Eighteenth Century
Rabbits were the main produce of the forest. The first warrens are mentioned in 1614. At the beginning of the 18th century there were five including the Great Warren to the south of Colgate, Plummers Plain and Sibballs (now known as Holmbush). By the end of the century the latter had some twelve thousand rabbits, London being the main market. The forest was described as bleak and barren as the Cumberland and Yorkshire moorland, and William Cobbett who travelled from Pease Pottage to Horsham in 1823 described it as "six of the worst miles in England...The first two of these miserable miles go though the estate of Lord ERSKINE . It was a bare heath here and there, in the better parts of it, some scrubby birch. It has been, in part, planted with fir-trees, which are as ugly as the heath was; and, in short, it is a most villanous track".
However Michael Mills planted a straight avenue of trees around 1720, and although these were blown down in 1836, the line of the avenue remains as a long narrow clearing (legend says that Mick Mills raced the devil and won - he went so fast that he burnt the trees on either side and they would never regrow).
Read more about this topic: St Leonard's Forest, History
Famous quotes related to eighteenth century:
“F.R. Leavis’s ‘eat up your broccoli’ approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)