump of gorse. Working her way through this, she stole out on the opposite side to the pack, and at a tremendous pace faced the hill, near the top of which I was sitting, by a chalk quarry. In the ascent she distanced the hounds once more, but she was getting done, and, in the gentle breeze which floated towards me, I distinctly heard her panting as she bounded upward. But here her instinctive cunning came into play. The hill top was a few feet above me, some twenty yards away. I sat motionless, and, in her anxiety about her pursuers, she never observed me. She passed me, breathing heavily, and sprang along as far as the hill top; there, just at the brow, she paused, then cantered forward a few yards, returned, and repeated this more than once. Then, turning suddenly towards me, she made four or five huge bounds, only just touching the ground, and dropped into the chalk quarry a few feet below me, and crept under the shelter of some dwarf thorn bushes. Her object was manifest. By passing more than once over her own tracks, on the hill top, she created a strong scent, which the breeze, just catching it at the brow, would carry further forward. By her leaps towards the quarry, she had left but a slight scent, and under those thorn bushes she was doubtless waiting tremblingly the result of her ruse. I remained motionless, watching the issue. The pack came somewhat laboriously up the hill side, keeping close to the line she had taken; and a pretty sight it was, as a large sheet would almost have covered them, as they held on compactly together. They passed, as the hare had done, within a few yards of the chalk quarry; pressed on to the brow of the hill, and thence followed the scent which had been blown on beyond it. Presently there was a check, and the music ceased. The master never thought of harking back, his pack having followed a strong scent beyond the brow; but pushed on to a spinney lying on the slope of the next dean. I sat for a time longer by the quarry, and presently I saw puss, having recovered her breath, emerge from her hiding place and steal away, bent, doubtless, on reaching some distant secure retreat before her limbs became stiff from the unwonted exertion.

I have known a hare, when hard pressed by the harriers, enter a tunnel under a field gateway; but here instinct rather fails her; for, too often, it is only avoiding one mode of death by courting another. If there is water in the ditch, running through the tunnel, the obstruction caused by her body makes the water rise, and she is drowned; or, if she stays any time in the tunnel, her cramped limbs get so stiff after her exertions, that she cannot get out.

There is one kind of foe which the hare finds more difficult to shake off, or elude, than a pack of harriers or beagles. Stoats, foumarts, polecats, et id genus omne, are becoming scarcer every year; although the writer was recently told of a marten-catprobably the Pine-marten (martes abietum)being killed in a tree, and sold for 10s. as a rarity. I was a witness of the following:Walking, in the small hours of the morning, in a parish contiguous to Woodhall, on my way to a stream where I was going to fish, I saw a hare in a field adjoining the road, which was leaping about in a most extraordinary fashion, starting hither and thither, plunging into the rushes, springing into the air, and performing all sorts of strange antics, which I could only account for, had she been as mad as a March hare, as the saying is; but this was in the month of May. Presently she rushed forward, occasionally leaping into the air, towards the fence which separated me from the fields. I expected to see her appear through the hedge, in front of me; but she did not come. Out of curiosity I got over the fence, when I saw the hare lying, a few yards further on, stretched out as though dead. I went up to her, and found that she was, indeed, quite dead; and fast on her neck was a weasel, so gorged with her blood, that its usually slender body was quite bloated. Following the proverbial national instinct, I killed the weasel; carried the hare to a footpath, and left it there, that some labourer passing by might take it home to regale his family.

This incident leads me to speak of the pertinacity of our weasels in hunting their prey, say a hare, as above, or a rabbit. On one occasion, as I was riding by the side of a strip of low whinbushes and long grass, a rabbit rushed out just in front of me, its fur apparently curled with perspiration, uttering a kind of suppressed cry, and evidently in a state of the greatest terror. I pulled up in order to discover the cause of this alarm. The rabbit re-entered the cover a few yards further on; but presently, where it had emerged, I saw a weasel; and then I became aware that a number of these creatures were working through the grass. I watched their movements, following them at a distance, till they had about reached the spot where the rabbit re-entered. Then, feeling a keen sympathy for the poor persecuted rabbit, I charged into the midst of the pack, and by dint of plunging up and down among the startled company, and striking at them with my whip, I succeeded in dispersing them. At the same moment the rabbit, which had no doubt been crouching near, half paralysed with fear, darted out, and passing by me, went away at a great pace, as if rejoicing in the rescue. I pursued the weasels for some distance, and should say there was not less than a dozen. I was much astonished at the enormous leaps which they made in their flight, their long, lithe bodies contracting, and then expanding with a sudden jerk which threw them forward several feet at a time. As to the habit of weasels hunting in a pack, Waterton, the naturalist, mentions that he has seen two old stoats with five half-grown young ones hunting together. {69} Richard Jefferies, in his book, Round about a Great Estate, mentions having seen a pack of five stoats hunting in company, and says that a poacher told him that he had seen as many as fourteen so engaged. In the above case, which came under my own observation, the weasels were all apparently full grown and equally agile.



CHAPTER VI. REPTILES, FISHES, INSECTS.

