From Connaught Water a good road, known as the Green Ride, leads to Ambresbury Bucks and Epping, and another called the Rangers to Buckhurst Hill and Loughton. Buckhurst Hill, from {65} which for many years the famous Easter Hunt used to start, must once have been one of the loveliest villages in the forest, and is still charming in spite of the many new houses that have been built. Its name has been very variously explained, some supposing it to commemorate the aristocratic poet of Elizabethan times, Lord Buckhurst, others that the original form was Book Forest, signifying a tract reserved in otherwise open moorlands by royal charter. Before the Easter Hunt was transferred to Beech Hill there were many descriptions in the contemporary press of the scenes that used to take place at Buckhurst, notably one that appeared in the _Morning Herald_ in the week after Easter 1826, in which the writer gloats over the gay costumes worn 'by the three thousand merry lieges then and there assembled' to watch the uncarting of the stag that, when released, marched proudly down between an avenue of horsemen 'wearing a chaplet of flowers round its neck, a girth of divers-coloured ribbons, and a long blue-and-white streamer depending from the summit of its branching horns, adding that when it caught a glimpse of the hounds and huntsmen waiting for it, it bounded sideways, knocking down and trampling all who crowded the path it chose.' The account ends by stating that the stag was finally caught at Chingford, 'nobody knows how, for everybody returned to town before the end except those who stopped to regale afresh and recount the glorious perils of the day.' The picturesque village of Loughton, perched on high ground above the valley of the Roding, about a {66} mile from Buckhurst Hill, was originally a mere appanage of the manor of the same name that was given by Harold to the Abbey of Waltham, and after the Reformation was presented by Edward VI. to Sir Thomas Davey, only to revert to the Crown in the reign of Mary, since which time it has changed hands again and again. Its ancient church is now a mere ruin, but it has been supplemented by a fairly satisfactory modern building in the Norman style. The old manor-house, in which Queen Elizabeth and James I. were guests at different times, was destroyed by fire in 1836, with the exception of part of the great hall, now incorporated in a farm, and the fine wrought-iron entrance gates. In olden times the inhabitants of Loughton enjoyed, in addition to the privileges common to all of pasturing their cattle in the forest and turning out their pigs at Michaelmas to eat beechwood and acorns, that of lopping the trees in the vicinity of their village, and it was the interference of the lord of the manor with the undue exercise of this right that inaugurated the agitation which in the end had the happy result of securing to the whole nation the priceless possession of Epping Forest. [Sidenote: Chigwell Row]