miles, from which you may get a view over thirty miles, with the rocky heights of Dartmoor Forest, where the autumn manoeuvres take place this year, on the one hand, and the Haldon Hills on the other.  This ancient heritage is still the property of the Cliffords, the present peer being eighth baron in direct descent from the lord treasurer.  The Cliffords have always remained constant to the Roman Catholic faith, and a Catholic chapel adjoins the mansion.

A discriminating foreign tourist writes of Lord Hill’s park, Hawkstone, in Shropshire, which, also lying rather off the beaten track, is comparatively little known:  “I must in some respects give Hawkstone the preference over all I have seen.  It is not art nor magnificence nor aristocratic splendor, but Nature alone to which it is indebted for this pre-eminence, and in such a degree that were I gifted with the power of adding to its beauty, I should ask, What can I add?  Imagine a spot so commandingly placed that from its highest point you can let your eye wander over fifteen counties.  Three sides of this wide panorama rise and fall in constant change of hill and dale like the waves of an agitated sea, and are bounded at the horizon by the strangely formed, jagged outline of the Welsh mountains, which at either end descend to a fertile plain shaded by thousands of lofty trees, and in the obscure distance, where it blends with the sky, is edged with a white misty line—­the Atlantic Ocean.”

Moor Park, in Hertfordshire, is remarkable for the following tradition concerning it:  In Charles II.’s reign it was bought by the duke of Monmouth, whose widow—­she who

  In pride of youth, in beauty’s bloom,
  Had wept o’er Monmouth’s bloody tomb—­

is said to have ordered the heads of the trees in the park to be cut off on being informed of her husband’s execution.  This tradition is strengthened by the condition of many of the oaks here, which are decayed from the top.  The duchess sold the place in 1720, thirty-five years after the duke’s death.  This is the Moor Park of apricot fame, but not the one where Sir William Temple lived when Swift was his secretary.

Most of the oldest and finest trees in England are naturally to be found in the deer-parks.  At Woburn, the duke of Bedford’s, is the largest ash—­ninety feet high and twenty-three feet six inches in circumference at the base.  The Abbot’s Oak, on which the last abbot was hung, stands, or lately stood, here.  It is remarkable that oaks are more often struck by lightning than any other trees.  At Tortworth, Lord Ducie’s, in Gloucestershire, is a chestnut asserted to have been a boundary tree in the time of King John.  So late as 1788 it produced great quantities of chestnuts.  At five feet from the ground this tree measured fifty feet in circumference.

The lover of fine trees should wander through the glades of Lord Leigh’s park at Stoneleigh, in Warwickshire, where tall and shapely oaks grow with such symmetry that you do not guess their size, and are surprised to discover on measuring them how great it is.