Chapter I: Preface

Stevenson once took a journey with a donkey, which animal gave him much trouble. I took my journey in a reliable little motor-car that happily gave me none. Though I went by car I went leisurely, stopping often by the way, for full well I realise the reward of loitering, and, as all wise wanderers can testify, there is such a thing as profitably loitering, and a joy in it. Had they been of his day Carlyle would probably have declared that motor-cars "are mostly employed for the transport of fools best left at home," at least he said so of railways. With a car, however, you can control the pace, and can stop at your pleasure; it is an excellent servant, though in truth a bad master.

I went "in search of the picturesque" and I found it, also of the unfamiliar in a familiar land. If I came to an interesting place, or happened upon some curious character steeped in the traditions of the countryside, whose speech was perchance racy of the soil, the matter of time did not trouble me. Why should it? The day was mine and the promise of it, my object was not to cover so many miles and make them meaningless by undue haste, but to linger long enough in pleasant places, the more remote the more to my mind, so that they could make their appeal to me and I could gather something of the spirit of them--a something beyond what the eye merely sees.

"Wise men," says Kingsley, "go a-fishing"; they also go a-travelling, and I can imagine no touring ground--I write this having wandered far and wide in foreign lands--more delightful than rural England, away from the ugliness of modern cities and all that has to do with them. By not confining myself to the high-road but by seeking the byway and the lane I got right into the heart of the real, unspoilt country, where pleasant pastoral scenery, time-honoured homes, quiet farmsteads, old coaching inns (I hope I have not talked too much of them), peaceful villages, each with their ancient churches, quaint little market-towns picturesquely unprogressive, and here and there a ruined abbey or crumbling castle, grey with years, gladden the eye of the pilgrim. Places and scenes to be remembered.

Neither speed, by which we miss much, nor reliance on guide-books formed any part of my programme, for, as Sir Arthur Helps says, "in travel it is remarkable how much more pleasure we obtain from unexpected incidents than from deliberate sightseeing." I set forth for Anywhere by any roads, trusting to fortune for what I might see, content to know that I should arrive at a good many places.

One confession, perhaps, I may make. My book was mainly written at odd times and in varying moods during the journey, when the impressions of people I came across, of places and scenes, were fresh upon me. It is a first-hand, unvarnished record of experiences, but little altered or mended since, and I have been minded to leave it so, for the like reason that I generally prefer an artist's rough sketch and the spirit of it to his finished picture--for polish is not always an improvement, sometimes it is but mere gloss.

The route that eventually evolved itself is but roughly indicated in my Sketch Map, for I found it impossible, on a map of so small a scale, to trace all our devious wanderings, or to note more than a few of the many places visited. As to the illustrations, in a few cases where my photographs unfortunately proved failures I have ventured to replace them with my own drawings; for these--they are but mere brush notes--I crave a kind indulgence.

If I missed anything worth seeing on the way, I can only plead with Plato of old that "as it is the commendation of a good huntsman to find game in a wide wood, so it is no imputation if he hath not caught all."

J. J. HISSEY.

TREVIN TOWERS,
EASTBOURNE.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAGE

Different methods of travel--The old coaching days--Maps _versus_ guide-books--The fortune of the road--The South Downs--Hilly roads--The price of beauty--The sentimental traveller--A lonely farmstead--Oxen at work--A quaint old-world village 1

CHAPTER II

A quiet valley--The importance of the unimportant--Moated and haunted houses--Romances in stone--A farmhouse holiday--A picture-book village--A matter of Fate--The tomb of Gibbon the historian--A gruesome happening--Upright burials--An interesting church--A curious epitaph 17

CHAPTER III

An old coaching inn--The resurrection of the road--Far from anywhere--The charm of the unexpected--A historic milestone--"Mine host" of past days--Our port-wine drinking ancestors--The lure of the lane--Village life--Miniature effigy of a knight--The tomb of "the good Archbishop Leighton"--A church clerk's story 40

CHAPTER IV

Dane Hill--Epitaphs--A wild bit of country--Ashdown Forest--Exploring--The use of maps--Curious inn signs--A Tudor home--The Devil's door--A medieval priest and guest house--Old-fashioned flowers--An ancient interior--Curious carvings--Roads in the old times--The window and hearth tax 59

CHAPTER V

"Great-upon-Little"--The woods of Sussex--A maze of lanes--Frensham Pond--A holiday haunt--The legend of the shivering reeds--Rural inns--Roughing it(?)--Waverley Abbey--The monks of old--The sites of abbeys--Quiet country towns--Stocks and whipping-post--A curious font--"A haven of rest" 80