Walking along the path through the wood, from the cross roads, near St. Andrews Church, towards the Victoria Hotel, the writer, on one occasion, observed a lady poking with her parasol at some object lying on the ground close to her feet. On coming to the spot he found that she was playing with an adder, which had crossed her path, apparently quite innocent of the danger she was incurring, the serpent still, evidently, having some attractive power for this, too curious daughter of Eve. He at once, by a blow on the head with his walking stick, despatched it, and then explained to her that it was lucky for her that it had not bitten her on the ankle. The adder or viper (Vipera Berus) is, fortunately, not common about Woodhall, but it exists there, and may be seen at times, basking on a sunny bank, or lying among the dead and dry foliage near a path, or on the open heath, where the unwary pedestrian is liable to tread upon it. It is the more dangerous because it is apt to vary in colour, according to the locality which it frequents, and therefore is the less easily observed. The colour is always some shade of brown, from a dull yellow to an olive tint; but it may be specially known by the zigzag, black markings along the back, and its broad head, with V-shaped mark in the centre. Its length is from a foot to a foot-and-a-half, although specimens have been killed as long as four feet. (Naturalist, 1895, p. 206.) The female is larger than the male. Its bite is made with great rapidity, so that there is little opportunity to escape it. The poison is very virulent, and we are told that in some cases it has proved fatal, but that was probably in the case of a naturally inflammatory subject. The writer has killed several at different times, on the Moor, near Woodhall. On one occasion, on a hot day in September, when a friend was shooting with him, the dog of the friend was bitten. It immediately howled, and seemed to be in considerable pain. He was in time to see the adder and to kill it. He then hurried off with the dog and caught a train to Horncastle, where a dose of Eau de Luce was administered, and the dog recovered. Olive oil, also, well rubbed into the bitten part, is said to be an effective remedy, and is often more easily obtainable. Another variety of snake found here is what is commonly called the slow worm or blind worm (Anguis fragilis), which is generally seen in moist meadow ground. It is from 10 to 16 inches in length, and quite harmless. Strictly speaking, it is a lizard, not a snake. The only other kind is the common grass snake (coluber natrix). This is fairly common. The writer has seen three linked together, lying on a bank in Kirkby-lane, a favourite walk near Woodhall. If taken unawares, without time to escape, it will hiss and make a show of fight, but it is perfectly harmless and defenceless, and usually endeavours to escape as quickly as possible, and will bury itself in the long grass, the hedge bottom, or underground with marvellous rapidity. Like the late Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, the writer has more than once kept a tame snake of this species, and has even carried it about in his coat pocket, to the astonishment of urchins who have seen its head peeping out. In a state of nature they hybernate; but when kept in a room, a favourite resort in cold weather was among the ashes under a fire-grate. If a hot coal fell from the grate into the ashes, the snake would rush out hissing, but presently return to its warm retreat again. Held out by the tail, they will try to climb up their own body, and snap, as if to bite at ones hand; but their only real mode of defence is to inflate the body with air to its utmost power of expansion, and then emit it again, charged with a strong odour, repulsive enough to drive most things from it. {71a} They are found in length from one foot and a half to three feet; and the writer has seen one killed, from which 32 unhatched eggs were taken, each egg about an inch long. The question of snakes swallowing their young, to shelter them from danger, though asserted by several authorities, I have never been able to prove or disprove, although I have often watched them. {71b}

The Lizard (Zoctoca vivipara) is found in sandy parts of the moor, and sunny banks, but is not very common. Many a time, as a boy, I have caught it, and found, immediately afterwards, nothing left in my hand but the tail, the rest of the creature darting away over the ground, as if none the worse; or, rather, as one might imagine, moving more freely when relieved of the incumbrance. This casting of the tail would seem, really, to be an interesting, self-protective effort. As the partridge shams lameness in its movements, to draw away an intruder from its young; or, conversely, as the Russian traveller, pursued by wolves, flings away his children, that he may escape himself; so the captured lizard, as a last resource, casts off its tail, and leaves it, wriggling, to attract the captors attention, while its own bodily better half seeks safety in concealment.

In the ponds at Woodhall the crested newt (Triton cristatus) and the smooth newt (Triton punctatus) were found by members of the Lincolnshire Naturalists Union, on their visit in August, 1893.

Of the fishes of our neighbourhood I have been furnished with the following list by the greatest local authority, who has inherited, and personally acquired, an intimate knowledge of the subject:Trout (Salmo fario), river Bain; grayling (Thymallus vulgaris), Bain; pike (Esox lucius), canal, ponds, Witham; chub (Leuciscus cephalus), Bain; carp (Cyprinus carpio), pondsrarely in Witham; rudd (Cyprinus Erythrophthalmus), Witham; bream (Abramis Brama), Witham; silver bream (Abramis Blicca), ponds; roach (Leuciscus rutilus), ponds, canals, Bain; dace (Leuciscus vulgaris), ponds, canal, Bain; blick (Alburnus lucidus), Witham; minnow (Leuciscus Phoxinus), Bain; tench, (Tinca vulgaris), ponds; perch (Perca fluviatilis), canal; loach (Nemachilus barbatulus), canal and river Waring; gudgeon (Gobio fluviatilis), canal, Bain, Waring, Witham; millers thumb (Gobio cottus), canal; stickleback or blue-eyed sailor (Gasterosteus aculeatus), Waring and ponds; lampern, or lamprey, or nine-eyed eel (Pteromyzon fluviatilis), Bain and Waring; burbot (Gadus lota), Witham; eel (Anguilla vulgaris), Witham, Bain, and ponds.

