Chapter IV: Part 4

In those days there was no church organ but only a barrel instrument with twenty mechanical tunes, not so tuneful as they might have been had some of the cogs not been missing off the wheels. Being missing, they gave rather a weird twist to the “Old Hundredth” and the others that made up the repertoire.

The interior of the building was then greatly neglected, and the lighting was accomplished by the aid of candles stuck on pieces of tin nailed to the ends of the pews. The church in those days possessed no font, and when the question of providing one came up at a vestry meeting, it was resolved that one be not ordered, “because there are never any christenings for the parishioners of Perivale, nor likely to be any.” In after years, on renovating the church, the ancient font was discovered among some rubbish. It is inscribed, “The gift of Simon Coston, gent., 1665.”

The pretty little church is now well cared for. Notice the very, very ancient and massive timbering of the belfry, also weather-boarded outside, and looking a very curiously un-ecclesiastical object across the meadows. The rectory is also a timber-framed structure of the fifteenth century.

Having thus recounted the short and simple annals of little Perivale, we will take the first road to the left after passing the church, and, crossing the Brent, turn to the right. This is a remarkably pretty road, with the river on one side, fringed with rushes and pollard willows. Little humpbacked bridges carry the road over it, and the wayside is marked with white posts, graduated up to seven and nine feet, to mark the depth of the floods prevalent here in winter. Now come the beginnings of Greenford—properly called “Greenford Magna,” to distinguish it from “Parva” we have just left, down the road. A sharp rise leads past a left-hand turning, immediately followed by one on the right, where Greenford village will be found scattered sparsely along the sides of a steep descent. At the foot of this, just before coming to the rustic little weather-boarded church, there is a lane on the left for Northolt, a mile and a quarter distant. Northolt, despite its somewhat severely sounding name (which, however, merely signifies “north wood,” just as Southall, originally “Southholt,” stands for a woodland once standing to the south), is one of the prettiest and most delightful villages in Middlesex; if it is, indeed, large enough to be called a village at all. Broad selvedges of common line the road where its scattered cottages do not form a street, and the exquisitely weathered and stained and patched little church stands away on a grassy bank, overlooking the scene from amidst a cluster of windy elms. The church is just in the picturesque condition the artist loves and the restorer wants to sweep and garnish into newness.

A long road of three and a half miles runs straight across from Northolt to Eastcote, undulating all the way. Reaching the cross-roads, turn right for Eastcote, which is a hamlet of Ruislip. Here are ups and downs along a tree-shaded hamlet of a few park-like residences and pretty cottages, the road bordered by the lazy waters of the Colne, lying listless, like a moat. Observe, on the right, the queer, old-fashioned, timber-framed cottage that serves the hamlet for a post-office.

Bear to the right at the fork in the road for Pinner, entered by a cluster of cottages and “villas,” built since the opening of the Metropolitan Extension to Harrow and Aylesbury a few years ago. Pinner is a large village in process of being spoiled by its railway facilities. A very broad street, lined with old-fashioned (and some new-fashioned) houses, leads up to the imposing church, which has a singular tall cross on the summit of its tower. Note on the way the “Queen’s Head Inn,” its sign a contemporary (and very bad) portrait of Queen Anne, dated 1705.

An odd tomb, in the shape of a tower, is to be seen in the churchyard. Now thickly overgrown with ivy, it is a picturesque object, but the peculiarity of it is that the body of the person “buried” here—a certain William London, in 1809—is contained in a stone-encased coffin, projecting from the tower, half-way up. The end of the coffin bears an epitaph, which, however, affords no clue to this freak. Legends, that may or may not be well founded, tell that the descendants of William London, a Scotch merchant, retain the property bequeathed by him so long as he remains “above ground.” This tower is supported on arches filled in with ornamental ironwork, on which appear the mysterious words, “BYDE-MY-TYME.” The inquisitive stranger naturally wants to know what he is waiting for, but the mystery is insoluble.

Leaving Pinner behind, turn left by the church, and so, by the second on the right, past Pinner, L. & N.W.R., Station, and along a very good running road, but otherwise featureless, to Stanmore. This is a good run of four miles. At Stanmore, a beautiful but growing village, there is the old ivy-covered tower of the demolished church standing romantically beside the new building. Past this there are many puzzling roads; an unlikely looking narrow one leads to Whitchurch and Edgware, but it is practically useless to try to indicate it here. Ask one of the many people who are always to be found at this corner. The route lies past Canons Park. Whitchurch Church is an ugly, would-be classic building. In the churchyard is the grave of the so-called “Harmonious Blacksmith,” from whose melodious anvil Handel is (incorrectly) said to have obtained the famous tune. It is decorated with a sculptured headstone.

Within a short distance comes Edgware, and, turning to the right, along the road to London, we spin along up Redhill, and then, after doing a mile and a quarter from Edgware, espy a turning on the right with a sign-post directing to Mount Pleasant. This is a steep little climb, leading to a charming country lane down which to coast. Take the next turning to the left, leading to Kingsbury Green, and then to the right, and, still bearing to the right, find a lane on the left, leading past Chalk Hill House and onward, circuitously leftwards to Wembley, around the park, where the colossal unfinished tower constitutes a distressing eyesore. At Wembley turn right, as for Sudbury, and, immediately after passing the station, to the left, coming down through canal-side Alperton (which every inhabitant will persist in calling “Appleton”), to the junction with our outward journey.

