It is still debated whether most or little of the downland was once covered with trees. Those recently planted on very high places have often failed to make more than a spindly and ruinous growth, as at Chanctonbury Ring, Liddington Hill, and Barbury. But wherever there is a tertiary deposit beech and oak, not to speak of lesser trees, abound and even flourish in great size and noble forms. Gorse, hawthorn, and elder rapidly take possession anywhere of neglected ground, and make an impenetrable scrub. Yews expand and beeches grow tall and close on steep and almost precipitous slopes where the chalk is easily bared by rain, traffic, or rabbits. There is thus some reason for thinking that the open downland is largely the product of cultivation and nibbling flocks.
The flocks no longer feed much on the hills, and, except when folded in squares of turnips or mustard, are seldom seen there. They have become more and more a kind of living machinery for turning vegetables into mutton, and only in their lambhood or motherhood are they obviously of a different tribe from sausage-machines, etc. In time, with the discovery of a way of concentrating food and sunlight and of adapting the organs of the sheep to these essences, it will be possible to dine carnivorously on Sunday upon what was grass on Friday; but “for ever climbing up the climbing wave,” men shall sigh for lambs born filleted with a double portion of sweetbreads.
From Uffington Castle the road descended slowly, and reached six hundred feet at the Wiltshire border, a third of a mile past the road from Idstone to Ashdown. Then gradually it rose towards a point much above seven hundred feet between two distinct breasts of down south-westward. In places it had a good hedge of thorn, maple, and brier on one side, at others only isolated little thickets of thorn, brier, and black bryony, or groups where the last May-blossom met the first guelder roses. Once at a corner before Ridgeway Farm five beeches stood together making a shadow. The highest point showed me the beeches of Liddington clump, each stem distinct, the fall of clear turf down to the plain, and beyond that the Barbury clump and the long down wall bending to Avebury.