14
A Country Walk in Spring Time.
The day began with a light persistant rain but by mid-day
it had ceased, leaving the air warm and clean with a hint of
sunshine behind the low clouds. The small timber clad cottages
at the bend of the road slept peacefully by the newly planted
horse chestnut; the weeping willow with its fresh green shoots
softened the scene still further.
We left the road taking a wide path which followed the
way indicated by a finger post bearing the words "cart track",
although we judged the wheel ruts more likely to be those of
tractors than carts, and the horse shoe prints at the side of
the path spoke of riders on ponies rather than heavy farm horses,
The track soon became a morass of mud with the yellow clay
clinging tenaciously to our boots. As we skirted along its
edge we spotted an old stone sink lying in the hedge, banished
perhaps from a cottage kitchen to the fields for watering live-
stock and now discarded once more to become buried in brambles.
Grossing from one side of the track to the other in an
attempt to find some drier ground we noticed that we were not
the first travellers to come this way, for there in the deep
mud was a single deer print pointing to a gap in the hedge
and the field of young corn beyond. We followed over the
shallow ditch and up the bank to be rewarded with more tracks
and spoor. Finding it much drier along the field's edge we
continued on this route, and so had the deer, the evidence of
their passage appeared in profusion every few yards.
Our next discovery was a mass of primroses growing midst
the bushes surrounding the ditch. As well as the yellow clumps
was one of light purple flowers so that at first we wondered
if they were a garden escape and indeed the area of bushes here
spread into a wide triangle suggesting an overgrown cottage
garden, but we could find no traces of a former building on the
ploughed field. We soon spotted more clumps of the yellow
primroses and decided they must be growing wild after all.
The field ended at a wood, the cart track was still as
impassable as before so, ignoring the loud reports of shot guns,
we continued along the drier ground amongst the trees.
Immediately we became aware of the bird song all around. Neither
of us can recognise many birds from their voices and it was
tantalising to hear them but be able to spot so few. There was
a great tit cheeping energetically with other tits joining in
the chorus. A wren gave us the pleasure of its urgent burst
of pure delight, the loud song as always so surprising from