UNDER THE NORTH DOWNS

So wooded are these lofty hills, so rustic their every bend and fold, and of so wondrous a fertility their bounteous soil, that, were it not for the established fact of mere distance from London lending the west country an additional charm, one would dare to compare this district with South Devon itself. Its actual merits are equal; its distance from town less than thirty miles, as compared with two hundred. But beyond compare are its old cottages, the red brick and timbered farmsteads, and the ancient manor-houses of this corner of Surrey, whose ruddy walls, or green and lichened roofs, exercise the palettes and the pencils of artists innumerable. Surrey farmhouses have their likeness nowhere else, and in no other county shall you seek with equal certainty of success these characteristics, or those clustered chimneys that make every humble home of these valley roads and sequestered bylanes an old-world-mansion, dignified and reposeful.

It could be very persuasively argued, if need were, _à propos_ of the title of this paper, that no one should climb hills if he would keep a proper respect for them. Let the valleys be easefully pedalled and exertion saved, and the fine sense of mystery and the illimitable which hilltops give, whether wreathed in mists or bathed in sunlight, be at the same time preserved. When you climb a hill you know its limits. You know, as a result of your exploration, every minor feature of it, and thus, fully informed, have of necessity something of that contempt engendered by familiarity. Thus are the easefully inclined excused of their easefulness. Not for such the toilsome climb—to discover that the grass of the hilltop is merely the grass of the valley, only of less luxuriant growth. “All is vanity and vexation of spirit,” said the Preacher. He had probably climbed the hilltops and become disillusioned. Thus it is to be an explorer! Why, even those stalwarts who have climbed Parnassus have found the empyrean something too thin, and the grass of those heights not so much rare as rank. Happy, then, those who are content with the level lands, and regard the uplands from that safe and comfortable vantage-point. They keep their illusions, and if they be imaginative there is no reason why lions and tigers, eagles and other fearful wild-fowl, should not inhabit the North Downs, instead of the rabbits and the song-birds that reward the explorer’s gaze.

The readiest way to reach this district is by train to Redhill Junction; not that anyone would resort to that modern town—that bald and artless creation of railway times—for any interest attaching to it, but its position makes it the key to a lovely stretch of country.

It is a charmingly happy circumstance that the southern face of the North Downs is followed for many miles—indeed, along the whole extent of that noble range, from Maidstone to Guildford and Farnham—by splendid roads, reasonably level, good, and direct. Those roads are traced in great measure in other pages of this book; let our route now lie from Redhill to Guildford.

From the grim cluster of asylums, reformatories, and industrial schools at Redhill, one finds solace presently at Reigate, where houses of from sixteenth to late eighteenth century date abound. It is a town typical of the coaching age, to which it owed its eighteenth-century prosperity, and is built in characteristic red brick. Thence to Reigate Heath, on whose fine breezy expanse the curious may discover that prime curiosity, the “Windmill Church.” The old windmill thus converted into a church nearly a quarter of a century ago has a curious history. Now a chapel-of-ease to Reigate, under the style of the “Chapel of Holy Cross,” the first service was conducted on the 14th of September 1880, and has been continued regularly on every Sunday since. The reason for this singular conversion was purely sentimental, the mill standing on the site of one of four ancient wayside oratories established for the use of pilgrims in days when this, the Pilgrims’ road from Southampton to Winchester and Canterbury, was largely travelled. One of the oratories became a prison, another suffered a transformation into a house attached to pleasure-grounds, and the Chapel of Holy Cross became a windmill. The original building, built for worship and used for milling, has long disappeared, and the present one, built as a mill and now used as a church, took its place. No attempt has been made to alter the character of the interior, whose oddly timbered circular space is simply fitted with altar, rush-bottomed chairs, and cocoa-nut matting, the great beams painted and here and there stencilled with ecclesiastical designs. A rental of one shilling a year is paid for the use of the building to Lady Henry Somerset.

All the way from Reigate Heath to Buckland the North Downs are seen going in a procession to the right, beneath them nowadays springing up the country homes of a generation that loves scenery and can scarce understand why our grandfathers did not appreciate it. Thoroughly typical of the old time was Captain Morris, author of those town-loving lines—

“In town let me live, then; in town let me die;
For no, I can’t relish the country, not I.
If one _must_ have a cottage in summer to dwell,
O give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.”

His aspiration was denied him, for that eighteenth-century Anacreon died here at Brockham.

A solemn row of immemorial yews along the shoulders of the hills marks where the sandalled feet of pilgrims trod the Pilgrims’ Way. At Buckland a pond, a sign-post, a tall elm, and a church that looks like a barn, and a barn that looks like a church, make up a very pretty picture. Betchworth lies to the left hand, a mile onward, and possesses some stately old houses. To it succeeds Dorking.

Now Dorking, if you can conceive the conjunction, is at once aristocratic and popular. The proximity of that Cockney pleasance, Box Hill, is, of course, responsible for the one, and doubtless the overawing neighbourhood of Denbies and Deepdene accounts for the other. Dorking is celebrated for a mythical battle, for a breed of fowls, and for having been the home of Tony Weller, who kept the “Markis o’ Granby” here. The name of the place was invariably spelt “Darking” a hundred years ago, even by literary folks, and country people still pronounce it in that way. It is a supremely cheerful town, with a very wide High Street.

