312 The History of Longleat. 
When Mr. Wyatt was erecting the north side of the house, 
which had been for many years in ruins, he found in the present 
kitchen chimney an old flue, containing 100 skeletons of jackdaws, 
and nine of some other bird, supposed to have fallen down the 
chimney, to the depth of sixty feet. I believe that since Sir Jeffrey 
Wyatyille’s time nothing whatever has been done to the house. 
Of the general demesnes it is quite needless to speak. Even 
those who have never seen them before, have to-day, by the owner’s 
liberal permission, a kind of free warren to examine for themselves. 
The beauty of the arboretum in the walk to Horningsham, the 
prospect from “ Heaven’s gate,” and the variety of scenery included 
within a park which measures its distances by milestones; of such 
things the best description is the sight. But the archeology of 
the plantations must not be overlooked. It consists, I believe, in 
sundry venerable oaks that escaped being sawn up into wainscot 
when the house was built; and in a remnant of an original 
“Weymouth Pine,” one of the first trees of that sort, (the New 
England Larch, or white pine, of good quality as timber, but 
disrespectfully called by Mr. Gilpin, “the most formal of its bro- 
therhood,”) naturalized in these woods from North America by 
the first Lord Weymouth, about the year 1705. Its head was 
blown off by a hurricane many years ago, but the rest of this 
curiosity has not yet wholly disappeared. 
I now bring to a conclusion this sketch of the History of the 
House to which we have been so hospitably invited to-day; and in 
doing so, I will venture to use the words of Mr. Repton, speaking 
in 1803, for they happily apply with equal propriety to 1856. 
* This magnificent estate, so far from being locked up to exclude 
mankind from partaking of its scenery, is always open, and visitors 
are allowed freely to amuse themselves; which circumstance tends 
to enliven the scene; to extend a more general knowledge of its 
beauty to strangers; and to mark the liberality of the noble pro- 
prietor, in thus deigning to share with others the good he enjoys.” 
J. EJ. 
