Having written to Radley College about my project, I received some very helpful information for which I’m very grateful. I was interested to know the location of Sir G.Bowyer’s lodge, next to which Richard Burgess was asked to stop by Stephen Hedges and his co-conspirators. Below is a map from 1875 showing St. Peter’s College, of which Radley Hall or House is a part. The house is circled in yellow. To the far left, is the lodge circled in green, at the end of a drive which leads out to the Oxford Road.
Below are two details taken from the map; first the lodge…
and then the house…
I think therefore we can assume that Richard Burgess was taking the route I suggested from Abingdon to Oxford. He stopped outside the Lodge whereupon Stephen Hedges, Stockwell and Harper left him to steal the lead from the ‘larder.’ The location of the larder is perhaps a little more difficult to ascertain. Benjamin Kent, who was renting the property from Sir George Bowyer, stated that the larder was about 100 yards from the ‘office’. In the painting of Radley Hall below, made by Turner in 1789 when he was just 14 years old, there is a collection a outbuildings on the left hand side, near to which, perhaps, the larder stood. Having stopped at the Lodge, Hedges and his accomplices left with a bag and returned five minutes later with the lead. If the larder was near the house, they must have worked very quickly to get to the larder, strip the roof, and return to the cart, suggesting perhaps they were well practiced in their ‘art’.