SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 195 



writer, Thomas Baskerville . " Taking a boat for pleasure to 

 view this city by water, the boatman brought us to a fair 

 garden belonging to the Duke of Norfolk, having handsome 

 stairs leading to the water, by which we ascended into the 

 garden, and saw a good bowling-green, and many fine walks." 

 In his journals, Baskerville notices the public bowling-greens 

 at all the small towns, and attached to many of the inns 

 he stayed at. Thus, of Pontefract Castle he writes, " of 

 which now only remains the platform and stump of the bottom 

 of the wall 2 or 3 yards above ground, but yet it is handsome, 

 because employed to fine gardens and a bowling-green, where 

 you may have for your money good wine " ; also at Bedford, 

 " the ruins of an old castle, containing within it a fine bowling- 

 green." Among others he notes Saffron Walden, " a very good 

 bowhng-green without the town," and of Watton, a small town 

 in Norfolk, he says there is little remarkable, save a fine new 

 bowling-green at the " George Inn." These stretches of good 

 turf must have added much to the beauty of places, and in 

 the small towns served as public gardens and recreation 

 grounds. 



Every garden also contained one or more sundials. They 

 formed, as a rule, a centre of the design, and were in themselves 

 a fitting and appropriate ornament. The sundial has frequently 

 survived destruction when all other traces of an old garden 

 have been obhterated. At Exton, in Rutlandshire, the old 

 sundial stands in front of the house which was burnt down, 

 almost the only vestige of the garden which formerly lay in 

 front of its windows. On some dials the owner's coat of arms 

 was used to form the style, as in the one at Euston in Suffolk ; 

 or on others the motto of the family was inscribed round the 

 dial, which data is often a help in fixing the year of their con- 

 struction.^ Occasionally an entire garden was laid out like a 

 sundial, the figures being planted in box or yew. There is a 

 good example of one after this design at Wentworth Stain- 

 borough, which was made in 1732, in which the letters are of 

 box and the style of yew. Loggan's views of Oxford and 

 Cambridge, especially in the plans of New College, Oxford, and 



^ For descriptions and mottoes on sundials, see The Book of Sundials, 

 collected by Mrs. Alfred Gatty, 1872. 



13—2 



