"Richard Jefferies - After London" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jefferies Richard)

Footpaths were concealed by the second year, but roads could be traced, though as green as the sward,
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and were still the best for walking, because the tangled wheat and weeds, and, in the meadows, the long
grass, caught the feet of those who tried to pass through. Year by year the original crops of wheat,
barley, oats, and beans asserted their presence by shooting up, but in gradually diminished force, as
nettles and coarser plants, such as the wild parsnips, spread out into the fields from the ditches and
choked them.

Aquatic grasses from the furrows and water-carriers extended in the meadows, and, with the rushes,
helped to destroy or take the place of the former sweet herbage. Meanwhile, the brambles, which grew
very fast, had pushed forward their prickly runners farther and farther from the hedges till they had now
reached ten or fifteen yards. The briars had followed, and the hedges had widened to three or four times
their first breadth, the fields being equally contracted. Starting from all sides at once, these brambles and
briars in the course of about twenty years met in the centre of the largest fields.

Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals,
the suckers of elm-trees rose and flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted
their heads. Of old time the cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves with the grass so soon as they
were out of the ground, but now most of the acorns that were dropped by birds, and the keys that were
wafted by the wind, twirling as they floated, took root and grew into trees. By this time the brambles and
briars had choked up and blocked the former roads, which were as impassable as the fields.

No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings
already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the
country into an immense forest. Where the ground was naturally moist, and the drains had become
choked with willow roots, which, when confined in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox,
sedges and flags and rushes covered it. Thorn bushes were there, too, but not so tall; they were hung
with lichen. Besides the flags and reeds, vast quantities of the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or
six feet high, and the willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled every approach.

By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could
walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had
long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down
them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been
fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.

As no care was taken with the brooks, the hatches upon them gradually rotted, and the force of the
winter rains carried away the weak timbers, flooding the lower grounds, which became swamps of larger
size. The dams, too, were drilled by water-rats, and the streams percolating through slowly increased the
size of these tunnels till the structure burst, and the current swept on and added to the floods below.
Mill-dams stood longer, but, as the ponds silted up, the current flowed round and even through the
mill-houses, which, going by degrees to ruin, were in some cases undermined till they fell.

Everywhere the lower lands adjacent to the streams had become marshes, some of them extending for
miles in a winding line, and occasionally spreading out to a mile in breadth. This was particularly the case
where brooks and streams of some volume joined the rivers, which were also blocked and obstructed in