LOST IN THE WILDS
WANDERERS’ ORDEAL When hope of finding them alive had been almost abandoned, two men lost in a trackless and remote part of Scottish territory were luckily traced and restored to safety. They are Francis Edwards, aged 23, a Shropshire man employed as a footman at Eishken Lodge, on the Island of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides, and Reginald Wallace, aged 19, a native of Lincolnshire, hall-boy at the lodge. For two days and nights they were missing in boglands of Park Deer Forest, on the island, and when discovered by a search party were in the last stages of exhaustion. Edwards and Wallace set off for a few minutes’ walk at night before turning in to bed. but lost themselves on the moor a short distance from the lodge. Throughout the night they walked backward and forward in heavy snow, getting farther and farther from the lodge. They were not missed until next morning, when the ghillies on the estate were immediately mobilised, and the whole staff organised an all-day search through the deer forest without avail. The missing men thus had to spend a second night-—one of dismal thaw—-In the open. They had only one coat between them, and they wrapped It round them and slept for eight hours on the open moor under the shelter of a huge boulder. On the second morning the searchers were reinforced by 20 crofters from the village of Ballallan, who voluntarily organised themselves into a party on hearing the news. Forming a line with about 200 yards between each man, the searchers advanced across the moor and peat-bogs, and, after about eight hours, sighted two figures walking with difficulty on the shoulder of a hill. They were the missing men, who had wandered inland to the centre of the deer forest. Wallace was still able to walk, but Edwards had to be assisted by the searchers. "When we did not find shelter on the first morning, we became very wearied and worried,” said Wallace. “We chased a sheep that night, intending to kill it. We were too weak to catch it, and in any case we had no knife to kill it with, and we had to go hungry.”
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Bibliographic details
Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20066, 25 March 1935, Page 14
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372LOST IN THE WILDS Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20066, 25 March 1935, Page 14
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