Beyond the town the North Downs assume a wilder and more wooded aspect, where the modern but pretty hamlet of Westcott stands by the way, and the deep valley and heavy woodlands of Wotton open out delightfully upon the wayfarer. In the “little church of Wotton”—pronounced “Wootton”—lies John Evelyn, the Diarist and lover of trees, with many other Evelyns, and Wotton Park is just beyond, where many trees of his planting yet flourish. Wotton Hatch, a lonely hamlet, overlooks the scene.

At Abinger Hammer and Gomshall, the trickling streams that have followed the valley are dammed up into “hammer ponds,” where, “once upon a time,” iron was forged. But it is nearly two hundred years since the last furnace was blown out and the final hammer rang upon the ultimate anvil at Abinger. The days when iron-ore was dug and smelted in Kent, Sussex, and Surrey are long forgot.

Shiere succeeds to Gomshall in half a mile. Shiere and picturesqueness are synonymous and interchangeable terms; a place composed of a narrow street with queer cottages all tumbled together, as though for warmth, or as if land were scarce and dear.

Now, along a winding but excellent road, we come to Albury; the famous “Silent Pool” lying a little way off to the right, on a fork of the road leading to Newlands Corner. It was the egregious Martin Tupper who made the “Silent Pool” famous, but, truth to tell, it is but a pretty lakelet, whose real name was Sherbourne Pond. Its remarkably clear waters swarm with trout, whose extraordinary tameness is perhaps due to the many visitors, who feed them for the pleasure of seeing them spring out of the water for their food.

Coming to Albury, we enter upon the loveliest section of the whole journey. The long, scattered village, with picturesque old houses and modern cottages, built with rare good taste, leads to Albury Park, the Surrey home of the Duke of Northumberland. The partly ruined church in the park, with the modern Irvingite transept and the curiously domed roof of the central tower, is worth seeing and sketching, as also is the romantically situated St. Martha’s Chapel, crowning one of the most conspicuous hills of the North Downs.

“St. Martha’s” Chapel may really have been “sancti martyris” originally, and dedicated to the “holy blisful martyr,” St. Thomas of Canterbury. It was built in the late twelfth century and was a chapel on the old Pilgrims’ Way. The corruption of the name into “St. Martha’s” can readily be understood.

On the way to Chilworth, Postford Ponds skirt the roadside and form a pretty grouping of water, woodlands, and old farmhouses, with St. Martha’s in the distance. Chilworth, whose not very accessible parish church St. Martha’s Chapel is, lies on the little stream that forms this chain of ponds. But hear what old Cobbett says: “This valley, which seems to have been created by a bountiful Providence as one of the choicest retreats of man, which seems formed for a scene of innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the mind of man under the influence of the Devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of banknotes.” The banknotes are no longer made at Chilworth, but the manufacture of “villainous saltpetre” still proceeds.

To Chilworth succeeds the wide common of Shalford, leading close by the winding Wey to Guildford town. Here that little river, evidently not so little, ages ago, has cut a deep cleft through the immense rampart of the North Downs, so that the road to the town is quite deeply recessed in a valley, and flat.

Do you know Guildford, and yet not love it—its quaint High Street, the steepest, they say, in all England, built along the slope of this cleft made by the Wey; its churches, Abbot’s Hospital, and that quaintest and most curious of old buildings, the Guildhall?

They do not build Guildhalls of this kind to-day, the architects who are called in to design such things. Perhaps they are not allowed. Nor are they called Guildhalls. “Perish the name!” say in effect the upstart towns of this expansive era, and nothing will serve their turn but “Municipal Buildings.” We know the Municipal Building order of architecture, and, sooth to say, we do not like it, whether it be named Classic or Victorian Renaissance, or labelled in any other style intended to cloak poverty of design and display a crazy patchwork of priggish eclecticism.

Compared with the frowning Keep of Guildford, the Guildhall is, of course, the merest parvenu, having been built in 1683, two years before Monmouth was dragged up to execution on Tower Hill after Sedgemoor fight. But the old Norman tower is four-square and stern, with only the picturesqueness that historic association can find; while the belfried turret of the Guildhall, and its boldly projecting clock, impending massively over the pavement of the High Street, are the pride of the eye and a delight to the artistic sense of all them that love their like.

Leaving Guildford’s picturesque High Street by one of the retiring thoroughfares branching from it on the north side, past that most sketchable of Guildhalls, we come, in something less than a mile, to a crossing of the Wey, and so to a hillside parting of the roads. Here we take the left-hand turning, to the secluded hamlet of Wood Street, whence roads and lanes in plenty—some straight, many devious—lead to that hamlet of “Normandy” where, in 1835, William Cobbett died. If it be true that William the First “loved the red deer like a father,” it may be said with at least equal appropriateness that Cobbett had as great a love for trees. Here, at oddly named Normandy, he oscillated between the equally congenial occupations of harrying a political opponent and of creating plantations, and many of the saplings he planted with his own hands are now grown up to form the woodlands that clothe this countryside.

It was well for Cobbett’s peace of mind that Aldershot Camp, the signs of whose neighbourhood now begin to be evident on our way to Ash and Farnham, had not come into being while he still lived; for, soldier though he had been, and a characteristically independent and sturdy one, he grew to hate the military, and never missed an opportunity of venting his apocalyptic wrath upon the Army. Did he live now, he would find plenty opportunities here, and around his birthplace at Farnham; for the presence of the redcoats—and the blue, the grey, the green, and the khaki coats too—is very much in evidence, alike on the road and on the surface of the road, cruelly cut up by ammunition waggons and guns.

