Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
The heads of these old pollards are favourite places for birds'-nests, and all kinds of plants and bushes take root in their decaying fibre, the seeds having been carried by the birds; so that ivy, brambles, wild gooseberries, currants, raspberries, nut bushes and elders, can be seen growing there.
"You seem to know them well," I remarked, fearful she would observe the emotion I could not quite keep out of my face. "No," she returned, with an assumption of grimness, which was evidently meant for sarcasm, "not well. Every one knows the Pollards, but I never heard any one say they knew them well." "Didn't Mr. Barrows?"
I had not learned then to honour them on the ground that they yield not a jot to the adversity of their circumstances; that, if they must be pollards, they still will be trees; and what they may not do with grace, they will yet do with bounty; that, in short, their life bursts forth, despite of all that is done to repress and destroy their individuality.
I could not believe it, and stood as if fascinated before this vision, that not only upset every past theory which my restless mind had been able to form of the character and motives of the secret denunciator of the Pollards, but awakened new thoughts and new inquiries of a nature which I vaguely felt to be as mysterious as any which had hitherto engaged my attention.
Church spires and windmills are the most prominent objects in the landscape; but though the flatness of the scenery is monotonous, there is something pleasing to the eye in the endless succession of well-cultivated fields, interrupted at intervals by patches of rough bushland, canals, or slow-moving streams winding between rows of pollards, country houses embowered in woods and pleasure-grounds, cottages with fruitful gardens, orchards, small villages, and compact little towns, in most of which the diligent antiquary will find something of interest a modest belfry, perhaps, with a romance of its own; a parish church, whose foundations were laid long ago in ground dedicated, in the distant past, to the worship of Thor or Woden; or the remains, it may be, of a mediæval castle, from which some worthy knight, whose name is forgotten except in local traditions, rode away to the Crusades.
In 1844 my father married Ellen Elizabeth, only child of John Pollard, M.D., a member of the ancient Yorkshire family of the Pollards of Bierley and Brunton, now chiefly represented, I believe, by the Pollards of Scarr Hall.
The appearance of the vines was that of sapless black stumps, about thirty inches high, and pruned so as to leave only four or five eyes; and though the subject of poverty is too serious to joke on, the withered and stunted appearance of the country people exactly corresponded to that of these dry pollards.
Down in the valley below, the daisies shone in all the meadows, varied with the buttercup and the celandine; while in damp places grew large pimpernels, and along the sides of the river, the meadow-sweet stood amongst the reeds at the very edge of the water, breathing out the odours of dreamful sleep. The clumsy pollards were each one mass of undivided green.
The tall poplars about the Dyke Inn stood out hard and clear in the ruddy light; beyond them the fen, stretched away to the flaming horizon gloomy and flat and desolate, with nothing higher than the stunted pollards visible against the lurid background. Upon the absolute silence of the scene there presently broke the steady humming of a car.
It was great to stand upright here in the pure night air out of sight of man or beast. Smokeless chimney-stacks deleted whole pages of stars, but put me more in mind of pollards rising out of these rigid valleys, and sprouting with telephone wires that interlaced for foliage.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking