THE DATE STONE

There has been a great deal of speculation about the Hale Duck Decoy date stone. It can be found in the ‘boat house' area of the central pond. This is the area where the Gamekeeper would have kept a boat. The use of a boat would have enabled him to do maintenance work in and around the pond.

Was the date stone placed there to denote when the Decoy was built? Was it a stone that was reclaimed from another building site? How do we interpret what the stone says? It has been suggested that the RC stands for the ‘Reign of Charles', which fits in with the time we would have expected the Decoy to have been built. There seems to be an X, a 6, followed by a dot and a 3 followed by a colon. We have interpreted this date as 1633 because we believe that the Decoy must have been constructed around this time but we may be mistaken. Do you have an alternative interpretation?