And so through crooked-streeted Ash, with its public-houses dedicated to military commanders distinguished and heroic, or merely Royal, and the stores and the shops showing the unromantic and domestic side of the soldier’s life, which, and not glory, is nearly the whole of Tommy Atkins’s existence, varied with dusty and inglorious drills in gritty barrack-yards and field-days in the Sahara-like Long Valley.

The neighbourhood of Aldershot and its camp is highly interesting to those who take an interest in soldiering (and most feel an attraction that way), but it is utterly destructive of the picturesque.

A mile beyond Ash we cross insensibly from Surrey into Hampshire, and in another mile back again, owing, not to any vagary in the road, an eminently and respectably straight highway, but to the serpentine and elusive character of the county boundary. And thus—through unsponsored new hamlets, the sporadic but unacknowledged offshoots of Aldershot, sprawling yonder across the sandy wastes—to the tail of the Hog’s Back, whose bristles are the larches and firs of this heathy country.

The right-hand way, at the junction of the roads, leads into Farnham, “rather better,” as the country people say, than a mile off. It is conceivable that, at the end of a long day, this might appear to be “rather worse.” Farnham remains itself still, despite its near military neighbour, a quietly prosperous old town, with a long east to west street, and a short and broad one in the middle of the town, running north to the Castle, and beyond it to a very welter of firs and sands. Farnham Castle yet gives its tone to Farnham, for it is still—as it has been for nearly eight hundred years—the residence of the Bishops of Winchester; although, to be sure, the Bishops cut a very small figure nowadays beside that soldier-statesman-churchman, Henry of Blois, who originally built the fortress. Farnham is appropriately sedate and decorous. The ruined Keep is here, in its pretty garden shaded by ancient cedars, and there are a few vestiges of antiquity within the great range of buildings; but very few, for the restorations by Bishop Morley in the late seventeenth century, and those of recent years, have preserved the place as a residence at the expense of archæology. Even so, the picture made by the long and varied front looking down upon Farnham and seeming to block the street, is very grand.

Away on the other side of the main street is the church; the churchyard a place of pilgrimage for the sake of Cobbett, that ardent reformer who frothed at the mouth with political denunciations for forty years, and now lies beneath a closely railed-in altar-tomb on the north side. A more cheerful resort is his birthplace, a very old gabled house, now the “Jolly Farmer Inn,” facing a bridge across the Wey, in Abbey Street.

He was born in 1762; and almost alone, perhaps, among the places with which he was familiar, the house is unchanged.

It is past the railway station that one leaves Farnham for Waverley Abbey. Signs of the hop-growing industry of which this town is a centre are evident to sight and smell in early days of autumn, for then are rumbling carts laden with fat sacks (“pockets,” they call them) of fragrant hops met with at every turn, and the scent of them produces the most furious appetite.

After passing the level crossing take the left-hand road, which leads to Waverley in under two miles, with Moor Park on the left, once the seat of Sir William Temple, the patron of Swift, the “eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman” who was that retired statesman’s secretary. How little dignified was the post above that of a lackey may be judged from the flirtation Swift began in the servants’ hall with Lady Giffard’s waiting-maid, a flirtation “which,” says Macaulay, “was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard.” The waiting-maid was “Stella,” and the poor secretary became that terrible genius, Dean Swift.

The park, rugged and impressive, with sombre conifers, is traversed by the Wey. Under a sundial before the house is buried the heart of Sir William Temple, the former owner of the place, at his own request, in a silver box; and at the other end of this domain is that celebrated cavern, “Mother Ludlam’s Hole,” a cave containing a spring, now railed off from vulgar profanation by an ornamental iron railing. It was here that the brethren of Waverley Abbey, it is thought, found the source of their drinking water. “Mother Ludlam” was a chimerical personage of the Robin Goodfellow type, who, according to the superstitious peasantry, supplied suppliants with any article they might require, on their repairing to her cave at the stroke of midnight, turning round thrice, and three times repeating the request; promising to return the borrowed article in two days. The next morning the object wished for would be found outside the mouth of the cavern. This beneficent personage at last lent a cauldron to some ill-principled person or another who forgot to return it, and since then the charm has ceased to work. The proof of this story lies in the fact that the cauldron is to be seen to this day, preserved in the vestry of Frensham Church; a fact, of course, conclusive!

A pretty, rose-entwined cottage by the entrance to Moor Park still goes by the name of “Stella’s,” and opposite, on the right hand of the road, is the lodge gate leading to the grounds of Waverley Abbey, whose scanty ruins stand in a flat meadow beside the river Wey, within sight of dark, pine-clad Crooksbury Hill. The river describes three parts of a circle around these crumbling walls, the poor relics of the first Cistercian Abbey in England. There is, indeed, more left of the Abbey underground than above, for the crypt remains perfect.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this spot is intangible, and lies in the fact that the title of the Waverley novels derives from these ruined walls, Scott having read those still-existing records of this religious brotherhood,—the “Annales Waverlienses,”—and having been impressed with the musical sound of the name.