CHAPTER VI

"Mine ease in mine inn"--King John's Castle--Greywell--Country odours--Hidden beauty-spots--The valley of the Kennett--A remote spot--Our picturesque villages--The charm of ancientness--Solitude and genius--Coate--Richard Jefferies' birthplace 100

CHAPTER VII

Wootton Bassett--A quaint market-hall--Old towns--A Roman road--The spirit of the past--A pre-Elizabethan gate-house--The Royal Agricultural College--Chat with an antiquary--Norman doorways--Second-hand book catalogues--Syde--Cotswold houses--Over the Cotswolds--At a Jacobean inn 121

CHAPTER VIII

The Vale of Evesham--A stormy drive--An angler's inn--A big fish--Dating from "the flood"!--Fishermen's tales--The joys of "the gentle craft"--Hotel visitors' books--A "quiet day"--Burford church and its monuments--The golden age of travel--A fine old half-timber inn--Ludlow--A Saxon doorway 141

CHAPTER IX

Place names--Bell ringing for lost travellers--A Robber's Grave and its story--Wild Wales--A picturesque interior--The fascination of the moors--Machynlleth--A Royal and ancient house--Ten miles of beauty--Aberdovey--Tramps and their ways--The poetical tramp 161

CHAPTER X

Mallwyd--Falling waters--Dinas Mawddwy--Amongst the moors and mountains--A wild drive--A farmer's logic--A famous old inn--A fisherman's tale--A Roman inscribed stone--Brass to old Thomas Parr--A cruel sport--Wem and its story--A chat with "mine host"--Hawkestone and its wonders 182

CHAPTER XI

Red Castle--A stately ruin--Old houses and new owners--The joy of discovery--High Ercall and its story--Mills and millers--The life of a stone-breaker--Old folk-songs--Haughmond Abbey--Ancient tombs--A peaceful spot--A place for a pilgrimage 203

CHAPTER XII

An angler's haunt--Ferries and stepping-stones--Curious old stained-glass window--The ruins of Uriconium--Watling Street--The Wrekin--Richard Baxter's old home--A Cabinet minister's story--A pretty village--Buildwas Abbey--Ironbridge--The "Methodists' Mecca" 221

CHAPTER XIII

Madeley Court--Chat with a collier--The miner's rule of life--Charles II. in hiding--The building of Boscobel--The story of a moated house--A stirring episode--A startling discovery--A curious planetarium--A wishing-well--Lilleshall Abbey--"The Westminster Abbey of Shropshire"--A freak in architecture--Tong Castle--Church clerk-hunting 234

CHAPTER XIV

A wonderful collection of tombs--A tombstone inscription by Shakespeare--A leper's door--Relics--Manufacturing the antique--Curiosity shops--The Golden Chapel--"The Great Bell of Tong"--White Ladies Nunnery--The grave of Dame Joan--Boscobel and its story--A tradition about The "Royal Oak" 253

CHAPTER XV

A town with two names--An amusing mistake--Abbot's Bromley and its quaint horn dance--Dr. Johnson doing penance at Uttoxeter--Burton-on-Trent--The "Hundreds All" milestone--Indoor wind-dials--Stone-milled flour--The old Globe Room at Banbury--Dick Turpin's pistol--A strange find 272

CHAPTER XVI

A gruesome carving--Architectural tit-bits--An ancient and historic hostelry--Chipping Norton--Wychwood--A parson's story--"Timothying"--Shipton-under-Wychwood--On the Cotswolds--"The grey old town" of Burford--Two old manor-houses--A new profession--Highworth--Church relics 293

CHAPTER XVII

Little country towns--The romance of the ferry--"The Bear" at Woodstock--Curious conditions of tenure--Where the Black Prince was born--Islip--The mystery of Joseph's Stone--An English Holland--Boarstall Tower--The ancient town of Brill--"Acres for Aeroplanes"--Stokenchurch--A quaint hiring fair 316

CHAPTER XVIII

An inn of the old-fashioned sort--A chat with "mine host"--A weird experience--Ghost stories--An ancient rectory house--A quaint interior--A haunted passage--Lost in a fog--The game of bowls--An old posting bill--The siege of Alton church--Ants as weather prophets 334

CHAPTER XIX

The Meon Valley--Warnford--A hidden church--A house "a million years old"!--A Saxon sun-dial--A ruined home--Corhampton and its Saxon church--A modern "Naboth's Vineyard"--An out-of-the-world village--A curious story--Quaint carvings and their legend--A church tower built by servants 349

CHAPTER XX

A tramp's story--A relic of a famous sea-fight--A tame road--Inn gardens--New landlords and old traditions--Chichester market-cross--A wind-swept land--"Dull and dreary Bognor"--A forgotten poet--Littlehampton--Country sights and sounds--A lulling landscape 363