At Sotherton, Mr. Rushworth considers employing popular landscape improver, Humphry Repton, his rates being five guineas a day. Repton had coined the term "landscape gardener" and also popularised the title "Park" as the description of an estate. Austen is thought to have based her fictional Sotherton partly on Stoneleigh Abbey which her uncle, Rev Thomas Leigh, inherited in 1806. On his first visit to claim the estate, he took Austen, her mother and sister with him. Leigh, who had already employed Repton at Adlestrop, now commissioned him to make improvements at Stoneleigh where he redirected the River Avon, flooded a section of the land to create a mirror lake, and added a bowling green lawn and cricket pitch.