The patches, wildly irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn and furze bushes.
Altogether the effect was very singular the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs.

Here the villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls, careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied with their own affairs.
I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the birds.
I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.

Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and yellow legs and beaks.

While I watched them they watched me; not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock.

Standing motionless thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a cathedral front.