Leaving the grounds of Waverley Abbey, the dark, pine-clad mass of Crooksbury Hill lies ahead, and must be climbed to reach Seale and the neighbouring villages that lie down below its northern shoulder, and under the lee of that ten miles’ stretch of the North Downs, from Guildford to Farnham, known as the Hog’s Back. Seale is a sheltered, secluded nook, shut in by pines. Two miles distant from it, following under the ridge towards Guildford, along an unfrequented road, comes Puttenham, owing everything, in a picturesque sense, to its solemn background of hills and woodlands. Without that scenic backing it would be nothing remarkable.

From here we bend in a south-easterly direction, away from the near companionship of the hills and woods, towards Compton, a village remarkable for its little Norman and Early English church, almost hidden from the stranger’s notice by the trees that densely surround it and its unassuming shingled spire. Notice the odd dormer windows in the roof, like those of a dwelling-house. But the great peculiarity here is that the chancel is in two storeys, a most remarkable and unusual device. The exterior of the chancel is commonplace, not to say ugly, and was rebuilt in 1860, when traces of an outside staircase to the upper storey of the chancel were destroyed; but the interior remains particularly beautiful and interesting. The chancel is divided from the nave by a round-headed Norman arch, ornamented with dog-tooth moulding, and immediately over the altar rises another of exactly the same type, but of only half its height. It is this, with its groined ceiling, dividing the eastern end of the building into two floors, which makes the chancel two-storeyed. This upper chamber is conjectured to have served the double purpose of rood-loft and chantry chapel; but beyond conjecture no one has ever been able to go, for the history of the church is silent on this point.

From Compton to the entrance of Loseley Park is a mile. The gates will be seen on the left, and admit to a tree-shaded park, which might almost, from its solitude and wildness, have been the original of the legend of the Sleeping Beauty. Such is Loseley, and such the grey stone Early Elizabethan house, standing ghostlike at the end of the avenue. Loseley was begun by Sir William More in 1515, and never completed after the architect’s full design. Still, it is a large and stately mansion, and contains treasures of stained glass and carvings, of armour and relics, that make it notable indeed. The “Loseley MSS.” preserved here, the correspondence during nearly five hundred years of England’s most famous statesmen and history-makers, is among the best of such collections.

A ramble through the park brings the traveller to a road running right and left. The turning to the right helps us toward the completion of our circle, and leads past another old mansion, Brabœuf House, to the old Portsmouth road, by St. Catherine’s Hill. Here our way lies downhill, to the left, into Guildford; but, before concluding, let us ascend the easy path to the hilltop, and look down to where that elusive companion of the greater part of this tour, the river Wey, runs far below, past picturesque St. Catherine’s Ferry. It is a romantic spot, this hollow on the hillside, through which runs the old highway to Portsmouth. Many years ago some long-dissolved Highway Trust lowered the road through the crest of the hill for the sake of the horses, and “St. Catherine’s Hollow,” as it is known, has since become the spot for a painter. Turner, indeed, painted it, but he was more concerned to show the ruined Chapel of St. Catherine beyond than to linger over the exquisite wildness and ruggedness of these overhanging banks. They are of the yellowest sand and softest sandstone, and here and there they form cliffs not so diminutive but that the sand martins have dug their tunnelled homes in them, and have found safety from attack. The face of these clifflets is as full of these nest-holes as the white cliffs of Dover are of batteries and casemates, and if you are content to wait quietly and to watch patiently, the lively inhabitants of them will be observed coming and going. Other tunnels there are here, bigger and less tidy. These are the burrows of the rabbits. There is a greater tunnel still down below—that of the South-Western Railway, between Guildford and Godalming, which collapsed suddenly one midnight in 1895, burying horses and carriages from the stables of a villa on this hilltop. Animals and carriages alike fell through into the depths beneath and were destroyed. The line was blocked for a week, and during that period this road was strangely peopled with omnibuses imported from London to convey passengers between Guildford Station and the temporary station of “St. Catherine’s,” built in a meadow beside the line, at the other end of the tunnel. The long-since ruined chapel of St. Catherine narrowly escaped complete demolition on that occasion; but it still stands, roofless and desecrated, as it has done for centuries past. Perhaps, in these days of restorations and revivals, it will be brought back to a decent condition of repair, even as was the hilltop chapel of St. Martha’s near by. With this speculation we will make for Guildford, and the conclusion of this lengthy run.

THE SUBURBAN THAMES

This run of thirty-seven or thirty-eight miles commences at Esher and Claremont Station, situated within a hundred yards or so of the old Portsmouth road that passes through Esher village. Leaving the station behind, you turn to the right at the high road, and so come up a gentle, mile-long incline to Esher, where, instead of wheeling up the long street, the first turning to the right is taken for Hersham. This leads to a fine gravel road passing between Esher new church and the village green, with the lodge gates of Esher Place showing prominently away to the right. In the grounds, in a low-lying meadow by the river Mole, stands the picturesque battlemented Gatehouse, all that is left of the once proud, but unhealthy, palace of Cardinal Wolsey, built long before Hampton Court. When the Cardinal lost favour with Henry the Eighth, that autocratic monarch commanded him to retire to this damp and objectionable retreat. Some of the fallen statesman’s letters are still in existence, written from this spot, complaining of the “moist and corrupt” air.

It is a delightful coast down for some distance towards Hersham, along a quite unspoiled road, crossing a bridge that spans the Mole. Hersham, a hamlet where four roads meet, is in summer a by no means unpleasing place, but the contemplative wayfarer, thinking of its fortunes all round the calendar, wonders how the inhabitants of this, and places similarly remote, can exist through the dull winter’s days without feeling buried alive.

