Keston village, originally a dependency of the manor of the same name that was once the property {138} of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, consists of a few old houses and cottages, some grouped about the Red Cross Inn, also known as Keston Mark, possibly because it is situated on an ancient boundary, others on the common near a picturesque windmill. Its church, a humble little sanctuary, with a nave and chancel only, contains a fine Norman arch, possibly a relic of an earlier building, and in its quiet graveyard rests the novelist Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss Muloch. [Sidenote: Holwood House] On Keston Common, in a spring known as Cæsar's Well, rises the Ravensbourne, which widens close by into a series of ponds overshadowed by venerable trees, and near to them, within the grounds of Holwood House, are the remains of a Roman camp in which, according to some authorities, Aulus Plautius awaited the coming of the Emperor Claudius to receive the homage of the conquered Britons. Whether there be any foundation for this belief or not, there appears at one time to have been an important Roman settlement on Holwood Hill, a complete villa, the foundations of a temple, and many bricks and tiles having been unearthed at different times. Keston is, however, now chiefly celebrated for its connection with William Pitt, who lived for many years in a house that occupied the site of the present mansion in Holwood Park. Even when still a child living on his father's estate at Hayes, Pitt longed, as he often told his friends, 'to call the wood of Holwood his own,' and great was his delight when, in 1785, two years after he became Prime Minister, he was able to purchase it. The table at {139} which he used to write is still preserved in Holwood House, and the park was laid out by him. Many of its trees were planted by his own hand, and others, already venerable when he became their owner, are associated with interesting incidents of his career. One noble wide-spreading oak near the chief entrance to the park is specially revered, because of the tradition that Pitt and William Wilberforce were seated beneath it when they arranged the opening of the campaign against slavery, a fact commemorated by a quotation from one of the latter's letters that is cut in the back of a stone seat marking their resting-place, placed in position by Lord Stanhope in 1862. 'I well remember,' said the philanthropist, 'after a conversation with Mr. Pitt, in the open air, on the root of an old tree at Holwood, just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston, I resolved to give notice, on a fit occasion, to bring forward the abolition of the slave-trade.' The important meeting probably took place in 1787, and Wilberforce was often at Holwood House during the first few of the nineteen years' struggle thus inaugurated, finding distraction from his ever accumulating worries in aiding his host in his amateur woodcraft.