Great walk! Can`t recommend it enough. Has to be worth 9/10 on the Deacy satisfaction scale.
See the map here.
Unfortunately – there are no pix (apart from this one) as the AA`s on the digi expired and I hadn`t done the boy scout thing. Pity really – there were some excellent views on the way.
The main place of interest (apart from the cavorting rabbits and foxes) was Selborne – a pleasant village with a great church and churchyard. But Selborne is best known for its association with Gilbert White, the naturalist
Information from the BBC web
What do you mean, you have never heard of Gilbert White? He was alive between 1720 and 1793 and was a modest bachelor who served as an Anglican priest in the parish of Selborne in Hampshire. In his lifetime he never achieved fame but he has since been proclaimed as “the father of field ornithology.” Why? He had two great talents: observational skills and a flair for writing. He recorded what he saw in words that were both charming and accurate.
From childhood he was a meticulous record keeper and his interests embraced all aspects of natural history and country life. Just as his words were to influence others, he was first smitten in 1768 by a copy of The Naturalist’s Journal, a publication for recording the daily progress of the seasons and the associated changes in the countryside’s plants, birds and animals. White began a lengthy correspondence with the book’s author, Daines Barrington, and did the same with the zoologist Thomas Pennant.
Encouraged by the pair, he was stirred to write a book. However, his approach was individual and unique. Rather than a treatise or an academic tome, he decided to compose letters on any subject that took his fancy. The content would be first-hand factual information but, writing in letter form, he would be free to indulge in narrative and speculation. This intimacy and informality marked the book, the Natural History of Selborne, for greatness.
White, who worked slowly and lived an unhurried life, took twenty years to complete the work. Initially it received minimal but positive notice. It was not until after his death that it truly gained renown becoming, to this day, the fourth most published book in the English language.
White’s perceptive powers led him to make a string of original discoveries. He noted the importance of song and territory among birds, and was the first to distinguish three species of ‘willow wren’: comprising wood warbler, willow warbler and chiffchaff. In reality he was the first to understand the importance of learning bird songs as a way of telling one species from another. He wrote, “I have now, past dispute, made out three distinct species of the willow wrens which constantly and invariably use distinct notes.”
As we know today, plumage features can also tell all three apart: so why did White not notice these? He had no binoculars and was alive in an era when plumage detail was studied on dead birds, not in the field. His hearing was probably of more benefit in identifying birds than his eyesight.
He was a “little, thin, upright man”, who, by his own admission, had stumpy legs. However, he was active and, at least in his early years, travelled widely on horseback; so much so that he was nicknamed the “hussar-parson”.
On his travels he determined that the cryptic plumage pattern of stone curlews was to disguise the birds by blending them with the background. Hence he stumbled upon birds’ use of protective coloration as camouflage. He traced the lineage of the domestic pigeon to the rock dove, and deduced that the ring ouzel was a bird of passage in southern England, rightly believing them to be of Scandinavian origin. Viewed from a modern perspective, this conclusion ought to have pointed him towards the phenomenon of migration as a means of explaining the seasonal changes in bird species. Yet this was a concept White struggled with all his life. He was prepared to admit that, at the end of the breeding season, some summer visitors left England for destinations unknown.
However, the winter whereabouts of swallows and martins posed a particular problem. Unlike other summer visitors, they remained well into autumn and could be met with in diminishing numbers until November. Were they really disappearing overseas or, as popular opinion held, retreating into holes in chimneys, riverbanks and among dense vegetation to hibernate until spring? Animals such as hedgehogs and dormice did this: so why not swallows and martins too?
White stuck to this belief despite the fact that his brother John, who was resident in Gibraltar, wrote to tell him about swallows flying through southern Spain at the end of each year. When informed that large numbers of swallows occurred in Senegal each winter he felt that they might be an equivalent African species and not wintering birds from Britain and Europe. Nevertheless, the question continued to perplex him. In September 1774 he wrote “House martins came remarkably late this year both in Hampshire and Devonshire: is this circumstance for or against either hiding or migration?”
By October 1771 he seemed reconciled to the conclusion that the birds hibernated and cited the following observation as grounds for his belief: “Having taking notice, in October 1780, that the last flight of House Martins was numerous, amounting perhaps to one hundred and fifty, and that the season was soft and still, I was resolved to pay uncommon attention to these late birds; to find, if possible, where they roosted, and to determine the precise time of their return. I took care to wait on them before they retired to rest among the low shrubs above the cottages at the end of the hill. This spot in many respects seems to be well calculated for their winter residence: and so, far from withdrawing to warmer climes, it would appear that they never depart three hundred yards from the village.”
Gilbert White was a gifted observer, not a revolutionary. He was self-questioning and had a healthy scepticism for the scientific theories of his day. Simply because he stopped short of believing in swallow migration is of little significance. His example of listening, looking and learning justifies his reputation as one of the great naturalists