Keeping to the right through Hersham, the way to Weybridge lies along a road bordering Burwood Park, and shaded by solemn pines, coming at length up a slight rise to a heathy expanse just outside Walton-on-Thames railway station. Keep straight on, with the railway on the right hand, for a mile, and then turn right along an excellent straight road for another mile, leading direct down into Weybridge.

That once pleasant village is rapidly being spoiled. Its healthy surrounding of heaths and pine-woods, and its position on the Wey and near the Thames, together with the fact of being situated on the South-Western main line, have caused the building of innumerable villas and the transformation of the quiet, old-fashioned village street into a suburban thoroughfare. The small green is still left, and on it a memorial column to the Duchess of York, who died more than eighty years ago at Oatlands Park, close by. It is surmounted by a pyramidal stone supporting a ducal coronet. If it were not for the very curious history that belongs to it, the column would not be worth much attention.

How few, however, know that history, or that it once stood in the centre of the street at Seven Dials, near Drury Lane! It was the pillar, in fact, that supported the seven-sided sundial once presenting a face to each of the seven radiating streets which centred at that spot. It was originally erected there about 1694, and stood until July 1773, when it was thrown down by a party of adventurers who, possessed by the singular idea that there was treasure buried at the base, excavated it, and found—nothing. The stones then occupied a neglected corner in a London stonemason’s yard for many years, until, indeed, they were purchased in 1822 by the inhabitants of Weybridge for the present purpose. The large block of stone originally supporting the dials may be seen embedded in the pathway near the “Ship Inn,” where it was long used as a mounting-block for horsemen; but it seems, curiously enough, to be only six-sided. The holes where the gnomons of the dials were fixed are still visible in the stone.

Oatlands Park, where the Duchess of York once lived, has long been converted into a riverside hotel, in whose grounds the gravestones of her pet dogs, to the number of sixty or so, are still to be seen. There lie “Pepper,” “Faithful Queenie,” “Topsy” and “Dinah,” and many another. “Julia” has the most elaborate epitaph—

“Here Julia rests, and here each day
Her mistress strews her grave with flowers,
Mourning her death whose frolic play
Enlivened oft the lonesome hours.
From Denmark did her race descend,
Beauteous her form and mild her spirit;
Companion gay, and faithful friend—
May ye who read have half her merit.”

Close by these memorials is still to be seen the two-storeyed grotto built by a Duke of Newcastle at a cost, it is said, of £40,000. It engrossed the labour of two men—father and son—for some years, and is decorated with shells, spars, marbles, and stalactites, said to be of rare varieties, but not a little shabby and dingy nowadays.

From Weybridge we make for Chertsey, crossing the Wey, and running beside the now beautiful canal, and then crossing the equally beautiful Bourne. Soon after passing this stream there is a choice of roads. Do not turn to the left to Addlestone, but keep straight on, past Addlestone Moor, where turn to the right, and then the first to the left. This road leads direct to Chertsey, where it crosses the main street of that place at right angles, close to the railway station.

Chertsey is a quite commonplace little town, with streets of that would-be smartness that succeeds only in being pretentiously mean; and church and Town Hall alike were erected in that most tasteless period which stretched between the beginning and the middle of last century. Chertsey Abbey once stood behind the present church, but the site is now a market garden, and the most interesting relics of it are to be seen in the Architectural Museum at Westminster in the shape of a set of tiles illustrating the legend of King Arthur. There is a house in Guildford Street, however, that should arrest the attention of the literary pilgrim. It is the quaint, Dutch-like red brick mansion where Cowley the poet lived—now named “Cowley House,” partly for that hero-worshipping reason, and partly because since its fine old porch, which once straddled across the pavement, has been destroyed, its old title of “Porch House” has ceased to be descriptive.

At one end of the town is Chertsey Bridge, but the Thames here is at its tamest and the meads on either side at their flattest—admirable, possibly, from the point of view of the cows that graze in them, but not from that of the sight-seer.

Having thus shown our contempt of Chertsey, let us pursue the uneven tenor of our way, returning whence we came until Pyrcroft Road, at the end of the town, is seen, turning off to the right. Having turned into this road, take neither the first to the left nor the one to the right, but keep ahead, on the road past the “Carpenters’ Arms,” and then, having passed that inn, take the left-hand at a fork in the road. This immediately brings the traveller to an old-fashioned lane, bordered on the left by a tall red brick wall, supported at regular intervals by a long series of buttresses, which now appear to be themselves in need of buttressing. Over this decrepit wall can be glimpsed the upper part of the old mansion of Pyrcroft House, which has long enjoyed the local reputation of having served Dickens as a model for the house at Chertsey burgled by Bill Sikes. Sikes and his companions, according to the story, hurried through the main street of Chertsey, and “cleared the town as the church bell struck two. Quickening their pace, they turned up a road upon the left hand. After walking about a quarter of a mile they stopped before a detached house surrounded by a wall, to the top of which Toby Crackit, scarcely pausing to take breath, climbed in a twinkling.” The wall is a particularly high one, and the scaling of it does credit to Mr. Toby Crackit’s agility.

