Charles G. Harper

“ The rail brings many East London excursionists here for half-day outings, and, indeed, the views from the hilltop are worth coming many miles to see, and well worth walking uphill with a cycle. Given a clear day, you have not only the estuary of the Thames from Greenwich to the Nore spread out before you, with the Kent and Essex marshes extending like a pictorial map on either shore, but the eye ranges away out to sea and across the intervening country to the broad silver band of the Medway, running up from Sheerness to Rochester. ”

“ Leaving Upton Church, we take a road that leads from opposite it to George Green, crossing the old Bath road, and over the Great Western Railway. A direct road runs thence to Langley Park, through whose recesses there is an entirely unhindered right of way for self and cycle. Black Park is alone worth the ride; a vast stretch of solemn pine-woods, where the breezes die away in hollow murmurs, or sink to absolute silences amid the clustered giant trunks. ”

“ It is no hardship to walk down this hill, for it is no less superlatively beautiful than dangerous. It is a hollow road, or rather lane, with rugged chalky sides, into which the trees have thrust great gnarled and knotty roots, like the fangs of teeth, with steep hillsides stretching away overhead. Great beeches and lesser hazels and hollies make a perfect tunnel of foliage, through whose framing the eye looks down to the Weald, far below. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the church we retrace our steps to the village, and taking the middle one of three roads, past the ornamental well-house in the centre of the street, make for that famous woodland, Burnham Beeches, along a very winding lane, taking every left-hand turning. Along a strip of common land, bordered by refreshment houses, we come downhill to the first glade, where the giant beeches crowd together in a dim light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The interior arrangements include original fireplaces, carved and painted ceilings, and a chapel. The grounds without and the forest trees beyond are green and luxuriant beyond belief outside the wonders of fairy tales—to whose realms, indeed, Ightham Mote more nearly belongs than to this workaday world. The moat, fed by a crystal stream, is clear and sparkling, and birds and butterflies skim over it and into the thickets of shrubs and wild flowers like so many joyous souls escaped from a life of care and pain to rejoice for ever and ever in sunshine and a careless existence. ”

“ From half a mile on the other side of East Grinstead we have been in Sussex, and now the scenery grows even bolder and the roads more lonely. At a mile and a half beyond the old assize town, in a hollow of the hills and beside a stream on the skirts of Ashdown Forest, the little settlement of Forest Row—a Bret Harte-ish, Californian-looking place—is gained. A path to the right, however, by the post-office, leads across meadows to something that California does not, but would be only too proud to, possess—the picturesque ruins of an ancient mansion. ”

“ Four lattice windows give views away over many miles of beautiful scenery, and the structure itself, built of red brick, plaster, and timber, is of the greatest curiosity and interest. In this odd structure lives either the parish clerk or the sexton, and the casual visitor to the church is like to be startled by the sight of a domestic interior at its west end, and to hear such unusual sounds as the washing of plates and dishes echoing through the building from the direction of the old priest’s habitation. ”

“ Beyond the hospital, a turning to the left leads to Windsor, past Clewer. Windsor bulks hugely from these levels, with huddled houses and the towering mass of the castle lining a ridge above the Thames; the Round Tower, grim and terrible in other days, merely, in these times, a picturesque adjunct to the landscape.
It seems, indeed, that everywhere in these days the iron gauntlet has given place to the kid glove; persuasion is, nowadays, more a mental than a physical process. ”

“ Onward to Lewes, the county-town of Sussex, the distance is eight miles; the road beautiful and lonely, with but one village—that of Little Horsted—on the way, until quite close to Lewes itself, when the suburb village of Cliffe is passed. Lewes, with its castle, its memories of the great battle in the long ago, its quaint old churches and quainter old houses, piled up against one another along the steep streets, is a place not to be hurried through or properly seen in an hour. ”

“ To have visited Jordans, where the early Quakers worshipped and are laid to rest; to have entered beneath the roof of the “pretty cot” at Chalfont St. Giles that sheltered Milton; to have seen with one’s own eyes Penshurst, the home of the Sidneys, and Chenies, the resting-place of the Russells; to have meditated beneath the “yew tree’s shade” at Stoke Poges; to have seen or done all these things is to have done much to educate one’s self in the historic resources of the much-talked-of but little-known countryside. ”

“ Two hundred years after its towers had been set here to diadem the green hill, the castle was deserted and left to decay, as having served its turn; and since then it has been a quarry to which everyone in the neighbourhood who wanted stone has resorted, so that only the ruined walls of two circular towers are left. But they form a striking and memorable picture, whether you take them for a foreground and gaze thence to Leigh and Southend and the mouth of the Thames, or look upon them and the hill from the pastures below. ”

