the octogenarian night have been ‘Old Thomas Wallace’, who died in 1727, aged eighty-five, ‘Old Thomas Wouldham’, who died in 1730, ‘aged 88 at lest’, or, just possibly, ‘Old Thomas Walter’, who died in 1725, aged eighty-eight ,and who would have been a collateral descendant of the Walters who acquired Scotgrove in the sixteenth century.
   The rector also made mention in his letter of other foundations in the same wood, which he guessed might have been of houses as there was a well very near them; this the owner had been forced to cover with timber when he last felled the wood. The well was still covered, to prevent accidents, when John Thorpe the younger visited the site in August 1769 and found there ‘the foundations of the chapel ... as described by Mr. Atwood’.²⁷ Apparently Thorpe did not know that his father had himself visited the site exactly forty-one years before, but that visit, made on 2 August 1728, was recorded by Dr Thorpe in a memorandum which reads:- 
   ‘I went this day with Mr. Samuel Atwood, Rector of Ash, and Mr. John Barnard, to view the site of the Chantry of Scotgreve. It lyes in a wood now commonly called Chappel Weed. Through the wood runs a path, leading from Ash towards Hartley. The next field to this on the north side lyes partly in Ash ant partly in Hartley. A very few rods on the west side of the path, and if I 

mistake not, about half-way across the wood, are ye remains of this Chantry. The vestiges of the walls thereof are plainly distinguished, being two or three feet above the level of the ground, and at the west end four or five feet. The door seems to have been on the south side. About ten rods on the west of it is a draw-well. This place has been entrenched round and within it are many foundations and marks of buildings’.²⁸
   The two old men who earlier had helped Mr Atwood had assured him from their own knowledge that Chapel Wood with ether lands adjoining ‘did formerly belong to the Walters of Faukham, and one of them gave it with a daughter to one Walker, who sold it to Mr. Morris, rector of Ash, that died about 1674’. Mr Morris, they had said, had given it with a daughter to Mr Clement; he, Atwood explained in his letter, was his own immediate predecessor, adding that Mr Clement’s grandson, ‘young Umfrey’, enjoyed it to that day.²’
   Most, at any rate, of the ancients’ recollections seem to have been right. John Walter, who had come into his own on his father's death in 1608, left the bulk of his estate after his wife’s death to his nephew and godson, another John Walter, who died in 1657. By the dour days of the Commonwealth the Walters were less prosperous and