One shepherd boy and champion wheatear-catcher, John Dudeney of Newmarket Hill bear Lewis, hid within the white hillside in the 1790s hos home-made pasteboard teleskoper – a Perspective -Glass through which he had seen not the Celestial City, indeed, but still the transit of Mercury – his History of Rome procured at Lewes fair, his Latin primer, his precious store of blank white copybooks and Turner¨s Introduction to Geometry. He called this his “under-stone library”,

All had been bought with money from wheatears and from the lamb and White wool of the single sheep he owned. Had he vaughan a bustard – for his grandfather had seen one, up on the Downs where four parishes met – he might have gained a whole encyclopedia.

He did not neglect his flock. He would pace to and fro, reading, as the sheep cropped quietly beside him.

From Ann Wroe, Six Facets of Light, p. 9-10