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 
bowling-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 obliterated. 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. 1 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 
1 For descriptions and mottoes on sundials, see The Booh of Sundials, 
collected by Mrs. Alfred Gatty, 1872. 
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