2-970-100 - /Heritage Images

Sharpham, on the Dart, Devon - the Largest Rookery in England, 1856. Bird-shooting in the English countryside: '...the river, owing to its surpentine eccentricities, presents the appearance of ten distinct lakes. The woods of Sharpham slope down to the water's edge, and dip their boughs reverentially into the tide, which, in its daily rise and fall of seven or eight feet, leaves on them the blighting salt-water mark of this involuntarily immersion. One side of the river is crowned with thick woods of beech and ash, where rooks have had their hereditary abodes times out of mind, and formed a colony as large as, if not larger than, the most celebrated rookeries in Essex and Kent..., the rooks' hour is come, and amid an endless fusilade of every species of artillery, from the delicate Minie to the ancient blunderbuss, family after family of squab rooks are picked off, and come to the ground...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.