3-074-585 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Dedication of Burnham Beeches to the public: spring-time at Burnham Beeches, 1883. 'The Lord Mayor of London, accompanied by the members of the City Corporation and the Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, with some of the nobility and gentry of that county, were engaged on Wednesday last in the interesting public ceremony of opening for ever to the free enjoyment of Londoners and all mankind this celebrated piece of sylvan scenery, which has been described by many visitors in the last hundred years...We now present...two engravings drawn by permission of Mr. Vernon Heath from his beautiful photographs, "Spring-time at Burnham Beeches," and "The Elder Brethren," the grandest of the old trees, which are especially admired. The Burnham Beeches are about four miles from Slough, and five or six from Windsor...The poet Gray, who composed his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" at Stoke Pogis, very near here, first made Burnham Beeches a scene of literary celebrity by one of his letters to Horace Walpole, written in September, 1737'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.