ry fine view of the coast-line on either hand
could be obtained. Best of all, the face of the cliff itself was the
breeding-place of some hundreds of herring-gulls. The eggs at the period
of my visit were not yet hatched, but highly incubated, and at that
stage both parents are almost constantly at home, as if in a state of
anxious suspense. I had seen a good many colonies of this gull before at
various breeding stations on the coast--south, west, and east--but never
in conditions so singularly favourable as at this spot. From the vale
where the Branscombe pours its clear waters through rough masses of
shingle into the sea the ground to the east rises steeply to a height of
nearly five hundred feet; the cliff is thus not nearly so high as many
another, but it has features of peculiar interest. Here, in some former
time, there has been a landslip, a large portion of the cliff at its
highest part falling below and forming a sloping mass a chalky soil
mingled with huge fragments of rock, which lies like a buttress against
the vertical precipice and seems to lend it support. The fall must have
occurred a very long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the
rude slope--hawthorn, furze, and ivy--has an ancient look. Here are huge
masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in their forms ruined
castles, towers, and churches, some of them completely overgrown with
ivy. On this rough slope, under the shelter of the cliff, with the sea
at its feet, the villagers have formed their cultivated patches. The
patches, wildly irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground
as to suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all
fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of rock, deep
fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn and furze bushes.
Altogether the effect was very singular the huge rough mass of jumbled
rock and soil, the ruin wrought by Nature in one of her Cromwellian
moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or
patches of cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel
lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves,
crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the villagers came by a
narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots;
while, overhead, the gulls, careless of their presence, pass and repass
wholly occupied with their own affairs.