On some of these fishes I may here make a few remarks. The grayling, Thymellus, or thyme scented fish, is not indigenous, but has, of late years, been imported from the small river Eau, at Claythorpe, near Alford; and it is now breeding in the river Bain. It is also called the umber, or shadow fish, because it does not lie near the surface, like the trout, but deeper down, and darts up at the fly, like a grey, dim shadow in the water. A recent angling author, referring to this habit of the fish, speaks of casting his fly on the surface of a deep pool on the Doon, in which the shadowy form of the grayling could be seen three feet below. A fish would shoot up with a rush, seize the fly, and drop backward to the bottom. (Angling Holidays, by C. W. Gedney, pp. 8, 9.) The special month for grayling fishing is August, and onward through the winter. The rudd, found in the Witham, is not unlike the roach, but a thicker fish, with sides and back almost of a green tinge. It has been taken up to 2½lb., but from 1 to 1½lb. is a commoner weight. It acquires its name from its red (ruddy-coloured) eyes. The blick is like the dace, but smaller and lighter in colour; very quick in taking the fly. Its average size is four to five inches. The stickleback, or blue-eyed sailor, is found almost everywherein pond and stream. It is remarkable for building a nest, almost like that of a bird, attached to the stem of a reed or some other aquatic plant, which the male fish defends with great pugnacity against all comers. It may be said to occupy a place among our fishes, analogous to that of the kingfisher among our birds, as being decked with brighter colours than any other kind; especially is this the case in time of excitement, as when defending the nest. It then darts about, with all its spines erect, and flashing with green and gold and red. Anyone who thrusts a stick into the water near the nest may witness this for himself. Sticklebacks were formerly found in such large quantities in fen waters that they were made a source of considerable profit, being boiled down for the oil they contained, and the refuse sold as manure. (Thompsons Boston, p. 368.) The millers thumb is about the size of a gudgeon, to which it is allied, but has a head broader than its body, whence it gets its other name of bull-head. The burbot has something of the flavour of the eel. The lamprey gets its name of the nine-eyed eel from nine orifices along the side of the throat, through which the water passes from the gills. It is sometimes said to be poisonous, but the Germans eat them as a delicacy. Carp, of the Lake variety, were put into the Witham several years ago, and they are occasionally taken 10lb. or 12lb. in weight. The ordinary pond carp is no longer known near Woodhall, but they survive in a pond, where the writer has caught them, at Wispington. They are a somewhat insipid fish, although at one time highly esteemed. There was an old saying that the carp was food fit for an abbot, the barbel for a king. Tench were found in great numbers in a pond which formerly existed on the site now occupied by Oranienhof Villa, within 150 yards of the Victoria Hotel. They have also been taken in the river Witham, but are now thought to be extinct. Very large tench were formerly abundant in a moat surrounding the house where the writer now lives. They are difficult to take with worm or paste, as, by continual sucking, they get the bait off the hook without being caught. The largest, sometimes weighing 3lb. or more, were taken in a wickerwork trap, of the shape of a dice-box, some 3ft. long, with the willow withes pointing inwards at each end. This was baited with a peony, or any gay-coloured flower; attracted by which, the tench found their way inwards, but could not get out. Every pond in Kirkstead has its fish; fish doubtless of ancient lineage, the descendants of those on which monks and abbotts once fattened. In an early blackletter edition of Chaucer, there is a fragment of a poem, called The Pilgryms Tale, which begins with these lines:

In Lyncolneshyr, fast by the fene, Ther stant an hows, and you yt ken.

Todds Gower and Chaucer, p. iv.

which might well apply to the hows, or monastery, of Kirkstead. Every such Religious House had its fish stews, or ponds, keeping, as Chaucer says, Many a bream, and many a luce (pike) in stew, and many a fat partrich eke in mewe. The Cistercian rules of diet were very severe, allowing only one meal a day, and none but the sickly were permitted to partake of animal food. Consequently, fish were in great demand, and the greater the variety, the more toothsome would be the monastic fare. {74} Roach abound in the Witham, and attain a very fair size, not unfrequently up to 1¼lb.; and the artizans of Sheffield, and elsewhere, brought by special trains, in hundreds, often carry away with them very fair baskets. Bream of both kinds are very abundant in the Witham. I am told by one angler that he has seen the water crowded with shoals of them, and they are caught up to 6lb. in weight, and even more. I have before me the paper-cut shape of a bream caught near Tattershall, which weighed 5¼lb., was 21 inches in length, and about 20 inches in girth. Chub in the river Bain, between Horncastle and Roughton, and again between Tattershall and Dogdyke, are caught weighing several pounds. They are a wary fish, but, when hooked, fight hard for a while, and then suddenly collapse. The writer has often, in the early morning or late evening, sat by the river fishing for them with black slug, and seen two or three big fish, 1½ft. in length, slowly rising and sinking in the stream, as they examined the bait. A chub was taken in the Bain, in 1898, with the spoon-bait, weighing 4lb. 10oz. The Pike attains a good size in some of the ponds in the neighbourhood, and also in the river Witham. In a large pond, about three-quarters of a mile from the Bath-house, at an abandoned brickyard known as Jordans Pond, a near relative of the writer, a few years ago, landed a pike weighing between 13lbs. and 14lbs. It was currently reported for several years that there was a much larger pike in this pond, which those who had seen it estimated at 20lbs. weight. A resident near has told the writer that he has seen it, holding across its jaws a captured fish fully a foot long. This pike disappeared, it is believed in the night, in the year 1897. Doubtless the nocturnal marauder has kept his own counsel from that day to this. There is an old laconic expression, Witham pike, none like, which is only a condensed form of an older adage,

Ancholme eels, and Witham pike, In all the world theres none syke.

The pike of the Witham were evidently famed of yore, for Drayton, in his Polyolbion (Song XXV.), personifying the Witham, says:

Thus to her proper song the burthen still she bare, Yet for my dainty pikes I am beyond compare.

Walter de Gaunt (A.D. 1115) granted to the Abbot of Bardney eight fisheries on the Witham, and a fishery on the Witham at Dogdyke (Dock-dike) was granted to the Abbot of Kirkstead by Philip de Kyme (A.D. 1162), which were privileges, in those times, of considerable value. (Reliqui galen, Introd., p. xxiii.). Records in the Archives of Lincoln state that when Henry VII. visited Lincoln, in 1486, keeping his Easter there, and humbly and christenly did wesh the feet of 30 poore menne with his noble hands, he was entertained at a banquet, to which the Mayor contributed 12 grete pykes, 12 grete tenches, and 12 salmons; {76a} and on a second visit, after his victory at Stoke field, the Corporation presented him with 2 fatte oxen, 20 fatte muttons, 12 fatte capons, and 6 grete fatte pykes. Pike have been taken in the Fens, says Mr. Skertchly, in his Fenland (p. 398), from 20lbs. to 24lbs. The largest known was taken when Whittlesea Mere was drained. It weighed 100lbs., and was given to the late naturalist, Frank Buckland. There are fine pike in the lake at Sturton Hall, where permission to fish may generally be obtained; and the present would seem to be an opportunity for placing on record that when, early in this century, the lake, of some eight acres in extent, was first formed by damming the stream which ran through the Park, it was stocked with pike and other fish from the moat which then enclosed the residence of the present writer, Langton Rectory. I find among my notes on Witham pike fishing, that in 1890 one angler {76b} took, in two hours, five fish, weighing altogether 31lbs.; the largest scaling over a stone (14lbs.), measured 35½ inches in length and 19 inches in girth. A few days later he landed fishes of 7lbs. and 5lbs., while another angler, about the same date, secured a pike of 16lbs. But a Horncastle fisherman, {76c} in the same week, captured one of 18lbs. in the Witham near Tattershall. One of our greatest anglers states that his largest pike, taken in the Witham, was 16¼lbs.; that he has landed 23 pike in one day, of all sizes, and 20 the next day, making 43 fish in two days. In the closing week of the season 18981899, a season below the average, a pike was taken in the Witham, near Tattershall, weighing 22lbs.

