NEEDWOOD FOREST. 49 



It would be impossible to speak of Bagot's Park 

 without mentioning the name of Henry Turnor, who 

 lived at Tumor's Lodge, and was so well known and 

 respected. There was always lunch at his house for 

 congenial spirits at the end of a day's Woodland hunting, 

 when he would delight his audience with his inexhaustible 

 fund of anecdotes of old forgotten days. He was a capital 

 sportsman, a fine horseman, and a first-rate shot. What 

 music those bloodhounds must have made in the woods 

 hunting in the outlying deer, and there was real melody 

 to be extracted from the odd-looking little twisted horn, 

 which the huntsman carried. There was a famous outlier, 

 which had been hunted from Wentworth in Yorkshire, 

 and which was harboured in Sudbury coppice, in April, 

 1840. Finding him there, they ran him to Thatched 

 Lodge, where he was taken, his antlers sawn off", and he 

 was turned into Basfot's Park. No one had the best of 

 Henry Turnor on his black horse, which was sold for a 

 good price in consequence, nor of his son, Pickering, on 

 a little Welsh mare. It is popularly supposed that blood- 

 hounds are slow, but no one found them so that day, and 

 it is, perhaps, worth mentioning that, one day, when one of 

 them. Ruby, was loose in front of the house, the Meynell 

 hounds, in the old squire's time, swept under Venison 

 Oak in full cry. Ruby joined in, and led them all the 

 way across the Park, to the astonishment of the squire, 

 who asked Turnor how he thought a cross would do 

 " between my foxhounds and your bloodhounds ? " These 

 hounds were kenneled in the corner of the wood just 

 behind the Lodge, which still bears the name of Dog- 

 Kennel Wood. There is a story told of how Rockwood 

 found his way home from a point between London and 

 Dover, a distance of from one hundred and fifty to one 

 hundred and sixty miles, in three nights and two days. 

 It seems that a draft had been sent up in the van to be 

 sold at Tattersall's. Rockwood and two or three others 

 were purchased by the King of the Belgians, and were 

 duly started on their way to Dover. Rockwood escaped 



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