Visit the church of St Mary’s in Northchurch, Hertfordshire and you will see, on a raised section of the churchyard opposite the south porch, a plain weathered gravestone carved with the inscription, ‘PETER the Wild Boy 1785’
Boxmoor Common is a pleasant place for a stroll on a warm spring day, verging on the bucolic were it not for the constant rumble of traffic from the A41 on its southern edge. Commons are places of recreation today, suitable for dog walking, bike riding and rambling.
One day in 1745 in the hamlet of Gubblecote, near Tring in Hertfordshire, an elderly woman named Ruth Osborne went to beg for some buttermilk at a local farm. She lived in poverty with her husband, John, neither of them able to get much work or support from their neighbours. The Osbornes were shunned for the double reason that they were thought to be witches and Jacobites (1745 also happened to be the year of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rising).