152 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



imagine, indicates also the time when the wild cattle 

 were first confined within its boundaries, for no record 

 of their introduction exists. I suppose that they, 

 previously wild denizens of the surrounding forest, were 

 then first incarcerated, as they were at Chartley and at 

 Lyme. The late Lord Tankerville states the question 

 very fairly. Writing in 1838, he says : — 



" I must premise that our information as to their 

 origin is very scanty. All that we know or believe in 

 respect to it rests in great measure on conjecture, sup- 

 ported, however, by certain facts and reasonings which 

 lead us to believe in their ancient origin, not so much 

 from any direct evidence as from the improbability of 

 any hypothesis ascribing to them a more recent date. 

 I remember an old gardener, of the name of Moscrop, 

 who died many years ago, at the age of perhaps eighty 

 or more, who used to tell of what his father had told 

 him as happening to him when a boy relative to these 

 wild cattle, which were then spoken of as wild cattle, 

 and with the same sort of curiosity as exists with 

 respect to them at the present day. 



"In my father's and my grandfather's time we know 

 that the same obscurity as to their origin prevailed ; 

 and if we suppose (as, no doubt, was the case) that there 

 were old persons in their time capable of carrying back 

 their recollections to the generations still antecedent to 

 them, this enables us at once to look back to a pretty 

 considerable period, during which no greater knowledge 

 existed as to their origin than at the present time." 



Mr. Hindmarsh, in commenting upon this state- 

 ment, points out that "the testimony of the two 

 Moscrops, connected with the contemporaries of the 

 first Moscrop, would carry us back a period of 200 



