On
This Account I Could Not Omit It, Nor Will It Be Found So
Inconsiderable An Article As Some May
Imagine, if this be true,
which I received an account of from a person living on the place,
viz., that
They have counted three hundred droves of turkeys (for
they drive them all in droves on foot) pass in one season over
Stratford Bridge on the River Stour, which parts Suffolk from
Essex, about six miles from Colchester, on the road from Ipswich to
London. These droves, as they say, generally contain from three
hundred to a thousand each drove; so that one may suppose them to
contain five hundred one with another, which is one hundred and
fifty thousand in all; and yet this is one of the least passages,
the numbers which travel by Newmarket Heath and the open country
and the forest, and also the numbers that come by Sudbury and Clare
being many more.
For the further supplies of the markets of London with poultry, of
which these countries particularly abound, they have within these
few years found it practicable to make the geese travel on foot
too, as well as the turkeys, and a prodigious number are brought up
to London in droves from the farthest parts of Norfolk; even from
the fen country about Lynn, Downham, Wisbech, and the Washes; as
also from all the east side of Norfolk and Suffolk, of whom it is
very frequent now to meet droves with a thousand, sometimes two
thousand in a drove.
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