Lord Rosebery has presented the town of Epsom with the
common fields, comprising twelve acres, at Woodcote. In a letter to the Epsom Urban Council Lord Rosebery observes that the interruption of late of his old intimate connexion with Epsom had made him all the more anxious to give this proof of his deep and abiding affection for the place and the people. The new pleasure ground which Lord Rosebery, moved by " local piety," has so generously presented to his fellow-townsmen, is immortalized by Pepys, another lover of Epsom. For it was in these "common fields" that Pepys's friend Mrs. Turner gathered " one of the prettiest nosegays that I ever saw in my life," on the famous occasion when Pepys met on Epsom Downs the shepherd and his little boy " reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him," and recorded his experi- ences in a passage which Stevenson found the most romantic in all the Diary.
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