Towthorpe is an insignificant and very secluded village, about four miles north of York, a little off the high road from thence to Sheriff-Hutton. Nothing is now left of the old manor-house; but near to the spot where it may be supposed to have stood, a not uninteresting object still remains, to carry the mind back to the days when Lancelot Turner and his nephew William were the proprietors. This is a sort of pleasance upon a small scale--a quadrangular plot of ground, about fifty yards square, surrounded by a rather broad moat, and thickly planted with fruit-trees arranged with some approach to symmetry--two or three of the outer rows being nut or filbert trees, the rest apple, pear, and plum. The nut-trees are obviously of great age, their stems being strangely contorted, and having attained a thickness seldom seen in this part of the country. The other trees have a less aged appearance; and probably a temple or summer-house may have formerly been placed upon the centre of the little island. A building of this kind, with its accompanying moat, was a favourite ornament in the quaint pleasure-grounds of the Elizabethan mansion. The moat would doubtless form a useful _piscaria_, especially valuable to persons to whom fish was, at certain seasons, an indispensable article of diet. At present, instead of seeing carp and tench, as in former days, quietly gliding through its waters, on approaching the island our ears were greeted with the harsh croaking of innumerable frogs and toads, the sole inhabitants of the moat. Whilst viewing this now solitary memorial of the past, it was impossible to avoid giving a little license to the imagination, and peopling the tiny pleasance with the forms of William Turner and Thomasine Newton in the happy hours of their courtship and early married life, which were spent at Towthorpe,--she musing over one of the song-books of their uncle Lancelot, which were so significantly reserved by his will for her especial use. What a contrast is the dull and uninteresting and most unpicturesque plain of the ancient forest of Galtres, in which the countryhouse of Edith Pope's parents stood, to the glorious vale of the Thames, where her illustrious son solaced himself with his trim garden, his grotto, and his quincunx! [38] Miles Newton, of Thorpe, in the county of York, gentleman, made his will on May 18, 1604. He desires to be buried in the church of Rippon. He gives to his eldest son Richard the bedstead which was his grandfather Thomas Collins's. To his son Christopher, a bedstead which was his (the testator's) father's. He names his wife, Jane Newton; his son, Henry, and his daughters, Katherine, Johanna, Rebecca (to whom he gives the better of the cushions which was her grandmother Beckwith's), Dorothy, and Elizabeth. He makes his children, Richard Newton and Christopher Newton, executors; and his brother Leonard Beckwith, and George Mallory, supervisors. Proved at York, by Richard Newton only, April 8, 1605.