A ewe and her lamb come through the gateway in the castle wall. They share the green slopes with me and browse along together. Overhead the gulls glide and a robber gull chases a jackdaw, who carries a lump of bread or fat in his beak. The gull presses hard upon the smaller bird, and Jack at last, after many a turn and twist, drops his treasure. Whereupon the gull dives downward and catches it in mid-air before it has fallen a dozen yards.
The flora on these crags is interesting, though of little diversity. Familiar grasses there are, with plantain and sheep's sorrel, the silene and cushion pink, the pennywort and blue jasione, the lotus and eye-bright; but unsleeping winds from the west affect them as altitude dwarfs the alpines, and these things, though perfect and healthy and fair to see, are reduced to exquisite miniatures, where they nestle in the crannies of the rocks and flash their pink and white, or blue and gold, against the grey and orange lichens that wash the stones with colour and climb the ruin in the midst.
In sheltered nooks the foxglove nods, but he, too, is dwarfed, yet seems to win a solid splendour of bells and intensity of tint from his environment.
Other castle fragments there are--scattered here and on the neighbour cliff to the east; but they are of small account--no more than the stumps of vanished ramparts and walls. Even so, they stood before any word was printed concerning them, or pictures made. An ancient etching of more than two hundred years old shows that their fragments were then as now, and only doubtful tradition furnishes the historian with any data.
But the castle is perched on a noble crag, whose strata of marble and slate and silver quartz slope from east to west downward until they round into sea-worn bosses and dip under the blue. The story of gigantic upheavals is written here, and the weathered rocks are cleft and serrated and full of wonderful convolutions for dawn and dusk to play upon. Here more wild flowers find foothold, and the wild bird makes her home. The cliffs are crested with samphire, and the white umbels of the carrot; they are brushed with the pale lemon of anthyllis, and the starry whiteness of the campion; they are honeycombed beneath by caverns, where the sea growls on calm days and thunders in time of storm.