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VERTEBRATA OCCURRING ABOUT EUSTON.
AN ANNOTATED LIST OF VERTEBRATA OCCURRING ABOUT EUSTON BESIDE THE SUFFOLK BRECKLAND. BY THE REV. REDMOND B. CATON, M.A. THIS List centres
in Great Fakenham vilage, embraces Euston to north and Bamham to west, extending into Coney Weston on east and Sapiston on south. Through the centre of the district passes the small River Blackbourn, running due north to join the westward-flowing Little Ouse, which divides the whole from Rushford and Thetford, with its famous warren. Peculiar interest lies in the juncture here of the open Breckland heaths, composed of blown-sands underlain by chalk, with rather light Pleistdcene boulder-clay which overlies the whole country south and east. But the latter leaves beside the Blackbourn a strip of breck-chalk, whereon stands Fakenham ; along the east bank is more breck running south to Sapiston bridge, inside which strip is Pleistocene valley-gravel extending to Bardwell and peat-bog north of that bridge ; while opposite, just south of Fakenham Magna, glacial-gravel outcrops nearly as far as Honington. Thus we find the Euston District border ing upon the eastern edge of Suffolk Breckland, with its Park of eleven hundred acres rising eastwardly uphill on the boulderclay that has always been timbered. For the rest, the fauna is that indigenous to the open heaths which stretch fully ten miles westward to the great Fens of Cambridge. Here is not the place to touch upon the specialised geology of the Breck ; and I will merely say that the mediaeval sterility of Euston's fifteen hundred acres is well displayed in the assessments of 1327 and 1454. Though it was already partly sheep-walks in 1315 (Patent Rolls, 8 Edward ii, pt. ii, 271), not tili near the end of thefifteenthCentury did the Rokewood family find the wealth of wool it would produce. Tree-planting began so late as 1667—hence, perhaps, our lack of Rookery; though, before about 1884 when the birds were driven away, there was one in the small Cold Harbour wood between Rymer and Euston—by Sir Henry Bennet; and in 1671 royal licence was accorded this same " Lord Arlington to impark two thousand acres of land in Euston, Little and Great Fakenham, Sapiston and Coney Weston, with grant of free warren" (State Papers 515, 546 and 592). Fakenham Parva parish was swallowed into this Park, and the post office has recently most foolishly and confusingly dubbed Fakenham Magna as " Little Fakenham," in Order to distinguish it from Fakenham in Norfolk ! Very wild the District surely was tili a Century