SPORT AT WITTENHAM (_continued_)


A month later Mr. Harcourt was shooting his woods at Nuneham. There are
more than four hundred acres of woods round this most beautiful park, all
of them giving ideal English estate scenery. The oaks of the park are like
those at Richmond, but there is not much fern except in the covers.
Nuneham is the best natural pheasant preserve in the Thames Valley, except
Wytham, Lord Abingdon's place, above Oxford. The woods lie roughly in a
ring round the park, in which the pheasants sun themselves. Outside these
woods are arable fields with quantities of feed, and all along the front
lies the river, which the pheasants do not often cross. The most striking
sport at Nuneham is the driving of the island by the lock cottage. Every
one who has been at Oxford has rowed down to have tea under the lovely
hanging woods by the old lock. Few see it later in the year when the
island opposite is covered with masses of silver-white clematis and
thousands of red berries of the wild rose and thorn. In the late autumn
mornings, when the mists are floating among the tall trees on the hill and
the sunbeams just striking down through the vapours as they top the wood
from the east, it is one of the prettiest sights on the Thames. In
November or early December, when the woods are shot, numbers of pheasants
are always found on the island. It holds a pool, in which and on the river
are usually a number of wild ducks. Shooting from the river itself is now
forbidden, and these and the half-wild duck have multiplied. The beaters,
in white smocks, all cross the old rustic bridge like a procession of
white-robed monks, and drive this island, and wild ducks and pheasants
come out high over the river, making for the top of the hill. The shooting
is fast and difficult, and the scene as the guns fire from the stations
all along the bank is most picturesque.