The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate.
THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS

The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they were when first cut in 1704, for the trimming of them was long neglected, and these curiously clipped evergreens require constant attention. The date on one side, and the churchwardens’ initials of the period on the other, once standing out boldly, are now only to be discerned by the Eye of Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they were{79} cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of the village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also living here, was scornfully refused by them. They were, says the legend, ‘as proud as peacocks,’ and the mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed to travellers on passing through Bedfont by every coachman and guard; nor, indeed, would it be at all surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented it, for they were masters in the art of romancing. So the Fame of the Peacocks grew. An old writer at once celebrates them, and the then landlord of the ‘Black Dog,’ in the rather neat verse:—
Harvey, whose inn commands a view
Of Bedfont’s church and churchyard too,
Where yew-trees into peacock’s shorn,
In vegetable torture mourn.
Image unavailable: EAST BEDFONT.
EAST BEDFONT.

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At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious poem:—
Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod............