FUNERAL OF THE LATE MR. CHARLES WATERTON
(Illustrated London News 17 June 1865)

Saturday week was a day of mournful solemnity at Walton Park, for more than four centuries the ancestral seat of the Watertons, and latterly endeared to the present generation of lovers and students of animated nature as the abode of that most genial and enthusiastic of all field naturalists, Charles Waterton. We read of the fine old place as it passed from the noble Saxon Thane by Swein and Fitz-Swein and the De Burghs to the Watertons, and history tells how the castellated hall was attacked by Cromwell and his troops, and how Oliverhimself fired a musket ball at the heroic lady of the mansion; and thither tourists have long resorted to read in many fondly preserved relics and memorials the romantic chronicles of Walton and its possessors; but there is nothing in all these fortunes and records that so moves the heart of the man "who can hang a thought upon every thorn," as the appropriation of Walton, as an "elysium of animals," by its latest owner, Charles Waterton. The place must ever be especially dear to the lover of ornithology: The birds, ... Securely there they build, and there Securely hatch their young. (Extract from the lengthy article in the ILN)

The grave of the old Squire. These days, the lake no longer almost touches the grave and the area itself is wild and overgrown - a wilderness that Waterton might well feel at home in.

He was a man who did no harm to the world he lived in but enhanced it by his presence and his care of it. Would that we could all have a similar epitaph.
Gerald Durrell, May 1988.
Foreword to Charles Waterton 1782 - 1865, Traveller and Conservatonist, by Julia Blackburn