Dick Turpin's connection to Epping Forest is genuinely documented rather than purely legendary: contemporary reporting in The Gentleman's Magazine records that on 4 May 1737, Turpin shot and killed Thomas Morris, a servant of one of the forest's keepers, after Morris armed himself and attempted to capture him. The location of Turpin's actual hideout at the time is less certain, and it is this uncertainty that "Turpin's Cave" has come to fill, as a name attached, with varying confidence, to several different spots in the forest over the following century and a half.
The most persistent identification places the cave north of Loughton Camp, the Iron Age hillfort covered elsewhere in this survey, an association reinforced when a nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map by the Loughton surveyor D'Oyley labelled the ground there "Dick Turpin's Cave" and a nearby public house took the same name. When the antiquarian B. H. Cowper excavated Loughton Camp itself in the 1870s, working from exactly those maps, he found no trace of any actual cave within the earthwork. The terrain across most of Epping Forest is sand and gravel, geologically unsuited to forming a natural cave of the kind popular illustrations show Turpin hiding in, which suggests the "cave" was always more likely an artificial dug-out or shelter than a natural feature, if it existed in the specific form the legend describes at all.
Despite the archaeological disappointment, a fenced dug-out answering the description was visible near the Turpin's Inn public house (built on the site sometime in the nineteenth century) as late as the 1960s, and the site remains a fixture of local walking guides and forest history to this day. Essex is not alone in claiming a "Turpin's Cave": near-identical sites carrying his name exist at Plumstead in south-east London and at Rammamere Heath in Bedfordshire, a reminder that a famous highwayman's name attaches itself to convenient local landmarks considerably more readily than any single hideout could actually have hosted him.
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