preserve of the Olivers. Mahala and Harriet Wadlow alone remained in the parish, transferring their dressmaking business to one of the cottages built by Solomon Wallis. They and their niece Emma, from Kingsdown, were the three ladies who in 1871 were carrying on the tradition of Bodkin Row.
   There seems to have been an especial influx of new families into Ash during the middle years of the eighteenth century. Amongst the newcomers at that time were the family of Elcombe, otherwise Ellcombe, Elcomb, Elcome or Elcom.
   Although the Elcombes were known to farm, or perhaps more usually to till the soil in an humbler capacity, they also filled, at least in later years, the more specialised roles of shoemakers, schoolmasters and parish clerks. In times of widespread illiteracy, schoolmasters and parish clerks were not easy to come by in country parishes and it must have been a 

considerable boon to the neighbourhood to possess in its midst a family that could adequately fulfil those duties and keep it shod as well.
   The first of the family certainly known to have been a shoemaker was one William Elcombe, who was probably a son of John and Mary Elcombe and a babe in arms when they arrived in the parish about the year 1750. John Elcombe’s trade is not recorded. In later life, maybe always, he lived in a cottage where the Royal Oak now stands. Mary and he both survived well past their allotted spans, dying within a few weeks of each other in 1789.
   The tenancy of the Elcombe’s cottage was taken over by Richard Venner, the former blacksmith of Butlers Point, but William the shoemaker and his wife, Elizabeth, may have lodged with him there; William’s only appearance in the