What was Ancient Britain?--Marshes and bittern--Oak forest--Pines--Savage country--Cornfield--Fire--Ice--Forest--Worms--Paleolithic family--The first farmers--Alfred the Great's first Government agricultural leaflet--Dr. Johnson--Prince Charlie's time--Misery of our forefathers--Oatmeal, milk, and cabbages--Patrick Miller--Tennyson's _Northern Farmer_--Flourishing days of 1830 to 1870--Derelict farmhouses and abandoned crofts--Where have the people gone?--Will they come back? When the eyes of man first beheld Britain, what sort of country was this of ours? It is very interesting to try to imagine what it was like, but of course it is a very difficult task. Still it is worth the attempt, for we ought to know something of what has been done by our forefathers. Where the great rivers Thames, Humber, Tyne, Forth, Clyde, Mersey, and Severn, approached the seashore they lost themselves in wildernesses of desolate, dreary fenlands. Here a small scrubby wood of willow, birch, and alder; there a miles-wide stretch of reeds and undrained marsh intersected by sluggish, lazy rivers, or varied by stagnant pools. The bittern boomed in those marshes. Herons, geese, swans, ducks, and aquatic birds of all sorts found what is now Chelsea a paradise, only disturbed by the eagle, harrier-hawk, vulture, and the like. Neither at the mouth nor even much higher up in its valley-course, was a river a steady stream in a defined bed. Such beds as it had were probably four or five times their present width; they would be quite irregular, meandering about, changing at every flood, full of islands, loops, backwaters, and continually interrupted by snags of trees. The rolling hills of the lowlands would be an almost unbroken forest of oak, except where perhaps level land and the absence of drainage produced a marsh or horrible peat-moss. But when we say forest, we do not mean a glorified Richmond Park. In good soil there might indeed be tall and magnificent trees. But it would be quite impossible to see them! The giants of the forest would be concealed in an inextricable tangle of young trees, brushwood, fallen logs, creepers, and undergrowth. Where the soil was sandy or stony, it might be a scrub rather than a forest, of gnarled, twisted, and stunted oaks, or possibly thickets of sloe, birch, rowan, hawthorn, brambles, and briers.