The late vicar of Tattershall, the Rev. Mortimer Latham, to whose memory the writer would here pay his tribute of regard and respect for as genuine, and withal as genial, an angler as Isaac Walton himself, knew, as we might say, by heart, the Witham, its finny occupants, and their haunts; and many a fine fish he landed, the shapes of which he kept, cut out in brown paper, in his study. The largest pike he ever took weighed 19½lbs. I have before me, as I write, the paper-cut shape of this fish, lent to me by his daughter; who writes: It may interest you to know that it was conveyed home in a bolster slip, and was on view in the vicarage courtyard, to the great entertainment of the whole village. Its length was 38 inches, girth about 21 inches. She further adds: My father, at one time, caught several tench (now supposed to be extinct in the Witham), and I am proud to say that the last one known to be captured was taken by myself, for being one of the keenest fishermen that even Lincolnshire ever produced, he made us as ardent fisherfolk as himself. I have also the shape of a perch caught by him, weighing 2½lbs., length 15½ins., girth about 12ins.

No fish is so coy and hard to please as the pike. Of them may be said, what someone has said of women,

If they will, they will, You may depend ont; And if they wont, they wont; And theres an end ont.

The proverbial variabile semper element is their characteristic feature, a living illustration of a line, pregnant with meaning, of Coleridge,

Naught may endure but mutability.

On one occasion, a well-known angler tells me, he fished three long hours in a gale of wind, which nearly carried him into the river, without stirring a fin, and then, an unaccountable change of mood coming over the water wolves, through the next hour and a half they took like mad, and he landed 42½lb. weight. At the time two Sheffield men were fishing close by, who had been at the work for three days, and had landed only a few bream or roach, and one small jack. Under their very noses he landed three splendid pike, while they looked on thunderstruck. Such are the fortunes of war with fishermen. On another occasion, when the day was dull and calm, and there was nothing, one would have thought, to stir the fish to any animation, he landed at the same spot one pike of 16¼lb., and three of 9lb. odd each. In fact, he says, pike are unaccountable. In December, 1898, a boy caught a pike of 16lb. weight in the Horncastle Canal, at Tattershall, 3½ feet in length and 9 inches in girth; and another of 11lbs. was taken in the Witham, shortly after; and other cases of 14lb., and so on, are recorded. Pike, as is well known, are exceedingly voracious, and not very particular as to what they eat. A writer in the Naturalist {78} states that a pair of Shoveller ducks nested in a disused brickpit, and brought off their young; but a pike in the pit gradually carried them off, one by one, taking one when it was large enough to fly. The same fish destroyed nearly the whole of another brood of ducks, hatched at the same pit. The present writer has himself witnessed a similar occurrence. He at one time kept (as he does still) wild ducks, which nested on the banks of the moat surrounding the house. There were large pike in the moat, and he has frequently heard a duck give a quack of alarm, has seen a curl on the water, and on counting his ducklings, found that there was one less. And if pike are not particular as to their dietall being grist that comes to the millneither are they particular as to the bait, if they are in the humour.

The writer, in a days fishing for trout, in a Scotch river, the Teviot, where he took perhaps a score or two in the day, would vary the sport on coming to a deep pool by taking off his flies, putting on stout gimp tackle, with a single large hook, which was run through the body of a small trout, or parr; and would often, in this way, land a good pike or two. Sometimes when drawing in the pike too hastily, it would disgorge the bait and hook, but on his making another cast, and letting them float down the pool again, the pike would return to the charge, unwarned by experience, and be eventually captured. On one occasion, rowing leisurely in a boat on Loch Vennachar, with his rod over the stern, and line trailing behind him, a trout, of a pound weight or so, took the fly, and hooked itself. This was immediately seized by a good-sized pike, and after a hard fight he secured both with gut tackle. Dining with the Marchioness who owned the above river, he was regaled on a 10lb. or 12lb. pike, which the Lady Cecil had caught that day, her boat being pushed along the river by a gillie, himself walking in the water, and she fishing with a single large hook, baited with a piece of red cloth.

We have quoted the lines celebrating the pike of the Witham, and the eels of the Ancholme (also a Lincolnshire river), but eels were, at one time, abundant also in the Witham. Large tubs containing hundreds of them used to be taken to Horncastle on market days, or were hawked about to the country houses. It is said that as many as 16,000 eels have been taken in one year. If you bought eels from these hawkers, they were brought to your kitchen door alive, and, being difficult creatures to handle, your cook generally got the seller to skin them alive, and they were often put into the pan for stewing before they had ceased wriggling. Hence the phrase to get accustomed to a thing; as eels do to skinning. But an eel can only be once skinned in its life, and even the skin, stript from its writhing body, was supposed to possess a virtue. If tied round a leg or an arm, it was considered a remedy, or preventive, for rheumatism; and your cook would sometimes preserve the skin for a rheumatic friend. In these days the eels brought to market are few, and not half the size they used to be. Eels, from 2ft. to 3ft. long, and as thick as ones wrist, were formerly quite common. Eels are supposed to migrate to the sea, and, in the year 1903, a large eel was found, early in the morning, about 100 yards from a large pond, in the parish of Wispington, travelling across a grass field, towards a stream, by which it might eventually reach the sea.

