ing of the roads. But it has a
certain bluntness and gauntness of its own, standing solid and stark in
the plain meadowland of the Wey. Perhaps if one were to "visit it by the
pale moonlight" it would take on darker graces and dignities. As it is,
there is somewhere about it an air of protest; it is like a ghost that
cannot get back before daylight. Horses gallop about the rough field
under its walls; boating parties wonder why it should be thought worth
while to fence it off with wire. Once I caught an echo of the real
Newark, late on a dark and stormy afternoon, when a sudden snipe rose at
my feet out of one of the half-dry Priory stewponds. That wild cry must
have been familiar enough to the old monks wandering by the stream in
search of a likely run for perch or pike.

The "very old castle" which Frank Buckland, the naturalist, mentions in
the following note, taken from his edition of White's _Selborne_, must
surely be Newark Priory, which is now a happy (and I think unmolested)
home of jackdaws:--

[Illustration: _Newark Priory._]

"At Whistley, near Weybridge, the people go in May, when the birds
are about a fortnight old, to the ruins of a very old castle. Men
carry long ladders, and with blunt iron hooks take out the young
jackdaws, and if there are no buyers they throw them to the ground.
Bird dealers take hampers down to Whistley and bring up all the
birds caught, as many as ten dozen of young jackdaws. They cost on
the spot 2s. per dozen. The reason why they are taken is to stop the
increase of jackdaws in the neighbourhood. If the young jackdaws are
taken when about a fortnight old, the old ones will not 'go to nest'
again that season. If the eggs only were taken, the birds would lay
again immediately."

The Canal and the Wey by Newark lie in some of the quietest and wildest
country in Surrey. It is not the wildness of Thursley Common, or the
quiet of the pinewoods; but it is the sunny peace of a waterway almost
deserted, of unploughed, rushy meadows, of waterside paths and thickets
that fill in April and May with a tide of bird life which stays here,
and elsewhere passes or is hardly seen. A May morning on the Wey Canal
rings with singing. You can count scores of cuckoos gliding in the sun
and calling from the budding branches; woodpeckers laugh from oak to
oak; plovers tumble in the wind; herons flap up lazily at a bend in the
stream, and flap lazily down aga