250 MY LIFE AS A NATURALIST 



There are 9 Public-houses, and their signs are : Blacksmiths' 

 Arms, Cat and Fiddle, The Fox, Live and Let Live, Old Hall, 

 Red Lion, Royal Oak, Shoulder of Mutton, and White Horse. 

 Only one of these (the Royal Oak) is a free house. 



Landowners are Davis, Delme-RadclifTe, Gurney, Handscombe, 

 and Walker. 



There are allotments at Bury Field, Hill Close, Willow Close, 

 and the Common. 



There is a Village Green, and about 40 acres of Glebe Land. 



The longest-lived family is the Handscombes, of whom several 

 have attained an age of ninety and over. At the time of our 

 survey there were three over eighty still alive, and one died in 1916 

 leaving great-great-great-grandchildren. 



There is no local knowledge of any natives who have become 

 famous. 



The Charities include 4 Almshouses, two of which were erected 

 from the Hammond Charity, consisting of the rent from 6 acres 

 of land at Punch's Cross, a portion of which is also applied to 

 put boys out as apprentices. 



Three members of the party were deputed to survey the grave- 

 stones in the churchyard, but those at Pirton seemed singularly 

 uninteresting. The earliest decipherable tomb was dated 1760. 

 The commonest names were Handscombe, Lake, Trussell and 

 its variants, Wood, and Woolston. There were only two epi- 

 taphs worth recording, and these need not be repeated here. The 

 record of age was borne by a stone of the Handscombe family, 

 which elicited the information that the two members buried 

 there attained the ages of ninety and ninety-two years. 



Making the acquaintance of an intelligent native who was 

 proud of his village and its associations, the information was 

 acquired that the stone used for the recent addition to the church 

 (the familiar " Church " or Totternhoe Stone) was dug from a 

 pit on Glebe Land between Pirton and Holwell. This pit, it 

 appears, is remarkably prolific in fossils, and there is a wonder- 

 fully fine fossil fish preserved in a case in the church. A splendid 

 fragment of ammonite is built into the wall over the door, and 

 there is another huge piece of the same extinct monster lying in 

 a heap near by. 



This communicative inhabitant also informed us that the only 

 school that the village formerly had was a Straw Plaiting School, 

 where this work was then the foremost object of concern, and 

 education was of secondary importance. Further, he expressed a 



