100 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



THE T FORD WARREN. 



By W. G. Clarke. 



Thetford Warren, in the parliamentary division of North- 

 west Suffolk, but for administrative purposes included as part of 

 the borough of Thetford, in the county of Norfolk, is interesting 

 not only for the extent and variety of its bird-life, the arid wild- 

 ness which for more than a century past has been its charac- 

 teristic, and the rare plants and insects that here have their 

 habitat, but also for the indications it gives of the varying 

 economic value and utility of a certain area of land. It is 

 slightly less than three thousand acres in extent, and the num- 

 ber of neolithic flint implements found on its surface prove that 

 the district must have been populous in later prehistoric times. 

 One of the rarest and most exquisitely worked neolithic imple- 

 ments ever found in the locality was a double-edged flint saw 

 less than two inches in length, with nearly thirty teeth on each 

 edge, which was picked up from a rut in a sandy trackway near 

 the middle of the Warren. There is a tradition of a " white 

 horse " cut on the rolling slopes of the East Anglian Heights 

 within the vicinity of the Warren, but the exact spot is not now 

 ascertainable. In early times, probably before the Norman 

 Conquest, portions of the Warren were arable land. In 1274 

 the Cluniac prior at Thetford was returned to furnish, at his 

 own expense, ten archers for forty days, whenever the king 

 went against the Welsh in person. The land for which this 

 service was rendered was part of Thetford, or, as it was then 

 termed, Westwick Warren. In the sixteenth century it was 

 almost devoted to profitable pastures and fold-courses, and was 

 also a favourite locality for " Kite-hawking." There is no record 

 of a Kite having been killed on the Warren since 1857. Writing 

 in 1622 of the junction of two streams less than a mile from the 

 Warren, Drayton said : — 



" Where since their confluent floods so fit for hawking lye, 

 And store of fowl intice skill'd Falconers there to fly." 



