124 BIRDS OP NORFOLK. 



western part of the county ; at least such is the only 

 inference to be drawn from the first quotation, if by 

 Norrold is meant Northwold, near Brandon, a parish 

 to this day locally termed Norrold* by labourers and 

 others. I have ascertained that this extract from 

 Wilkin's edition of Sir Thomas Browne's works was 

 faithfully copied from the original MS. in the British 

 Museum, my friend Mr. Hampden Glasspoole having 

 obligingly referred to the passage itself, and furnished 

 me with a fac simile of Sir Thomas' writing, but whilst 

 the spelling of some words is old and quaint, Norrold 

 is written plainly enough, nor is there any place on or 

 near the coast, in this or the adjoining county, at all 

 similar in name to either Norrold or Northwold. 



It is not, however, without precedent that a species 

 commonly associated, in this and other counties in 

 England, with the sea and its surroundings, should in 

 former times have selected for nesting purposes such 

 inland warrens, as, from the sandy nature of the soil 

 and an abundance of rabbit's burrows, were suited to its 

 habits, inasmuch as the ring dotterel, which ordinarily 

 deposits its eggs on the beach, just above high water 

 mark (see vol. ii., p. 84), breeds annually on the warrens 

 near Brandon and Thetford.f But on examining the 



This contracted form of spelling Northwold does not occur in 

 Blomefield's " History of Norfolk," but is mentioned as a provin- 

 cialism in Chambers' history of the county (1829) ; and the same 

 parish is printed North olde on a map of Norfolk, in Speed's " Theatre 

 of the Empire of Great Britain," 1627. 



j- A singular coincidence, and one I was not aware of when 

 describing the nesting habits of the ring dotterel on our inland 

 warrens, is the existence at the present time in those localities 

 of certain insects, chiefly amongst the smaller Lepidoptera, identical 

 with species found on the sandhills of the coast. I must refer 

 my readers to an able paper on the subject, by Mr. C. Gr. Barrett 

 (Trans. Norfolk and Norwich Nat. Society, 1870-71), in which, after 



