PROBING his roots, Downham Market, Norfolk, dentist David Carmichael turned to Looking Back for information on this old East Lancashire mansion (pictured) which features quaintly in his ancestry.

His grandfather was named after a 19th-century toff who lived there.

But while learning more about long-ruined Feniscowles Hall, in Blackburn, built 192 years ago by baronet Sir William Feilden who was the town's MP from 1832-47, Mr Carmichael provides us with an intriguing insight into a pastime of one of its Victorian residents -- one that would now fall seriously foul of both the law of present-day ethics.

It was Sir William's grandson, Henry Wemyss Feilden, after whom Mr Carmichael's ancestor, Henry Wemyss Feilden Allan was named when he was born in Stirling, Scotland, about 1865 -- apparently because he was the best friend of the boy's father.

The youngster grew up to become a pharmacist and in 1905 owned a chemist's shop in Liverpool, but the name that also linked him to Lancashire stemmed from the interest in wildlife that was shared by his father and the son of Feniscowles Hall -- as is chillingly revealed in an 1867 letter between the two setting out plans to steal the eggs of a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on Tayside before the birds were killed.

Henry Wemyss Feilden is described in WA Abram's 1877 History of Blackburn as a Royal Navy captain who was naturalist to the Arctic Expedition of 1875-6 and his letter of decade earlier -- which turned up recently in a bureau belonging to Mr Carmichael's late mother -- reveals both the service and naturalist aspects of his life, in that he was eager to squeeze the nest-robbing exercise into a Sunday away from the School of Musketry at Fleetwood where he was due to start on April 15, 1867. Much of the correspondence involved the trains that Feilden would need to catch to reach Gargunnock, some nine miles west of Stirling, and then travel -- perhaps through the night -- by horse-drawn gig deep into Tayside's wilds near Balloch, where, to his delight, he had been informed the birds were breeding, in order for him to return to Fleetwood in time for Monday morning's drill.

He was also keen to get as many eggs as possible -- wondering whether to raid the nest on the 20th when there was a chance of only finding one or two eggs in it, or to "run the chance of the eggs being a little sat on" and wait a week until the following Sunday when, he was sure, there would be three or four.

"The eggs being a little old makes no difference to an operator like myself," he wrote from Feniscowles Hall. He was also anxious that his ally had correctly measured the height of the birds' lofty nest so that they would have enough rope to reach it and "not be short of rope as we were the first time."

But his greatest fears were that someone else would get to the eggs first or that the birds would be killed before they laid -- evidently, by gamekeepers employed to ensure the area's game-birds were killed by guns and not preying falcons -- and, it seems, that backhander might be required to prevent this.

For he added: "Do you have the keepers all right? It would be a bad job if the birds were killed before they had laid and worse still if someone else slips in and bags the eggs."

Remarks Mr Carmichael: "Obviously, at the time collecting birds' eggs was an acceptable thing to do, but we shall never know if they succeeded."

The Feildens, who were related to Blackburn's most prominent family, the lords of manor Feildens of nearby Witton Park, left Feniscowles in the 1880s because of the industrial pollution of the River Darwen flowing the grounds of the hall.

Later, the hall and its grounds became pleasure gardens before they fell into disrepair and ruin.