Another village in intimate touch with Putney is Barnes, that some fifty years ago was a pretty riverside hamlet, but is now rapidly growing into a densely populated suburb, the pond on the green fed by the Beverley Brook, and the still unenclosed common alone preserving to it something of its rural character. The ancient church has been so often restored that, with the exception of the fifteenth-century tower, it retains little of the original structure, and most of the ancestral homesteads, that were once a distinctive feature of the neighbourhood, have been pulled down. Within the church, however, are preserved a few interesting memorials of the long ago, such as a brass in memory of William Millebourne, who died in 1415, and a tablet bearing an inscription to Edward Rose of London, who just before his death, in 1653, bequeathed £20 for the purchase of an acre of land, {192} the proceeds of the cultivation of which were to be given to the poor of Barnes after the deduction of enough to keep his own tomb in repair, for the planting of more trees about his grave, and the preservation from injury by the erection of a wooden paling, instructions that were literally obeyed for a long spell of years. The eighteenth-century mural monument to Sir Richard Hoare is also noteworthy, and in the churchyard, which with its venerable trees has an old-world appearance, are several ancient tombs with quaint inscriptions, besides the one in which rests Richard Rose. [Sidenote: Barn Elms]