Past this literary landmark the road immediately begins to mount St. Ann’s Hill, passing an inn on the right with the odd sign of the “Golden Grove.” Notice the great tree in front of it, and the summer-house built high up in its branches, and approached by a flight of stairs.

Now comes a rise so steep as to be scarce worth riding. Keep straight on, disregarding two turnings to the left. Here is the summit of St. Ann’s Hill, a delightful open woodland. From this point commences the descent, by a steep lane with loose gravel at all seasons of the year. The cautious cyclist will walk this, down to the junction with the road to Thorpe, where we turn left, and, crossing the Bourne where a pretty mill stands, continue by a winding, but level, gravelled road to the hamlet of Thorpe, pretty and secluded. Continuing through this, we turn to the left for Virginia Water, three miles ahead, passing the railway station of the same name half-way. The place is heralded for some distance down the road by the handsome and imposing buildings of the Holloway Sanatorium. With the exception of that cheery-looking red brick institution, the scanty modern settlement called Virginia Water (although the lake so-called is a mile and a half away) is a singularly depressing place—a wilderness of railway bridges, embankments, and curves, well calculated to undo all the good the air, the pine-woods, and the sandy soil of this district are said to effect. A straight, flat sandy road leads hence, and reaches the real Virginia Water opposite the “Wheatsheaf,” a well-known and very ugly, inn, frequented by picnic parties, and the stopping-place of the summer coach from town.

A gate in the wooden fence beside the inn opens immediately to the lake. The boys who hang about this gate and sell green apples, of which the very sight is almost sufficient to induce stomach-ache, tell the unwary that cycles are not allowed within, thereby deceiving many, and earning innumerable twopences for “minding” the machines. It is well to disregard what they have to say, and to manœuvre the cycle through the gate. Here we are within the bounds of Windsor Great Park. Directly in front stretches the beautiful sheet of water, said, on insufficient authority, to be “the largest artificial lake in England.” It is, however, very large: one and a half miles long, and with two arms, each half a mile in length. It was formed considerably over a hundred years ago by intercepting the waters of the Bourne, a little stream rising near Ascot and falling into the Thames at Chertsey, and by damming them in a natural hollow. The general idea was originated by the Duke of Cumberland, and the design was that of Paul Sandby, one of our early water-colourists. The name given to the lake derives from the Duke of Cumberland being at the time Governor of Virginia.

Surrounded on every side by dense woods of solemn pines, the place is very impressive. Turning to the left, and following the grassy shore for a little way, turn down a road bearing to the left again, away from the water. This leads down to the waterfall, down which the waters of the Bourne splash on their way to liberty and the Thames. The fall is made of great masses of rock piled up ingeniously to resemble a natural ravine. Shaded by trees and fringed by rushes, the scene is really very pretty. The rough stone bridge whence you view it, formed of immense slabs of rock, is not unlike those early British bridges found on Dartmoor—only more elaborate. If only this were not a modern imitation, how professional antiquaries would rave about it, to be sure!

Crossing this, and coming up a rise, one reaches the famous “ruins” by continuing ahead, by the shores of the lake. They stand on a broad lawn stretching away back from the water, and were built to resemble a ruined temple. They are thus sham ruins, and, knowing that, the visitor perversely refuses to receive the romantic thrill otherwise appropriate; which shows that picturesqueness is a matter more of sentiment than of form. As a matter of fact, the columns themselves are genuine antiques, from Corinth and from Tunis, the spoils of ruined temples of those sunny climes, brought here to moulder in the damp and rigours of a northern climate. The “ruins” themselves are growing ruinous, for two of the most picturesque of the Corinthian columns, with their architrave, have recently fallen, and lie, a confused heap, on the grass amid the other prostrate stones carefully arranged in disorder over a century since.

Leaving Virginia Water by the way we came, and turning to the right, as though for Bagshot, a right-hand road is immediately seen, with a finger-post directing to Ascot and Bracknell. This is a fine undulating stretch of sandy road following the palings of Windsor Park as far as the hamlet of Black Nest, where it bears to the left and goes direct, past Sunninghill, to Ascot, Bullbrook, and Bracknell. Nothing is seen of Sunninghill save the post-office on the left hand. A modern inn, also on the left, bearing the sign of “The Wells,” will be noticed. It derives its name from a chalybeate spring in the garden.

Ascot, to which we now come, up a rise, is a depressing backwoods-settlement kind of a place, with no history except that which belongs to a hundred years of horse-racing. The village (for such, presumably, it should be called) is singular in consisting of practically a one-sided street. This is made up of a row of shops and villas and the back of the long range of buildings belonging to the racecourse, a white clock-tower overlooking all. The whole place is built on what was once the desolate heath of Ascot—and looks it! “Royal Ascot” they call it in the racing season, and it may look the part with the fashionable and gaily-dressed crowds then assembled, but few places can possibly appear so forlorn at any other time.

The cyclist welcomes the fine long descent that enables him to hurry away. Indeed, the splendid coasts one may get on the way from Black Nest to Bracknell form practically the only good features of these six miles; and in fine weather they are exhilarating. But when slithering through the mud that succeeds a showery day, with, perhaps, the hoarse-tongued bell of Ascot Priory sounding like a funeral knell in one’s ears, this bit of country weighs heavily on one’s spirits.

