NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
243
White-tailed Eagle in Essex.—Two observers record (in British Birds,
xix., March, 1926) the occurrence of an immature White-tailed Eagle
(Haliaeetus albicilla) in some large woods in North Essex during January
and February of this year (1926); the bird was repeatedly seen by many
observers, and it is gratifying to know that it was strictly protected by
local landowners. A pellet from this eagle has been kindly presented to
the Stratford Museum by Mr. J. H. Owen, of Felsted. Editor.
Epping Forest..—There are those to whom the most princely pleasure
ground of London is an unknown land ; for between London and the Forest
lies all the unlovely barrier of the East End and the wilderness of bricks
and mortar which is for ever thrusting out further northward and eastward
from the City. Some day, it may be that the increasing difficulty of the
traffic problem will compel the construction of great elevated east and
west speedways from the heart of the "great wen" out to the open
country; and the run—it is only a dozen miles or so—will be so pleasant
that Epping will become familiar to all. It is worth knowing.
Did not Dickens consider Chingford1 "the greatest place in the world"?
To the scenery of the Forest we owe the inspiration of "Locksley Hall"
and "The Talking Oak," and much of "In Memoriam." Whether or
not Queen Elizabeth used, as legend declares, to make a practice of
riding her horse up the great staircase of her Hunting Lodge here—
converted now to a museum—it is, at least, a fine specimen of a Tudor
House. Somewhere hereabouts, perhaps in the immediate neighbour-
hood of Ambresbury Banks, tradition has it that Boadicea suffered her
great defeat at the hands of Suetonius, when, in the comprehensive
mathematics peculiar to these old wars, it is said that 80,000 Britons
lost their lives.
That the Banks are the outer defences of an old British fortified settle-
ment is certain; and, in hot weather such as we have had recently, there
could hardly be a pleasanter place in which to idle away an afternoon.
Though the main Epping road runs by within a hundred yards, you are
likely, on any day that is not a holiday, to have the old camp to yourself,
to be able to wander at will about the fortifications, still formidable
enough in parts, after all their centuries of weathering, or to lie and dream
beneath the great trees, beech and hornbeam, grotesque in shape, most
of them, and many-fingered from much pollarding. For the right to
lop was, from time immemorial, one of the privileges of the dwellers in
the Forest area; and they have evidently used it freely.
There are plenty of noble trees in the forest which are untouched ; oaks
and beeches, hornbeam, silver birch and hollies of exceptional growth;
but nowhere in the world, perhaps, can one see on such a scale the effect
en great trees of ancient pollarding; giant beeches splitting into eight
or ten huge limbs which rise radiating like the spokes of a gargantuan
umbrella, making enormous carapaces of green shade, and hornbearhs,
probably hundreds of years old, whose branches writhe and twist, while
the trees, in their agony, have sent up from their roots new shoots, grown
to massive trunks, to join the main growth higher up.
Famous individual trees there are, such as the oak planted by Queen
Victoria, at the opening of the Forest to the public, at High Beach, and
1 A slip for Chigwell.—Ed.