THE
ESSEX NATURALIST:
BEING THE
Journal of the Essex Field Club
FOR 1895.
THE EASTERN BOUNDARY STONES OF THE
FOREST OF WALTHAM.
By RAPHAEL MELDOLA, F.R.S., Pres. Ent. Soc., Permanent V.P. Essex
Field Club.
IN the spring of 1894, the Rev. S. Coode Hore, Curate of Nave-
stock, called my attention to a stone, rather like a milestone in
appearance, standing in a corner of a piece of open land, marked in
the maps as Curtis Mill Green (see Fig. 1).1 As the stone was
remote from any public road, and did not correspond in position
with any parish or other boundary, it occurred to me that it might
be one of the boundary stones of the Forest of Waltham referred to
in the Perambulation of the reign of Charles I. At the time of
our first visit we had with us only the one-inch maps, old
and new, and as the stone was not entered in these we had no
means of checking my suggestion, since no inscription of any kind
could be detected on the stone in the light in which we viewed it.
A subsequent inspection of Carey's "Map of the Country Fifteen
Miles round London" (1786), showed, however, that my surmise
was correct, and that we had discovered the stone referred to as
"Richard's Stone" in the Perambulation, and entered as such in
Carey's map. As I was not prepared for the possibility of any of
these stones being still in existence, the discovery gave an impetus
1 The five pictures of the stones are reproduced from drawings made on the spot in June,
1894, by Mr. H. A., Cole, who has presented them to the Club, and we are indebted to Pro).
Meldola for defraying the cost of the process-etching.—Ed.
A