The only other fish which I have to remark upon is the trout. They are not found in the Witham; but the Bain trout are handsome; both the golden, or rich yellow kind, with pink spots, and the purple or mauve-coloured variety, but the former are much finer in flavour. For some years the swans on the Horncastle Canal made great havoc among the young trout and spawn {79a} in the neighbouring river Bain, but the last swan died in 1897. Further, there is now an artificial breeding tank established at Horncastle, managed by Mr. Rushton, for keeping up the supply. Some very fine fish have been taken at different times. My notes record as follows:In April, 1896, one of the anglers already referred to {79b} caught a trout in the Bain, close to Horncastle, weighing 4lb. 6oz., 23in. in length. The same fisherman, in July, 1888, took another, within half a mile of the same place, weighing 4lb. 10oz., 23in. in length. The son {79c} of a quondam veteran angler, and himself one of our keenest fishermen, tells me that he, several years ago, assisted his father to land a male trout of 7lb. weight, from the watermill pool at Horncastle. It fought so hard that he and his brother had to rush into the water and take it in their arms, their fathers tackle not being intended for such a monster. {80a} This, however, was surpassed by a trout taken by the late Mr. Robert Clitherow, of Horncastle, a beau ideal disciple of the gentle craft, which weighed 8lbs.

Probably the handsomest trout in the neighbourhood, though not the largest, are those of the Somersby beck, The Brook, rendered for ever classical by the sweet poem of the late Poet Laureate. In years gone by the writer has enjoyed many a picnic on its banks, when we used to pull off our shoes and stockings, and turn up our trousersgentlemen as well as boysto catch the trout by the process called tickling them, while hiding in their holes; which the ladies afterwards cooked on a fire extemporised on the bank. The music of the rippling stream haunts one still, as one reads those liquid lines of the poet, themselves almost a runnel:

I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles; I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. {80b}

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, the dykes in the Fens, near the Witham, abounded in fish of the coarser kinds, with some goodly pike among them. As a boy the writer has caught many a pike by the process called sniggling, i.e., a noose of wire, or gimp, attached to the end of a stiff rod, or stick, which is deftly slipt over a fishs head, as he basks among the water weeds, and, when thus snared, he is jerked ashore. When shooting in the Fens he has also killed, at one shot, five or six fish crowded together in a dyke. But climatic alterations, and over-perfect drainage, have changed all this. The water now runs out to sea so rapidly that the Fen drains are dry for a great part of the year, and the fish are no more.

Enough has now been said to show that the visitor to Woodhall Spa, who has a taste for the contemplative mans recreation, {81} may find some employment in its vicinity. Most of the ponds can be fished on asking the farmers permission. As to the Witham, although there are angling clubs at Boston and Lincoln, the river is practically open to every one, in the season. It may be added that close to Tattershall station there is a large ballast pond containing good pike, and a letter to the shooting tenant, or to Lord Fortescues agent, would probably obtain permission to fish. At Revesby there is a reservoir, the source of the water supply of Boston, a large piece of water, which abounds in fish of various kinds. Bream, both of the silver and the carp kinds, are plentiful, running up to 4lb. in weight. Very large eels are taken there. Roach are of a fair size. Rudd are numerous; as also are perch, but small. Gudgeons are plentiful, serving for bait. Pike are abundant. In one case three were taken by the same rod within twenty minutes, one of them weighing 13lb. Another rod took two of 16lb. and 10lb., and it is commonly said that there is one occasionally seen as long as a rail. Permission may be obtained to fish here from the agent of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope, Revesby Abbey. There is good accommodation at the Red Lion Hotel.

As, in the next chapter, I am to enter upon a different branch of my subject, passing roughly speaking, from the organic to inorganicfrom the living to the deadI will here give a few particulars, recently received, which may interest the entomologist. In the month of August, 1898, I conducted the members of our county Naturalists Union from Woodhall Spa to Tumby, through a varied tract of country. The following is a list of the Lepidoptera which were found by one of the members:

Pieris brassicæ E. hyperanthus

P. rapæ Thecla quercus

P. napi Polyommatus phlas

Colias edusa Lycna icarus

Argynnis aglaia Hesperia thaumas

A. paphia Spilosoma mendica (two larvæ)

Vanessa io

V. atalanta Psilura monacha

Apatura iris Plusia gamma

Pararge megæra Geometra papilionaria

Epinephele janira Cidaria immanata

E. tithonus Eubolia limitata



Two other members collected the following:



NEUOPTERA

Sympetrum sp.



HYMENOPTERA

Vespa germanica Crabro cribrarius

V. vulgaris C. albilabris

Bombus lapidarius Halictus leucopus

Bombus hortorum Apis mellifica

Formica rufa

DIPTERA

Platychirus clypeatus Calliphora vomitoria

Scatophaga stercoraria

COLEOPTERA

Geotrupes spiniger Otiorrhyncus picipes

G. stercorarius Psylliodes cupro-nitens

Coccinella 7-punctata Ragonycha fulva

C. variabilis Meligethes æneus

Strangalia armata Necrophorus humator

Polydrusus pterygomalis N. ruspator

N. mortuorum

Strophosomus coryli Aphodius rufipes

HEMIPTERA-HETEROPTERA

(in Fulsby Wood).

Miris lævigatus Leptopterna ferrugata

Calocoris roseomaculatus torhinus angulatus

Orthotylus scotti

C. bipunctatus Nabis lativentris



(In Tumby Wood.)

Those marked * are new to Lincolnshire.

*Piezodorus lituratus (abundant *Onychumenus decolor on gorse)

Stygnus rusticus (at roots of *Psallus alnicola (on birch) heather)

*Dictyonota strichnocera (on Asciodema obsoletum gorse)

Miris calcaratus Lygus viridis (on birch)

Orthotylus ericetorum (abundant on heather)

SPIDERS.

