A Georgian Memory: [By Llewelyn Powys]: the great West Country Road from London to Exeter at one time ran through the village of Odcombe, Somerset, and from there over Ham Hill. A little past the cross-roads named Five Ashes there still may be seen standing on the bank half-hidden in grass and bracken a weather worn milestone with the exact distance between Hyde Park Corner and the sandy Somerset highway, cut deeply into its surface. If the traveller walks westward a few hundred yards from this stone, he will observe a gate on his left which leads down to Pitt Pond. This miniature lake was made by one of the Phelipses of Montacute House during the eighteenth century, at a time when landscape gardening on a large scale was a fashionable occupation with country gentlemen. Mrs. Ingilby, the eldest daughter of the last squire of Montacute, has told me that the pond owes its name to the fact that it was William Pitt, the elder, who first put the notion of damming up the stream that runs through the wood into her ancestor’s head. It is likely enough that the Great Commoner had come over from his newly acquired property of Burton Pynsent to visit the Elizabethan mansion of his neighbour, his mind full the changes that he himself was making on his Sedgemoor hillside, and eager to share with any friend the advantages of his own lively invention. … …
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