“ Flat fields, chiefly serving the useful purpose of the market-gardener, constitute the scenery immediately next the road on leaving Barking; but beyond them, across the turbid estuary of the Thames, made by the witchery of the sunshine to glitter and sparkle as though its waters were of the purest—beyond them rise in the distance the Kentish hills, where the woods of Bostal look down upon busy Plumstead. ”

“ Mereworth village, on the borders of the wide-spreading Mereworth Woods, lies up a turning to the right, on the fine broad road leading to Maidstone. Mereworth is remarkable for its hideous church, resembling some of Wren’s City of London churches; with a classical colonnaded porch, windows like those of a factory, and great overhanging eaves, very like those of that “great barn,” St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. A tall steeple, with classic peristyle, completes the outward composition. Now turn to the interior; an even more pagan sight than the exterior prepares the stranger for. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Welwyn is an old coaching village, and still keeps evidences of its past prosperity. These decayed old coaching towns and villages must needs be a great deal more interesting now than they ever were when in the full flush of their success. In the same way, doubtless, when railways are superseded, the romance of them will become suddenly apparent. Welwyn Church is a queer jumble of ancient and modern. The scorching cyclists who are the curse of the Great North Road are of the opinion that it is a nuisance, projecting as it does into the highway at the bend of the road. ”

“ Away, four miles to the left, on its striking hillside, is Claybury, the towers of its asylum rubricated in the warm glow of the afternoon sun until they take on a glory like that of a New Jerusalem. Along the road one comes to an old red brick barn, and then to the first of the many old Essex wooden windmills. A gentle rise leads up to the small hamlet of Collier Row, and thence the road goes uphill all the way to Havering, turning to the left at a point duly sign-posted. This is the first taste of the Essex hills. Notice, as you ascend, a [77] red brick house in a park on the right hand. ”

“ The church is secluded amid hop-kilns and fruit farms, and backed by a wooded knoll.
It is a run of seven miles from Newington to Chatham, through Rainham, identical in name with the Essex Rainham we have already passed through. One of the finest panoramas in the world lies stretched out below this road, on the right hand, the whole of the way: the panorama, that is to say, of the broad estuary of the Medway, crowded with vessels, large and small, where the Might of the Mailed Hand of England is plain to see, in the big battleships and the smart cruisers that occupy the fairway. ”

“ The road is of splendid quality, running through the sad, sage-coloured marshes to where a railway bridge on the line from Sittingbourne to Queenborough and Sheerness—a railway bridge and a road bridge combined—now spans the ancient King’s Ferry, across the quarter-of-a-mile channel of the Swale. The toll is cheap—a penny for self and cycle inclusive. ”

“ Orsett village itself partakes of this market-gardening and cabbage-growing character, and is distinctly rural, with crazy, weather-boarded cottages a feature of its street. Here our road turns sharply to the right, and again, at the “Cock Inn,” as sharply to the left along a very straight, flat, and dreary highway, whose forbidding character is, however, mitigated by the lovely views of the Essex hills at Laindon and Horndon-on-the-Hill, on the left hand, forming a green and well-wooded range almost at right angles with our course. ”

“ Here a sign-post points ahead for Abinger, with the added information that the first turning to the left should be taken. Turning accordingly, as bidden, a pretty lane is reached, with a very beautiful old pond, fringed with rushes, on the left. This is Abinger mill-pond, and the rust-red roofs of the mill itself can be seen rising from a hollow on the farther side; an old, old building which Nature has long since reclaimed as her own, with lichens growing everywhere, and ferns and wild plants that only the botanist can name luxuriating amid the dampness of the disused mill-wheel. ”

“ Down goes the road in a long descent to Purley, where we cross the old Brighton road, and, passing beneath the railway, gently ascend the fine highway to Riddlesdown. Here we are amid the Surrey hills, which spread out in a lovely panorama of hills and valleys to the right. Riddlesdown is a place for picnickers and school treats. Continuing past it, we come to the hamlet of Whyteleafe, and under a railway bridge up a steep lane to the left, which speedily becomes too steep to ride. ”

“ Ightham village, to which we now make our way, must by no means be confounded with Ightham Mote, two miles distant from it southward, past the hamlet of Ivy Hatch. Steeply up, and as steeply down, with intervals of welcome flatness, goes the road to the village, always through the pine-woods, and here and there the way is overhung with little craggy cliffs of yellow sand and gravel, as yet untouched by the road-surveyors of the County Council, who will doubtless some day trim away all these rustic selvedges of the forest, and curb and bank them in a straight line. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Esher, up along the hill, is a pretty village, with many and varied associations and an extraordinary number of curious relics. It is a charmingly rural place, with a humble old church behind an old coaching inn, and a new church, not at all humble, across the way. The old church and the old inn—the “Bear,” they call it—are both extremely interesting. In the hall of the inn, placed within a glass case, secure from the touch of the vulgar, are the huge boots worn by the post-boy who drove Louis Philippe, the fugitive King of the French, to Claremont in 1848. ”