Anyphæna accentuata Meta segmentata

Epeira gibbosa (a first record) Epeira marmorea (doubtful, not yet recorded in Britain)

Dictyna arundinacea Xysticus pini

Dia dorsata (a first record) Epeira sollers

Epeira quadrata Linyphia triangularis

E. scalaris Theridion varians



CHAPTER VII. GEOLOGICAL NOTES.

In a county like Lincolnshire, mainly agricultural, in which the operations of man are, for the most part, confined to the earths crust, in ploughing and sowing, and, as some one has said, in tickling the earths surface into fertility,in such a county we are not led ordinarily to explore the inner bowels of the world; as is necessary in mining districts such as certain parts of Yorkshire, Durham, Cornwall and elsewhere. Yet, with regard to our knowledge of its geological features, Woodhall may be said to compare favourably with a large majority of places. With one exception {84a} it is the spot, par excellence, in this part of the kingdom, where the earths hidden resources have been tapped, and tapped to considerable purpose, in the unique commodity for which it is famedits mineral water. The book of Nature, so often sealed, has here been opened and its contents indexed. We have in the strata of the Woodhall well sundry chapters in the earths past history unfolded, at least to the initiated. The writer is not going to attempt here a systematic disquisition on a subject so abstruse (for which, indeed, he is not qualified), beyond touching upon some of its more salient, or more interesting features. The geological records of the Woodhall well have already been given {84b} in the very concise form in which they have been preserved for us. Whether they are to be entirely depended upon is questionable, but we may here repeat them:Gravel and boulder clay, 10 feet; Kimeridge and Oxford clays, 350; Kellaways rock, blue clays, cornbrash, limestone, great oolite, clay and limestone, upper Estuarine clay, 140; Lincolnshire oolite, and Northampton sand, 140; lias, upper, middle, and lower, 380 feet; total, 1,120 feet. The mineral spring is said to have issued from a stratum of spongy rock lying at a depth of 540ft. {85a} This would probably be in or near the ferruginous Northampton sand, the lowest layer of the oolite, and lying immediately above the upper lias. {85b}

In the year 1897 a boring was commenced within 500 yards of the original well by the artesian engineers, Messrs. Isler and Co., on behalf of the Rev. J. O. Stephens, on the west side of the Stixwould road, with a view to obtaining a second supply of the Woodhall water; this was carried to a depth of 700 feet. The engineers furnished me with a register of the strata so far pierced by the bore, but, as they are not described in the technical terms of geology, it is rather difficult to compare them with those of the old well. At a depth of 490 feet, sandstone with iron pyrites was pierced; this would probably be the ferruginous Northampton sand of the Oolite. It is at a less depth than the same stratum at the Spa well; but that was to be expected, as geologists state that all the geological strata dip eastward, and this bore being to the west, the stratum would naturally tilt upward. This born was ultimately abandoned. According to the records of the Spa well, derived from Dr. Snaith, of Horncastle, who knew the well from its birth, the saline spring was found at 540ft.; but Dr. Granville, who visited Woodhall, and wrote his version, in 1841, puts it at 510ft. It is difficult to say which of these two doctors, who differ, should be accepted as the more trustworthy; and in 1841 Dr. Granville would still certainly be able to find plenty of persons familiar with the well and its details. But in the ferruginous sand, or near it, the spring was to be expected; and there it would seem Messrs. Isler, in the new boring, found saline water, though only in small quantity. The depth, according to their computation, was, as we have said 490ft., which is 20ft. above the Spa springs level, according to Granvilles version, and 60ft. above the depth given by Snaith. The paucity of the supply of the saline water in the Isler boring may probably be accounted for thus: The trend of the current found in making the Spa well was said to be from south-east to north-west, whereas this new bore is very nearly due west from the Spa well. If, therefore, the stream is of narrow width, this later boring is scarcely in the position to catch more than the side soakage of the current, and it would seem that the main stream can only be tapped either by another boring further north, or by a lateral shaft from the present bore running northward till it encounters the current. There remains, of course, the further and open question as to whether the saline stream formerly passing through the Spa shaft, still continues its former north-westerly course, after having the outlet afforded by that shaft. Would it not be more in accordance with the law of nature that the stream should take the course of least resistance by rising in the well, and not flowing further along the bed of its special original stratum? If that be so, the only chance of another well would be to bore south-eastward of the Spa; and probably the shaft sunk by the late Mr. Blyton beside Coalpit Wood, if it had been continued, would have proved a safer venture than any other as yet attempted. At some future time we may have the wolf disturbing the stream, above the lamb represented by the original well, to the detriment of the latter. It may be here noticed that in the Scarle boring, as we are told, there was found a strong spring in the upper part of the lower Keuper sandstone at the depth of 790ft., and a still stronger spring at the base of that formation at 950ft. In that case, therefore, as also at Woodhall, the water was found in sandstone, but at a much greater depth, and also in sandstone of a different character, viz., the Keuper at Scarle, the Northampton at Woodhall. Another difference is that in the Scarle strata we pass at once from the surface drift to the lower Lias; the Kimeridge clay and all the Oolite formations, which are found at Woodhall, with a thickness of some 630ft., being entirely absent. These differences, of course, illustrate the fact that, owing to abrasion and other causes, not only do the strata underlying the surface drift vary in different localities, but their several thicknesses vary; while, as at Harrogate, the mineral properties of the water also vary at a distance of only a few yards. Pass beyond the limits of the particular stream, and, below ground as well as above it, you are not in the swim.

In the spring of 1904, Mr. R. A. Came, of the Royal Hotel, commenced sinking a shaft, in search of the Spa water, at a point some ¾ mile south of the original well; and early in 1905 water was struck at a depth of 492 feet, which proved to have the same saline properties, with the addition of Epsom salt, a good supply issuing from the spongy sandstone. This opens up a vista of great possibilities in the future; it does away with the monopoly hitherto existing, and may have a most important effect, in the further development of the Spa. The well is 7ft. in diameter, is bricked to a depth of 495ft., and sunk to 520ft. The boring was carried out by Mr. Joseph Aldridge, of Measham, near Atherstone, Warwickshire, an expert mining engineer. Many fine fossils, as ammonites, belemnites, and bi-valves, were found in the different strata that were pierced.

