30 



Report of a Field Meeting held at Eynfsord, Kent, 

 June 25th, 1904. 



By RoPjKrt Adkin. Read January i2fh, 1905. 



Eynsford is another of those villages on the banks of the 

 river Darenth that offer facilities as a convenient base from which 

 a half-day field meeting may be held. From London it is dis- 

 tant some eighteen miles, and is situated on the cross road between 

 Farningham and Sevenoaks. It has a railway station about half 

 a mile from the village, on the Swanley and Sevenoaks branch 

 of the L.C. & 1). Railway. Ranges of hills rise to the east 

 and west of it, the former, with which we are at the moment more 

 intimately concerned, attaining by a gentle rise an altitude of, in 

 round numbers, 500 feet. Of the districts already visited in this 

 series of Field Meetings it most nearly resembles Otford, from which 

 it is distant some five or six miles, and the country is of quite 

 a different type from that of the " Charts " at Brasted and Lymps- 

 field. The woods are all of modern origin and consist chiefly of 

 narrow strips or comparatively small patches, no doubt planted with' 

 the primary object of affording protection for game, and the open 

 land is pretty closely cultivated. At first sight one might be in- 

 clined to think that there was little chance of profitable collecting 

 of any sort, but on closer acquaintance one finds that the woods 

 are fairly prolific ; indeed, the profusion of moths, chiefly Geometers,, 

 that I met with during a hurried ramble through these same woods 

 on May 28th was greater than I had .seen elsewhere for many years. 

 Almost every tree trunk was tenanted, sometimes by half-a-dozen 

 specimens and perhaps as many species, and every tap at the under- 

 growth set numbers of individuals hurrying off to fresh cover. 

 These woods are also interesting in that they are one of the nearest 

 places to London, if not the nearest, where one may find the 

 columbine {Aqi/ilegia vulgaris, Linn) growing wild. The green helle- 

 bore {^HeUeborus viridis, Linn) also is very abundant on their borders, 

 but I fear the former of these plants is doomed to extinction, for, 

 whereas where not twenty years ago it was to be found commonly one 

 has now a difficulty in finding even one or two examples, Many of 

 the hedgerows also in the district are of unusually heavy growth and 

 afford good cover for moths and suitable feeding-places for their 

 larvae. Occasionally a bit of waste ground, too poor for cultivation, 

 but covered with an abundance of rough herbage, may be met with, 

 and suggests possibilities for the micro-lepidopterist and the hymen- 

 opterist. So much for the district. 



The meeting was hardly the unqualified success that it had been 

 hoped it would be. Arrangements had been made for the accommo- 