Bullbrook, which lies in a hollow and is just a modern hamlet of Bracknell, is succeeded by a sharp rise to Bracknell itself, a little town of no particular interest. Turn down here to the left, past the (modern) church. Coming to Bracknell Station, turn to the left across the bridge that spans the railway, and then the second to the right, if you wish to look at the (also modern) church of Easthampstead. Returning from this, bear to the right, then first to the left, and then to the right again, along the palings of South Hill Park, and you are on the straight four-mile stretch to Bagshot, through the densest pine-woods all the way, with grass rides now and again on either side, giving views of infinities of pines. It is a lonely road, aromatic with the odours of these woodlands, and reverberant with the scurrying of the partridges or the hollow ejaculations of the pheasants. Perhaps a hare or rabbit scuttles across the road, or you may meet a velveteen-coated gamekeeper, his gun under his arm; but never another cyclist. It is a splendid road for speed, going in this direction, and the four miles may be done with ease in a quarter of an hour. Nearing the Bagshot end, the gates of the Duke of Connaught’s seat, Bagshot Park, are passed, and turning to the right, over the railway bridge, Bagshot village is reached, past an old white-faced inn—the “Cricketers.”

Bagshot is not the busy place it was in the old coaching days, when, standing as it does on the old road to Exeter, it did a big trade with passing travellers. Its old inns are mostly gone, with the stories that belonged to them; but the “King’s Arms” remains, and the tale of how the “Golden Farmer” was brought a captive to its door one night. The person who went by that name lived on the hill outside Bagshot, and was known for always paying his debts in gold, instead of by bills or cheques. Contemporary with him was a terrible highwayman who never took anything but gold coin off the coach-passengers whom he plundered on Bagshot Heath, rejecting jewellery or notes. One night a more than usually courageous traveller shot him when his back was turned, and when the wounded highwayman was brought here, he was discovered to be the highly respectable farmer who paid only in specie. He was eventually tried, found guilty, hanged, and gibbeted on his own threshold, on the “Jolly Farmer” hill, on the way to Yorktown.

A winding lane leads out of the south side of Bagshot’s one street to Windlesham, a mile and a half distant, falling to the left across the Windle brook. The village is mildly pretty, the rebuilt church wildly grotesque. Away to the right, in the distance, rise the bleak and barren Chobham Ridges, and three miles and a half onward, away from the Ridges, is Chobham village, the roads to it duly sign-posted and the way alternating with patches of heath and pine trees and with cultivated fields, won with much toil and expense from the hungry Bagshot sands. To the north of Chobham village lies the bleak and barren common, and the hamlet curiously named Up Down. On the common took place the elaborate military picnic, dignified by the name of “manœuvres,” over forty years ago, at a time when the military system of the country was at its lowest ebb of inefficiency.

Chobham village is old-world, and being quite far removed from any railway station, and rather inaccessible, is consequently unspoiled. The Bourne stream runs picturesquely down one side of the village street in a deep and narrow channel, spanned by footbridges and bordered by a row of pollarded limes. Quaint old brick and half-timbered houses are a feature of the place. The church, with sturdy stone tower and leaden spire, is unusually rugged and weather-beaten, and is roofed with stone slabs instead of with the more usual tiles; altogether a homely and cosy village, that seems to have no sort of commerce with the outer world, and would appear to be rather proud of the fact.

Turning back from the village, and then turning to the right, four miles, mostly of ghastly heath, that might fitly have been the scene where the three witches met Macbeth, interpose between this and the hamlet of Ottershaw, where there are cross-roads, a chapel built by Sir Gilbert Scott, and Ottershaw Park, in which, secluded from the road and adjoining the mansion, is a kitchen built in the shape of a church by a former proprietor, who must have had the greatest reverence for his stomach. Turning to the left after passing the cross-roads, we reach Chertsey, past the well-wooded park of Botleys, and come again into that uninteresting town over the level crossing at the railway station.

THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS: KINGSTON TO EWELL, WARLINGHAM, AND CROYDON

The circular tour of twenty-eight miles here mapped out does not take us very far afield. It follows the outer fringe of the southern suburbs, and is planned the more especially to afford the Londoner some idea of what the country adjoining the Surrey hills—soon, alas! to be swallowed up by the ever-extending bricks and mortar—is like. It may also prove valuable to those who are seeking a suitable home just beyond London’s smoke.

Starting from Kingston we make for Norbiton Church, and, leaving it to the right, take the next turning to the right beyond. This is Coombe Lane, and though not so direct as the turning just before Norbiton Church, is infinitely preferable, leading gently upwards along a lane with farms and a few scattered houses, and, passing under a railway bridge, coming, in two miles from Kingston Station, to the hamlet of Coombe. Turn here, when up the rise, to the right, where a sign-post marks the way to Malden. A fine coast down leads in a mile to Coombe and Malden Station and the commonplace modern settlement of New Malden.

Now straight ahead, past this spot, turning to the right again at a fork of the roads where a country inn, called the “Plough,” stands and points to Ewell. It is very pretty and rural here. Just after turning down this road we come to Old Malden, with its quaint red brick church on the right hand. Here a very beautiful lane, shaded by a fine avenue, leads on a down gradient for a mile and a quarter, with pretty views on the right to the valley of the not very charmingly named Hogsmill River, and with dense coppices and undergrowth fringing the left. This is the border of Worcester Park. Where this lane ends and joins a broad highway, running to right and left, turn to the left, coming in two miles to Ewell, where the Hogsmill River expands into a broad pond beside the village street, outside the gates of a beautiful park.