The Natural History of Selborne

Some few grapes just eatable: a large crop.  Housed all the billet wood.  Leaves fall in showers.  A curlew is heard loudly whistling on the hill towards the Wadden. On this day Mrs S. Barker was brought to bed of a boy, who advances my nepotes to the round & compleat number of 60.

Hired two old labourers to house my cleft billet wood, which is still in a dam, cold condition, & should have been under cover some months ago, had the weather permitted.

Dr Bingham & family left Selborne.

Made presents of berberries to several neighbours.  Ring-ouzel seen in the King’s field.

Gathered in the dearling apples: fruit small, & stunted.

Dr Chandler mows the church-litton closes for hay.  Farmer Parsons houses pease, which have been hacked for weeks.  Barley abroad.

Master Hale houses barley that looks like old thatch.  Much barley about the country, & some wheat.  Some pheasants found in the manour.  The sound of great guns was heard distinctly this day to the S.E. probably from Goodwood, where the Duke of Richmond has a detachment from the train of artillery encamped in his park, that he may try experiments with some of the ordnance.

The crop of stoneless berberries is prodigious!  Among the many sorts of people that are injured by this very wet summer, the peat-cutters are great sufferers:  for they have not disposed of half the peat & turf which they ave prepared; & the poor have lost their season for laying in their forest fuel.  The brick-burner can get no dry heath to burn his lime, & bricks: nor can I house my cleft wood, which lies drenched in wet.  The brick-burner could never get his last makings of tiles & bricks dry enough for burning the autumn thro’ so they must be destroyed, & worked up again.  He had paid duty for them; but is, I understand, to be reimbursed.

Many Hirundines: several very young swallows on the thatch of the cottage near the pound.  The evening is uncommonly dark.

Hirundines swarm around the Plestor, & up & down the street.