Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her letters to her daughter, tells her that she well remembers Caen Wood (she spells it Kane Wood[203]) House, and cannot wish her a more agreeable place. But in those days the house was comparatively insignificant, and the gardens and grounds not nearly so extensive or so well laid out as at present. Neither was it so secluded or self-contained. The road to Highgate at this time came close up to the principal entrance. A wood called Turner’s Wood adjoined it, which became in 1737 the site of the very original and favourite place of amusement, New Georgia—a tea-drinking house, and pleasure-grounds, with waterworks, and various ingenious contrivances laid out, invented, and executed by a sexagenarian, who appears to have had considerable mechanical skill, and some humour in his application of it. The cottage, on which an inscription set forth that he, Robert Caxton, had built it with his own hands,[204] contained several rooms, in one of which a chair sank on a person sitting in it, while another contained a pillory, into which, when a gentleman put his head, he could only be extricated by a lady kissing him—a grace which the free manners of the times allowed on the part of maids or matrons without the fear of scandal or the police-courts. We learn from contemporary writings that this contrivance became exceedingly popular, and the _Connoisseur_[205] informs us ‘that it made a favourite Sunday recreation of the citizens to put their necks into the pillory at New Georgia.’[206] But the close neighbourhood of this popular place of resort could scarcely have added to the charms of Ken Wood or the peace of its noble proprietor, and accordingly, some time subsequent to 1755, ‘for a cause that did him honour’ (the payment of his debts), Lord Bute sold Ken Wood to the then Attorney-General, the erewhile Mr. Murray of the Chicken House. Turner’s Wood, with the humorous cottage, garden, ponds, labyrinths, etc., became absorbed in the grounds of that domain.[207]