32 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF LEICESTER AND DISTRICT 
sackful. Railway goods guards, I found when resident in Leicester, are 
particularly fond of collecting herbs on their journeys, and in this way 
I have secured further evidence of the occurrence of such plants as bella- 
donna or henbane, in spots where they were undoubtedly alien. In 
Rutland the former is perhaps native in some woods, and great quantities 
were collected during the Great War for pharmaceutical purposes from 
Exton Park, where it is abundant. 
Wild fruits of the countryside in some districts figure in season in 
the local market periodically, and Pulteney in 1746-1765 records the 
local names of the raspberry and of whortleberry brought into 
Loughborough or Leicester markets. 
Willows of every type, sallows, osiers, etc., play a part also locally in 
industry, the Ellmore factory with its osier plantations at Thurmaston 
and elsewhere being well known. Mr. Ellmore expressed the belief 
that there were no hybrid willows, but Linton at Shipley, was able by 
cultivation and experiment to show that there were. 
THE CHALKY BOULDER CLay AREA AND ITS EARLY COLONISATION 
BY THE ANGLO-SAXONS. 
In Essex it has been found by Woolridge that the distribution of the 
Great Chalky Boulder Clay coincides very remarkably with the distri- 
bution of the Anglo-Saxon settlements and to a less degree the later 
Danish ones. The reason given for this is the suitability of the soil, 
a stony loam or calcareous marl, for crop cultivation, and the fact that it 
is also one of the best superficial water-bearing strata. An examination 
of the area of the Great Chalky Boulder Clay, largely confined to that 
part of Leicestershire east of the Soar valley, leads to the same conclusion, 
that it is more or less that area in which the Anglo-Saxons in their first 
settlements in the county took up their abode. That area is, moreover, 
almost entirely ‘ ridge and furrow,’ a relic of Saxon drainage. 
FORESTRY AND THE FLORA OF THE DISTRICT. 
It is reasonable to suppose, since pine occurs in deposits of pre-Glacial 
age in the Midlands, that this was one of the forest trees at higher altitudes 
in this area, and that Charnwood Forest was once partly pinewood, 
which would account for the prevalence (formerly more marked) of ling 
and other heaths, which follow in natural succession after loss of pine- 
wood in an area, just as bracken follows oakwood—a process in widespread 
operation on Charnwood at the present time. In this region the area most 
generally afforested was Charnwood Forest. "The Domesday Survey shows 
large gaps between scattered woodlands, elsewhere than on Charnwood, 
in 1086, and the existence of much land in such areas under plough or 
grass as early as that period. 
Charnwood Forest itself appears—if Burton be correct (though Throsby 
doubted him)—to have been disafforested shortly after the Conquest, 
and afforested by Henry II, but disafforested by Henry III. It was also 
bare of forest, ‘ almost without a tree,’ in Marshall’s time (1790). -In 
recent years, since the Enclosure (1829), much pine, larch, beech, wych 
