Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/60

34 cool, sweet water when all the other sources have given out. Below this well are several hollows to contain water for the sheep; in one of these hollows I found the rarest but most widely distributed of our newts, the palmated newt. Is this the only batrachian on the island? Bingley was told that there were no toads, frogs, or snakes on Bardsey, and a friend of mine who visited the island made enquiries, and was informed that no "great snakes" occurred, only "little small ones." What these were we neither of us discovered. Frogs, my friend was told, could not live on Bardsey, and Bardsey earth, if taken to the mainland, was fatal to the frogs where it was put down. The man who told him afirmed that he had tried this and that the frogs died. The sacred earth or the curse of the saints has apparently failed to banish all the "reptiles," for this one newt, which also occurs in a pool above St. Mary's Well near Braich-y-pwll, is here, an interesting problem in distribution. High on the mountain at the northern end, where we look out across the ever racing tides to furthest Lleyn, is another well, or rather two. These are the pilgrims' wells, two deep holes in the rock, always filled with not overclean water; in the old days, tradition says, it was here the pilgrims went to wash and shave.

Herring-gulls, in a huge colony, nest along the top of the cliffs on the eastern side of the island; their nests containing eggs or grey-downed young were placed even on the narrow sheep-track which runs between the actual rocks and the slippery slope above. A pair of greater black-backs nest amongst them, and oyster-catchers, by their excitement, proved that they, too, were interested in young. Rock pipits piped anxiously when we invaded the colony, but their notes were drowned by the barks and laughs of the angry gulls. A few carrion crows build on the rocks, and one or two pairs of kestrels; when