The Scots-fir is an interloper in the New Forest, and always looks out of place; it was introduced as an experiment I believe, less than 150 years ago, and has been found useful as I have explained for sheltering young plantations of oaks.  It grows rapidly, and has been planted by itself on land too poor for more valuable timber, chiefly for pit-props.  During the war immense numbers of Canadians and Portuguese have been employed in felling these trees and cutting them up into stakes for wire entanglements, trench timbers, and sleepers for light railways.  Huge temporary villages have grown up for the accommodation of the men employed, equipped with steam sawing-tackle, canteens, offices and quarters, and with light railways running far away into the plantations where the trees are cut.  It was a wonderful sight to see these busy centres alive with men and machinery, in places where before there was nothing but the silence of the woods.  And it is curious that, as in the old days the New Forest provided the oak timber for the battleships that fought upon the sea in Nelson’s time, so now, in the fighting on land, we have been able to export from the same place hundreds of thousands of tons of fir for the use of our troops in France and Belgium.

Old railway sleepers are exceedingly useful for many purposes on farms, and as they are soaked in creosote, they last many years, for light bridges and rough shelters, after they are worn out for railway purposes.  The railway company adjoining my land discarded a quantity of these partly defective sleepers, and left them, for a time, lying beside the hedge which separated the line from my fields.  I applied to the Company for some, and suggested that they need only be put over the hedge, and I would cart them away.  But that is not the routine of the working of such matters; though it appeals to the simple rustic mind, it would be considered “irregular.”  They had to be loaded on trucks sent specially on the railway, taken to Worcester sixteen miles by train, unloaded, sorted, loaded again, sent back to my station, unloaded, loaded again on to my waggons, and carted a mile and a half on the waggons which had been sent empty the same distance to the station!

Overgrown old hedges are exceedingly pretty in autumn when hung with clusters of “haws,” the brilliant berries of the hawthorn, and the “hips” of the wild rose.  There is, too, the peculiar pink-hued berry of the spindle wood, and, in chalky and limestone districts, the “old man’s beard” of the wild clematis, bright fresh hazel nuts, and golden wreaths of wild hops.  It is said that

     “Hops, reformation, bays and beer
     Came into England all in a year.”

But it is certain that the wild hops at any rate must have been indigenous, for one finds them in neighbourhoods far from districts where hops are cultivated, and the couplet probably refers to the Flemish variety, which would be the sort imported in the days of Henry VIII., though at the present time our best varieties are far superior.