The heads of these old pollards are favourite places for birds’-nests, and all kinds of plants and bushes take root in their decaying fibre, the seeds having been carried by the birds; so that ivy, brambles, wild gooseberries, currants, raspberries, nut bushes and elders, can be seen growing there.  Whenever the foxhounds ran a fox to Aldington he was always lost near the brookside, and it was said that the cunning beast eluded the hounds by mounting a pollard and jumping from one to another, until the scent was dissipated.  It was also a tradition that when hunting began on the Cotswolds the experienced foxes left for the Vale, leaving the less crafty to fight it out with the hounds; for the Evesham district was seldom visited by the hunt, owing to possible damage to the highly cultivated winter crops of the market-gardeners.

Jarge had a very narrow escape when grubbing out an old willow overhanging a pool.  He had been at work some hours, and had a deep trench dug out all round the tree, to attack the roots with a stock-axe.  He had cut them all through except the tough tap-root, when I reached him, and he was standing in the trench at work upon it.  He was certain that it would be some time before the tree fell, the tap-root being very large; but, as I stood watching on the ground above, I thought I saw a suspicious tremor pass over the tree, and an instant later I was certain it was coming down.  I shouted to him to get out of the trench.  It took a second or two to get clear, as the trench was deep, and he was not a tall man, so he was scarcely out when the tree fell with a crash on the exact spot where he had been at work.  Had I not been present it must have fallen upon him, for not expecting the end was so near he had not been watching the signs.  Though not a tall tree, it was a very stout and heavy trunk, and the tap-root on inspection proved to be partly rotten.

       “Forth into the fields I went,
     And Nature’s living motion lent
     The pulse of hope to discontent.

     “I wonder’d at the bounteous hours,
     The slow result of winter showers: 
     You scarce could see the grass for flowers.

     “I wonder’d, while I paced along: 
     The woods were fill’d so full with song,
     There seemed no room for sense of wrong.”

Such is Tennyson’s description of a spring day in the fields and woods, and nothing more beautiful could be written.  And so it was with joy that my men and carter boys with waggons and teams started early on the spring mornings to bring home the newly purchased hop-poles from the distant woods.  These poles are sold by auction in stacks where they are cut, and the buyer has to cart them home.  Usually, after a successful hop year they were in great demand; prices would rise in proportion, and the early seller did well, but when the later sales came sometimes, the demand being satisfied, there would be a heavy fall in values, and as a cunning buyer expressed it, “The poles lasted longer than the money.”