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C. J. Cornish - The Naturalist on the Thames
and falling in the basin, set round with liverwort and moss, and watering a bed of teazles in the wood
below. Children drink from it, and pluck wild strawberries by its banks, and the pheasant and the fox
come there to quench their thirst. An unexpected but not uncommon site of such springs is close to the
margin of streams, which themselves are fed, not mainly by springs, but from the surface waters. [2]
Wherever high ground slopes down to a stream, and ends in a rising bank at some distance from the
river, there a true spring often rises, with an existence wholly apart from that of the river close by, into
which its surplus of waters flows. Such springs have their special flora, their own "phenomena," and their
own little set of effects on their liliput landscape. In the centre the waters well up, absolutely pure, and
only discoloured when a more impatient earth-throb drives up a column of cloudy sand or earth. The
spreading circles broaden outwards, and make their little marsh, planted with water-grass and
forget-me-nots and blue bog-bean, and in the spring with butterburs. Outside, on the firmer but still moist
soil the creeping jenny mats the ground; and the succulent grasses which attract the cattle to tread the
marsh into a muddy paste. At the foot of the larger chalk downs the springs sometimes break out in
different fashion, a modest imitation of classical fountains. The chalky soil breaks down, and from its
sides the water often spouts in jets, as may be seen in Betterton glen, above Lockinge House, and in
many other heads of the chalk brooks.
Springs of this kind are the natural outflowing of the water-bearing strata, where they lie upon others not
pervious. But the upflowing springs are often fed by the accumulations of a great area of country, coming
to the surface like water from the orifice of a syphon, and flowing permanently neither in greater nor less
volume with constant force. If these cease to run the inference is that the old conditions are seriously
disturbed. This has happened so frequently of late that local authorities would do well to schedule lists of
the larger springs and request the owners or occupiers of the land to inform them from time to time
whether there is a decrease in the flow. Stored water is almost as valuable as earth in a cycle of deficient
rainfall, and the loss of any of our fountains and springs is a local misfortune not easily remedied.
[1] "Well deckings" are still common festivals in the North. Quite lately a Scotch loch was dragged with
nets to catch a kelpie, and the bottom sowed with lime. The Church early forbade well worship.
[2] There is one such just above Marston Ferry, near Oxford, on the Cherwell, and two in a field below
Ardington, near Lockinge.
BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES
On September 16, 1896, after a period of very stormy wet weather, I saw a great migration of swallows
down the Thames. It was a dark, dripping evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered
with wet leaf. Between five and six o'clock immense flights of swallows and martins suddenly appeared
above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with
them, and their numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds, twisting round
like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept sweeping just over the tops of the willows, skimming so
thickly that the sky-line was almost blotted out for the height of from three to four feet. The quarter from
which these armies of swallows came was at first undiscoverable. They might have been hatched, like
gnats, from the river.
In time I discovered whence they came. They were literally "dropping from the sky." The flocks were
travelling at a height at which they were quite invisible in the cloudy air, and from minute to minute they
kept dropping down into sight, and so perpendicularly to the very surface of the river or of the eyot. One
of these flocks dropped from the invisible regions to the lawn on the river bank on which I stood.
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