I now proceed to remark upon some of the geological strata, as found at Woodhall. And first, after the mere surface gravel, we have the Boulder clay. This has a very interesting history. In the Life of Nansen, the Arctic traveller, it is stated {87a} that the geological strata of the Arctic regions show that at some remote period the climatic conditions were the reverse of those which prevail now. Throughout those regions, at present of intense cold, there was quite a southern climate, in which walnut trees, magnolias, vines, etc., flourished; while, on the other hand, there was also a period during which our own country, and large parts of the Continent, lying in the same latitude, were buried under vast ice-fields with an Esquimaux climate. It is there further stated {87b} that boulders are found scattered over Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which have been transported thither on glaciers, from regions still further north. In like manner glaciers at one time also spread over what are now Scotland and a great part of England, bringing along with them boulders from Norway, and Scandinavia generally. The present condition of Greenland, with its vast glaciers, pouring through its valleys, down to the waters edge, on the sea shore, illustrates the condition of our own country at that remote period. {88a} As regards this country, these ice-streams may be classed under two distinct heads, (a) the native, inland glaciers, and (b) the north-eastern, Scandinavian glacier. To speak first of the former. As the climate, from causes into which we cannot here enter, {88b} gradually became coldier, glaciers were formed among the rugged hills in the present lake country of Cumberland and Westmoreland, some of which pushed their way westward, literally inch by inch, until they debouched in the Irish Sea, and filled it to overflowing, for it is only shallow. From Borrowdale, Buttermere, Eskdale, and other head centres, they also streamed southward and eastward. There was an immense central stream, which forced its way over the wild tract of Stainmoor (named doubtless from the thousands of boulders with which it is strewn); then, fed by lateral branches from many directions, it traversed Teesdale, turned towards the coast, passing by Scarborough, and so on to Holderness and the Humber, a branch also filling up Airedale and the Vale of York. {88c} From Holderness it passed the Humber, into Lincolnshire. Its most eastern limb would doubtless have debouched in the North Sea, and filled it; but here the north-eastern glacier, to which I have alluded, came into collision. Taking its rise in Scandinavia, it had spread into a vast sheet in parts 3,000ft. thick, {89a} filled up the shallow North Sea, and the Baltic, a veritable mer de glace, and over-run northern Germany, its thickness even at Berlin being supposed to have been 1,300ft. Impinging on our eastern coast of Scotland and of northern England, it spread over a great part of Holderness, meeting and blending with the inland native glacier on the Humber; and the vast united ice-stream thence pursued its onward southern course, enfolding everything in its icy embrace, to the Thames and to the Severn. {89b} These great ice-streams created the geological formation called The Drift, or boulder-clay, which we have at Woodhall. The clay is simply the detritus, produced by the grinding, through long ages, of the rocks under the vast and weighty ice-fields slowly moving over them, and the abrasion of the hill-sides which they scraped in their course. The boulders are detached fragments, which fell from various rocky heights overhanging the ice-stream, rested on the surface of the ice-sheet, were borne along by it through hundreds of miles, and when, in the course of ages untold, the climate became milder, and the glaciers gradually shrunk and eventually disappeared, these fragments, often bearing the marks of ice-scraping, and oftener rounded by ice-action, fell to the soil beneath, and remain to this day, to bear their silent witness to the course once taken by the giant ice-stream. The period through which this process was going on has been variously computed, from 18,000 years, according to the estimate of Major-General A. W. Drayson, F.R.A.S., who gives elaborate astronomical statistics in support of his views (Trans. Victoria Institute, No. 104, p. 260), to 160,000, as calculated by Mr. James Croll (Climate and Time). It is now generally held that there were more than one ice-age, with inter-glacial breaks. These boulders are abundant in our neighbourhood, and of all sizes. They may be measured by inches or by yards. There is a good-sized one in the vicarage garden at Woodhall Spa, which the present writer had carted from Kirkby-lane, a distance of a mile and a half. There is a larger one lying on the moor, near the south-east corner of the Ostler Ground. The writer has one in his own garden, a large one, more than 6ft. in length by 3½ft. high, and 2½ft. thick. It took five horses to drag it from its position, a quarter of a mile distant. There are six visible in the parish of Langton, two or three large ones near Old Woodhall Church; several large ones in Thimbleby, Edlington, and elsewhere. Smaller ones are often to be seen placed at turns in the roads to prevent drivers running their vehicles into the bank, or used as foundations to old cottages or farm buildings; and still smaller specimens may be constantly picked up by the pedestrian, or the sportsman, in his rambles through the fields. Much interest has of late years been taken in these boulders, arising from the distinct classes of glaciers to which I have referred, and the consequent difference between the nature of the boulders, as well as the source from which they have come, according as they belong to the one class or the other; and our Lincolnshire Naturalists Union have now a special boulder committee engaged in the investigation of this subject.

The late Professor Sedgewick, of Cambridge (whose lectures the writer attended), was the first to notice that along the Holderness shore there were (as he says) an incredible number of blocks of granite, gneiss, greenstone, mica, etc., etc., resembling specimens derived from various parts of Scandinavia. {90} These, we now know, were dropped by the great Scandinavian glacier; and, along with the kinds of stone here named, there are also boulders of Rhombporphyry (the Rhomben porphyry of Norwegian geologists, from the neighbourhood of Christiana), Augite syenite, and several more, not of British origin. These boulders are now being searched for, and found in our own neighbourhood. On the other hand, there is the different class of boulders which were brought down by the native inland glaciers. These consist largely of igneous kinds. The rugged hills of the Lake district owe their origin to fire; and the boulders which the glaciers have transported correspond. The shap granite, for instance, which is probably one of the commonest of this class, comes from the shap granite bed of Wastdale, in Cumberland. Boulders of this rock, as Mr. Kendall tells us, passed over Stainmoor in tens of thousands, {91a} to visit us in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Other kinds are Felspar porphyry from Eskdale, in Cumberland, Andesite from Borrowdale, Granophyr from Ennerdale and Buttermere, Quartz, Basalt, and several more from the crystalline formations in the Lake district. Several boulders of these rocks have also been found in our own neighbourhood; and doubtless more remain to reward the explorer. {91b} I have dwelt at some length on this particular formationthe boulder claybecause it is the most ready to hand; it lies on the surface, in many parts around us, within the ken of the ordinary visitor to Woodhall Spa. It may give an additional interest to his rambles in search of health, to know that he may, at any moment, pick up a boulder which has travelled further, and passed through more strange vicissitudes, than he can well have done himself; perhaps, with Shakespeare, to read Sermons in Stones, and to moralise on the brevity of human life, with all its ailments, compared with those ages untold, through which the pebble in his hand slowly {91c} travelled on its long, laborious journey, to rest at length as a constituent element of the locality, where he himself is seeking relief and recreation.

