Charles G. Harper

“ Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable. ”

“ Just where the road bends, and, crossing the railway, begins to climb Clayton Hill, the Gothic, battlemented entrance to Clayton Tunnel looms with a kind of scowling picturesqueness, well suited to its dark history, continually vomiting steam and smoke, like a hell’s mouth.
Above it rises the hill, with telegraph-poles and circular brick ventilating-shafts going in a long [Pg 232] perspective above the chalky cutting in the road; and on the left hand the little rustic church of Clayton, humbly crouching under the lee of the downs. ”

“ All these engineering manifestations give the old grim neighbourhood of Smitham Bottom a new grimness. The trains of the Brighton line boom, rattle, and clank overhead into the covered way, whose ventilators spout steam like some infernal laundry, and from the 80-foot deep cuttings close beside the road, steamy billows arise very weirdly. Presiding over all are the beautiful grounds and vast ranges of buildings of the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum, housing an ever-increasing population of lunatics, now numbering some three thousand. ”

“ From the hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows, mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient Rome.
Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. ”

“ One could find it in one’s heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists foregather by the “Red Lion,” are the most striking features of the place.
The “Red Lion” is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands of another age of wheels. ”

“ This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. ”

“ From here a bye-lane leads steeply once more into the high road, which winds along the valley, sloping always towards the Weald. Down the long descent into Merstham village tall and close battalions of fir-trees lend a sombre colouring to the foreground, while “southward o’er Surrey’s pleasant hills” the evening sunlight streams in parting radiance. On the left hand as we descend are the eerie-looking blow-holes of the Merstham tunnel, which here succeeds the cutting. ”

“ I do not think any one ever rode from London to Brighton on one of these machines; and, when you come to consider the build and the limitations of them, and then think of the hills on the way, it is quite impossible that any one should so ride. It was perhaps within the limits of human endurance to ride a Hobby Horse along the levels, to walk it up the rises, and then to madly descend the hills, and so reach Brighton, very sore; but records do not tell us of such a stern pioneer. The Hobby Horse, it should be said, was an affair of two wooden wheels with iron tyres. ”

“ Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the chalky bosom of the hills. ”

“ But Brighton itself is eternal. It suffers change, it grows continually; but while the sea remains and the air is clean and the sun shines, it, and the road to it, will be the most popular resorts in England. ”

“ Even the ghastly loneliness of the long straight road ascending the pass of Smitham Bottom is no more, for little villas, with dank little dungeons of gardens, line the way, and tradesmen’s carts calling for orders compete with the motorists who shall kill and maim most travellers along the highway. ”

“ It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town. ”

“ Leaving the asylum grounds, the railway re-crosses the road by a hideous skew girder bridge of 180 feet span, supported by giant piers and retaining-walls, and then crosses the deep cutting of the South Eastern, to enter a cutting of its own leading into a tunnel a mile and a quarter in length—the new Merstham tunnel—running parallel with the old tunnel of the same name through which the South Eastern Railway passes. At the southern end of this gloomy tunnel is the pretty village of Merstham, where the hillside sinks down to the level lands between that point and Redhill. ”

“ Looking southward, Brighton is seen—a pillar of smoke by day, a glowing, twinkling light at evening: but for all it is so near, it has very little affected the old pastoral country life of the downland villages. The shepherds, carrying as of yore their Pyecombe crooks, still tend huge flocks of sheep, and the dull and hollow music of the sheep-bells remains as ever the characteristic sound of the district. ”

“ Sir Walter Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat, over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. ”

“ They were chiefly sportsmen who travelled it in the days when it began to be a road: those full-blooded sportsmen, ready for any freakish wager, who were the boon companions of the Prince; and they set a fashion which has not merely survived into modern times, but has grown amazingly.
But it would never have been the road for sport it is, had its length not been so conveniently and alluringly near an even fifty miles. ”

“ It was in 1782, when but twenty years of age, that he first knew Brighton, and until the last—for close upon forty-eight years—it retained his affections. He is thus the presiding genius of the way; and because, when we speak or think of the Brighton Road, we cannot help thinking of him, I have appropriately placed the portrait of George the Fourth, by the courtly Lawrence, in this book.
The Prince and King was the inevitable product of his times and of his upbringing: we mostly are. Only the rarest and most forceful figures can mould the world to their own form. ”

