Close by this quaint corner the two old curiously gabled Dutch-looking cottages pictured here are seen. The space between them is now merely a yard occupied by the Richmond Corporation for storing carts and road-making materials, but these were once the lodge-gates to the entrance of Petersham Park, in the old times when it was a private estate containing old Petersham Lodge, the mansion of my Lord Harrington, that peer to whom the poet Thomson, of “The Seasons,” alluded in his lines on the view from Richmond Hill:
“There let the feasted eye unwearied stray;
Luxurious, there, rove through the pendant woods
That nodding hang o’er Harrington’s retreat.”
The view in these pages shows a glimpse of those pendant woods, still flourishing up along the ridge of Richmond Park, but it is now the better part of a hundred years since the Commissioners of Woods and Forests purchased that peer’s old estate, demolished the mansion, and added the land as a very beautiful annexe to Richmond Park. The cottages, with their little gardens, are charming, and would be even more so were they red bricks of which they are built, instead of common yellow stock brick.
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE.
I have just now remarked that there are at Petersham those who are numbered of the elect. But it must sadly be admitted that not all in the borough of Richmond, in which we have the doubtful honour of being included, are of the opinion that Petersham is inhabited by the children of light and grace. Indeed, the following remarks of a deleterious and poisonous character, lately brought to my notice, convince me that there exists among some misguided folk up yonder an idea that this most delightful of surviving villages within a short distance of London is inhabited wholly, or at least largely, by the mentally afflicted. This desolating and alarming belief was brought home to me by a friend, who hired a conveyance at Richmond station, to be brought down to our idyllic village.