She was brought up in a parish closely connected with Woodhall, and she may almost be said to return to her “native heath” to renew her years. The reader will please excuse this digression, as it illustrates the condition of things under which occurred the incident of local history which I am now about to give. A no less atrocious murder than that in the Wilderness was committed, within less than a mile of the same place, at Well-Syke Wood, which again is about two miles from Woodhall Spa. The shooting of the wood belonged to the Rev. John Dymoke, afterwards the champion, who rented it from Lord Fortescue. In the year 1850, the head keeper, Richard Tasker, received a written intimation that a gang of poachers intended to visit the wood on a certain night, and the writer of the letter recommended him, for his own sake, to keep away. Tasker, however, was lodging not far from the wood, with a small farmer named Emanuel Howden, who also occasionally acted as a watchman; and the two men, accompanied by the “rabbiter,” James Donner, went to the wood, to protect their master’s pheasants. Howden hung back, not liking the undertaking; Donner went off to watch the wood from another point. Presently a shot was heard, and on Howden and Donner coming to Tasker, they found him lying on the ground severely wounded, and he died the following day. It was a bright moonlight night, {21a} and Donner tried, for a time, to follow the poachers, but they eluded him. This occurred in a field just outside Well-Syke Wood, at the north-west corner, then occupied by William Hutchinson, grandfather of the present tenant, whose house adjoins the Horncastle-road, some two miles from Woodhall Spa. Most of the poachers were believed to have come from Horsington; two of them, brothers, named Bowring, and a third, Pearson Clarke, and another named Hinds; a man named Stennet was also arrested on suspicion; but they were all eventually discharged, there being no means of identifying them, as the murdered man was the only one who came to close quarters with any of them. Along with these, it is believed there was also a man named Joseph Kent, from Tattershall Thorpe, who is supposed to have fired the fatal shot. As Tasker approached the wood, this man came forward and recommended him to go home. Tasker called out that he was not yet going home, and that he knew him, whereupon Kent, finding that he was recognised, fined the shot. {21b}