“ What the future may have in store none may be so hardy as to prophesy. Finality has a way of ever receding into the infinite, and when the unpaced cyclist shall have beaten the paced record of 5 hrs. 6 mins. 42 secs. made by Neason in 1897, other new fields will arise to be conquered. And let no one say that speed and sport on the Brighton Road have finally declined, for, as we have seen, it is abundantly easy in these days for a popular Press to “call spirits from the vasty deep,” and arouse sporting enthusiasm almost to frenzy, whenever and wherever it is “worth the while.” ”

“ For when you ascend gradually, past the Bon Marché, and come to the hill-top, you leave for awhile the shops and the continuous, conjoined houses, and arrive, past the transitional stage of semi-detachedness, at the wholly blest condition of splendid isolation in the rear of fences and carriage entrances, with gentility-balls on the gate-posts, a circular lawn in front of the house, skirted by its gravel drive, and perhaps even a stone dog on either side of the doorway! ”

“ No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed—or been afflicted with—the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is, by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the wayfarers’ friend. ”

“ Hundreds, nay, thousands are continually passing almost within hail of their slumberous sites, and have been passing for hundreds of years, yet they and their inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.
The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the valley of the Mole. ”

“ The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always thus, for in those centuries—from the fourteenth until the early part of the eighteenth—when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks. ”

“ It was a word of dread among cyclists until, say, the year 1900, when rim-and back-pedalling brakes superseded the inefficient spoon-brake, acting on the front tyre. Coming from Brighton, the hill drops steeply into the Weald of Sussex, and not only steeply, but the road takes a sudden and perilous turn over the railway bridge, at the foot of the descent, precisely where descending vehicles not under control attain their greatest speed. Here many a cyclist has been flung against the brick wall of the bridge, and his machine broken and himself injured ”

“ Not the most charitable person could lay his hand upon his heart and declare, honestly, that the church of St. Mark, Kennington, which stands at this beginning of the Brixton Road, is other than extremely hideous. Fortunately, its pagan architecture, once fondly thought to revive the glories of old Greece, is largely screened from sight by the thriving trees of its churchyard, and so nervous wayfarers are spared something of the inevitable shock. ”

“ He paced the tomb like one distracted; he stamped upon the iron plate; he smote with his hands upon the door; he shouted, and the vault hollowly echoed his lamentations. But Time’s sand ran on, and Luke arrived not.
“Alan now abandoned himself wholly to despair. He could no longer anticipate his grandson’s coming—no longer hope for deliverance. His fate was sealed. Death awaited him. He must anticipate his slow but inevitable stroke, enduring all the grinding horrors of starvation. ”

“ The history of Gatton, in truth, goes back to immemorial times, and has no beginning: for where history thins out and becomes a mere scatter of disjointed scraps purporting [Pg 142] to be facts, tradition carries back the tale into a very fog of legend and conjecture. It was “Gatone” when the Domesday survey was made: the Saxon “Geat-ton,” the town in the “gate,” passage, or road through the North Downs, just as Reigate is the Saxon “Rige-geat,” the road over the ridge. ”

“ The way into Crawley along the main road, passing the modern hamlet of Lowfield Heath, is uneventful. The church, the “White Lion,” and a few attendant houses stand on one side of the road, and on the other, by the farm or mansion styled Heath House, a sedgy piece of ground alone remains to show what the heath was like before enclosure. Much of the land is now under cultivation as a nursery for shrubs, and a bee-farm attracts the wayfarers’ attention nearer Crawley, where another hamlet has sprung up. ”

“ At Norbury railway station the railway crosses over the road, and eminently respectable suburbs occupy that wayside where the foot-pads used to await the timorous traveller. Trim villas rise in hundreds, and where the extra large and permanent gallows stood, [Pg 106] like a football goal, at what used to be a horse-pond, there is to-day the prettily-planted garden and pond of Thornton Heath, with a Jubilee fountain which has in later years been persuaded to play. ”