The Natural History of Selborne

My tall beech in Sparrow’s hanger, which measured 50 feet to the first fork, & 42 afterwards, is just 6 feet in girth at 2 feet above the ground.  At the back of Burhant house, in an abrupt field which inclines towards nightingale-lane, stand four noble beech-trees on the edge of a steep ravin or water gully the largest of which measures 9 ft. 5. in. at about a yard from the ground.  This ravin runs with a strong torrent in winter from nightingale-lane, but is dry in the summer.  The beeches above are now the finest remaining in the neighbourhood, & carry fine heads.  There is a romantic, perennial spring in this gully, that might be rendered very ornamental was it situated in a gentleman’s outlet.

Martins congregate on the weather-cock, & vane of the may-pole.  The boys brought me their first wasps nest from Kimber’s; it was near as big as a gallon.  When there is no fruit, as is remarkably the case this year, wasps eat flies, & suck the honey from flowers, from ivy blossoms, & umbellated plants: they carry-off also flesh from butcher’s shambles.

Cut 100 cucumbers. Sweet autumnal weather.

Onions rot.  Barley round the village very fine.

Cut 158 cucumbers.  Nep. Ben White, & wife, & little Ben & Glyd came from Fyfield.

Cut 140 cucumbers.  Hops light, & not very good.  Sister Barker & Molly & Betsy left us, & went to London: Charles White also, & Bessy returned to Fyfield.

Two stone-curlews in a fallow near Southington.  A fern-owl flies over my house.

Hardly here and there a wasp to be seen.

Boiled a mess of autumnal spinage, sown Aug. 3rs.  Nep J. White left us, & returned to Sarum.  There is a fine thriving oak near the path as you go to Combwood, just before you arrive at the pond, round which, at about the distance of the extremities of the boughs, may be seen a sort of circle in the grass, in which the herbage appears dry & withered, as if a fariy-ring was beginning.  I remember somewhat of the same appearance at the same place in former years.

Some hop-poles blown donw.  Mr Prowting of Chawton begins to pick hops.