IN HIGH SUFFOLK 



SUNDOWN IN SHOTLEY WOOD 



SHOTLEY WOOD is marked on the county map. 

 Sometimes, though rarely, when there was enough 

 spare money in the county to keep a three-days-a-week 

 pack, it figured among the less popular meets of the 

 season. Now it is forgotten by the world, even the 

 world of county sport. Yet it has stood or rather 

 it has been felled and risen again since the days 

 of King John. From the time of Magna Charta till 

 the present day, no plough or harrow has cut the 

 virgin soil within its fences ; and every decent piece 

 of building in the parish, from the church roof set 

 on in the year of grace 1507 to the newest barn floor, 

 has been fitted with the timber grown on its seventy 

 acres of deep yellow clay. "Us be all despret poor 

 now," as the exciseman (the only rich man in the 

 parish) truly says ; and those who had sense to read 

 the signs of the times have made treaty with necessity, 

 and stepped back, with a rough and rugged insistance 

 on the change, to the plain living of Saxon times. 