To the west of Woodhall Spa, beyond the Stixwould-road, near the vicarage, and northward, the surface sand, in some parts, at the depth of a foot, or slightly more, hardens into an ironstone, so compact that tree roots cannot penetrate it. In root-pruning or manuring apple-trees, I have found the tap-root stunted into a large round knob, further downward growth being prevented by this indurated formation. This oxide of iron also pervades the sandy soil, in parts, to a depth of four or five feet, impregnating the water with ferruginous properties, so that it ferrs bottles, or vessels, in which it is allowed to stand for any length of time. In consequence, the water frequently has a dull appearance, although the iron may probably make it a wholesome tonic.

The surface sand, which is of a still lighter character on the moor ground in Woodhall, and in Martin, Roughton, and Kirkby, contiguous to Woodhall, is what is technically called the Old Blown Sand, borne by the winds from the whilom salt marshflats of the Witham, when it was much wider than at present, and a tidal arm of the sea. It is comparatively a recent formation, yet abounding in fine particles, or pebbles, of quartz, and other elements of far earlier date; the larger of these are often rounded by tidal action. Below this surface sand we find, in many parts, a blue clay of varying depth. In a pit called Jordans pond, in an abandoned brickyard on the east of the road to Stixwould, it is at least 16ft. thick; also, in a large pit in Kirkstead, near Hogwood, some half-mile south-east of the Abbey Inn, which was dug to procure this clay, for claying the light super-soil, otherwise almost barren, it is many feet thick. Ammonites and other fossils are plentiful in it, often cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of The country around Lincoln. Close by the latter pit the writer once found a curious fossil, which was for some time a puzzle to all who saw it. It is now in the British Museum, and was pronounced to be an Echinus crashed into an Ammonite.

The Kimeridge clay, named as the next stratum in the bore of the Woodhall well, crops up first about Halstead Hall in Stixwould, and continues through Woodhall to Horncastle, and so on to Wragby and Market Rasen. It abounds in fossils. Mr. Skertchly {92} found in the first of the pits just named, that this clay was divided into three layers, the upper being a line of Septaria (or nodules) full of serpulæ one foot in depth, then soft dark-blue clay, 6ft.; and below that another course of Septaria; and Professor J. R. Blake records from this pit the following fossils{93a}:Belemnites nitidus, Ammonites serratus, Rissoa mosensis, Avicula ædiligensis, Cyprina cyreneformis, Ostrea deltoides, Lima ædilignensis, Thracia depressa, Arca, Serpula tetragona. In other pits in the neighbourhood several other fossils have been found. {93b} [For a list of fossils found about Woodhall see Appendix II.] A peculiarity of this stratum is that the upper part of it contains bands of inflammable shales, being blue, laminated, bituminous clays, which burn readily. It was the presence of these which has tempted explorers to throw away their money in search of coal; as in the case at Donington on-Bain, where Mr. Bogg drove a bore to the depth of 309ft., but only found clay and thin bands of inflammable schist. {93c} In the case of Woodhall Spa, the money thrown away on one purpose has brought health and wealth to others, from a source then undreamt of in mans philosophy. We cannot leave the Kimeridge clay without noting that its presence at Woodhall, in the position where it is, as the first geological formation below the surface drift, opens to us a vistareveals to us a yawning hiatuswhich embraces a vast expanse of time.

In the normal order of geological strata, the whole series of cretaceous formations have to be passed through before reaching the Oolite formation, of which the Kimeridge clay forms almost the upper layer. But at Woodhall and the surrounding district the whole of this series of rocks and soils is wanting. Their absence is eloquent, and tells a tale of widespread destruction. Standing near the Tower on the Moor we can see in the distance, stretching from north-west to south east, the range of hills called the Wolds, which, with a cap of marls, or sandy and flinty loams, are composed almost entirely of chalk; from them, near Cawkwell Hill (the hill par excellence of chalk), comes the water supply of Horncastle and Woodhall. They extend for a length of some 45 miles, with a width of some six miles to eight. The actual depth of the chalk is not exactly known, but a boring made through it, near Hull, reached the Oolite beneath at 530ft. We may perhaps, therefore, put the average at 500ft. {94a} Doubtless, at one period, this cretaceous formation extended over the whole tract of country, but southward and westward from the foot of the present wolds it has since been swept away. And this must have taken place before the glacial period, because the glacial boulder clay lies upon the Kimeridge clay, which normally underlies the chalk. Mr. Jukes Brown (Geological Journal, No. 162, p. 117) says: The Boulder clay is bedded against the slope of the chalk, shewing that this escarpment had retired to its present position in pre-glacial times. By what precise process this was effected must be left to our savants to decide; but the remarkable fact remains, that a solid stratum, or rather series of allied strata, from 500ft. to 1,000ft. in thickness, has, by one process or another, been wiped out of existence, over the large area now coated by the Kimeridge clay. Through ages of enormous length the chalk was forming as the bed of a sea; a deposit consisting of inconceivable myriads of beautiful minute shells, mainly of the foraminifera, which can be detected by the microscope; and its destruction probably occupied as long a period as its formation.