The head of this vale does not hold out much promise of beauty, and you feel surprised that any one, were he fifty times a poet, could contrive to make anything readable on such a subject as the dreary uninteresting valley before you. It is indeed a desolate spot, stretching its unrelieved length for two miles from the foot of this hill, with nothing for the eye to exercise itself, or the heart to console itself with, but bare fells, grey crags, screes and boulders, and a stone-vexed rivulet winding its lonely way along the bottom of the dale, but not a sign of life except what may be contained in moss and lichens, with here and there a little fern and grass.
There are many who would persuade you that all these bleak hills and dales were formerly and for centuries covered with dense forests. Mr Wordsworth, in sonnet number two, speaks of âmighty forestsâ having existed hereabout for thousands of years before archery or hunting became fashionable, and Dan Birkett, of whom more anon, declares that formerly a con (vulgarly called a squirrel), could hop from branch to branch all the way from the top of Wrynose to Millom Castle; the same tradition, I may remark, exists in the same form in other localities; for instance, it is averred that the aforesaid little animal, could, in the olden time, accomplish a similar aerial journey from Wythburn to Keswick, and also from Loweswater to the sea at Moresby. But perhaps the best of the sort is the tradition cherished by the descendants of one of the old Border clans, which asserts that some time before âthe good old days of Adam and Eveâ a moss trooper might ride in the shade of trees from the head of Annandale to the Solway, about thirty-five miles, and all upon land belonging to the Hallidays.
Take my word for it, the extent, duration, and number of these old forests are very much exaggerated. Let us take these hill sides as an instance. Where are the vestiges of a thick wood existing here for ages? Burnt, you may say!âYes, but where is the rich loam inevitably produced by copious deposit of decayed vegetable matter on dry situations, or the deep peat-moss that always betokens the former existence of timber in wet localities? Here, to your left, you perceive there has been a small land-slipâexamine the soil exposed, and what do you find? Why, about a single inch of the soil created by vegetable growth and decay, just as much as the poor little mosses can make and no more, and a substratum of the tenacious reddish gravel locally called sammel; but no where do we see anything approaching to the thick superstratum of rich vegetable mould always discovered on the sites of primeval forests. No! no! where you cannot find either loam or peat-moss, be assured there has been at no period, however remote, any considerable covering of wood.