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of our surroundings. Lichens are widely recognised to be indicators of pollution levels,
many other life forms are also known to be indicative of deteriorating conditions, as with
the increasing fragility of raptorial birds' eggs and the resultant decline in a species
numbers through the uptake in the foodchain of farm poisons such as polychlorinated
hydrocarbons and biphenyls.
Can we afford to lose AN Y species? We have a duty to conserve life and the species the
world contains, to hand on to future generations, the world we ourselves inherited and
which we hold in trust for future generations. They will not thank us for a sterile world
depleted to only a few species useful for food.
This is not to say that there must be no attempt to control vectors of disease, malarial
mosquitoes, ticks carrying scrub typhus, black rats carrying plague, are examples, but we
should be more aware of the consequences of our actions, and very careful before we
exterminate a species. The natural world is the basis for life itself, the environment on
which we too, depend.
Reference also to the N.C.C. leaflet "Why conserve wildlife?"
PROSPECTING FOR PLEISTOCENE MACRO-MAMMALIAN REMAINS
AT WALTON-ON-THE-NAZE, ESSEX IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Introduction
Large fossilised mammal bones have been collected from Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex for
more than 750 years. The majority of these bones were collected in the period 1800-
1850. This short note reviews some of the manuscript and published accounts and details
some recent finds which confirm the source of much of this material.
History of Collecting
1) Pre 1800. The chronicler Ralph, who was Abbot of Coggeshall, 1207-18 wrote "In
the time of King Richard, on the sea-shore, in a village called Edulfinesses [Walton] were
found two teeth of a giant, of such prodigious bigness, that two hundred of such teeth
might be cut out of one of them. These I saw at Cogshal, and handled with great
admiration". William Camden (1695 p. 351) also refers to bones of giants being found at
Walton at the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603).
2) 1800-1820s. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1803 (part II p. 1075) is an account
of the discoveiy, following the collapse of part of the cliff, of an enormous animal which
measured 30 feet. Some of the individual bones were up to 6 or 7 feet in length. Mr.
J.Jackson of Colchester removed one tooth which weighed 7 pounds, was of square form
and had several zigzag rows of laminae. John Hanson of Great Bromley Hall wrote his
memoirs for the period 1768-1822; part of these have been published (Brown 1972 pp.
59-60). He recollected in a note, sandwiched between 1805 and 1806, picnics to the
shore at Walton where "at extreme low water of the spring tide, after a violent storm had
washed away the sand and shingle, a great collection of antediluvian remains of animals
of immense size and the tusks and teeth if the elephant and rhinoceros, of the horns and
heads of deer of extraordinary dimensions embedded in one mass of the lower soil" were
discovered. He added that due to the fragility of the bones and submergence by the tide
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 20, February 1997