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CHARLES G. HARPER

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

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CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Brighton Road: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway.

The Portsmouth Road : And its Tributaries, To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an old Highway.

The Exeter Road : The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road : An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail Coach Route to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road. [In the Press.

WW' ''^

THE OLU^LYCHGATE, PENSHURST.

CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON

RIDDEN WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES G. HARPER

AUTHOR OF "THE BRIGHTON ROAD" "THE PORTS- MOUTH ROAD" "THE DOVER ROAD" "THE BATH ROAD" "THE EXETER ROAD" "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD" "THE NORWICH ROAD" and "THE HOLYHEAD ROAD"

London: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1902.

{All Right! Reserved)

H2.3C

PREFACE

When that sturdy pioneer^ J oJin Mayall junior, first rode his velocipede from London to Brighton in 1869, in much physical discomfort, and left his two would-be companions behind him in a crippled condition, no one could have foreseen the days when many thousands of Londoners would with little effort explore the Home Counties on Saturdays or zveek-ends, and ride sixty or seventy miles a day for the mere pleasure of seeking country lanes and historic spots.

There are, indeed, no more ardent lovers of t lie country, of scenery, of ancient hails and churches, of quiet hamlets and historic castles than London cyclists, zuho are often, in fact, recruited from the ranks of those pedestrians who, finding they could by means of the cycle extend their expeditions in search of the venerable and the beautiful, have cast away staff and stout walking-boots, and have learnt the nice art of balancing astride two zvheels.

So much accomplished, the ex-pedestrian has at once widened his radius to at least thrice its former extent, and places that to him zcere little knozvn, or merely unmeaning names, have become suddenly familiar. Even the sea — that far cry to the Londoner — is within reach of an easy summer day's ride.

viii Preface

Few have anything like an adequate idea of how rich in beauty and interest is the country comprised roughly in a radius of from tiventy to thirty miles from London. To treat those many miles thoroughly would require long study and many volumes, and these pages pretend to do nothing more than dip here and there into the inexhaustible resources, pictorial and literary, of the hinterland that lies without the uttermost suburbs. •

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 zvith 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. The King's Stone in Kingston market-place, Ccesar's Well on K est on Common, the " Town Hall" at Gatton, the Pilgrims' Way under the lee of the North Downs, and the monumental brasses of the D'A bernons at Stoke D'A bernon have each and all their engrossing interest ; or, if you think them to savour too greatly of the dry-as-dust studies of the antiquary, there remain for you the quaint old inns, the sleepy hamletSy and the tributary rivers of the Thames, all putting forth a never-failing charm ivhen May has come, and with it the sunshine, the leaves and floivers, and the song of the birds.

CHARLES G. HARPER. Petersham, Surrey, April 1902.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chenies and the Milton Country . . . . i

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD ..... 22

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Med way . . .36

The Darenth and the Grays ..... 53 Croydon to Knockholt Beeches and the Kentish

Commons . . . . . . .63

In Old-World Essex ...... 75

Among the Essex Hills. ..... 86

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking . . . -97

Ripley and the Surrey Commons . . . .111

Rural Middlesex . . . . ' . .121

Under the North Downs . . . . .131

The Suburban Thames ...... 155

The Southern Suburbs : Kingston to Ewell, Warlingham,

and Croydon ....... 169

Ewell to Merstham, Godstone, and Lingfield . .177

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge . . . 186

To Stoke Poges and Burn ham Beeches . . -199

Dartford to Rochester, Aylesford, and Borough Green . 218 Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways . . -231

The Back Way to Brighton . . . . -251

Barking to Southend and Sheppey .... 260

I4ST.

The Old Lychgate, Penshurst

RUISLIP , . , .

Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St. Giles

Jesus Hospital, Bray

Esher Old Church

Horseshoe Clump

Brass to Sir John D'Abernon

The Hall, Slyfield House

The "Running Horse".

Elynor Rummyng

Sign of the "Running Horse"

Crown Point

Sign of the "Sir Jeffrey Amherst"

Cromwell's Skull

Ightham Mote

The Courtyard, Ightham Mote

The Dumb Borsholder .

The Quintain, Offham ,

The Waterside, Erith .

On the Thames, near Erith .

Purfleet, from the Darenth Meadows

The Darenth

Eynesford .

The P'ool's Cap Crest of Sir John Spi

The Little Church of Woldingham

Knockholt Beeches

C/tsAR's Well

The Stocks, Havering-atte-Bower

Navestock Church

Blackmore Church

PAGE

Frontispiece 4 13 20 26 28 30 • 31 32 33 35 38 39 40

43 45 50 51 54 55 57 58 60 62 66 71 73 76

79 81

List of Illustrations

XI

Two Churches in one Churchyard: the Sister Cm

OF WiLLINGALE SpAIN AND WiLLINGALE DOE

Stock Church

Laindon Church .

Pars LOWES ....

EwELi. Old Church Tower

Evershed's Rough

Leith Hill

Claremont.

Newark Priory .

The Little Church of Perivale

Pinner ....

A Mysterious Monument

Reigate Heath .

Westcott ....

The Little Church of Wotton

Postford Ponds .

An Old Weir on the Wey

The Guildhall and High Street, Guildfori

Puttenham

The Seven-Dials Pillar, Weybridge

Pyrcroft House .

The Ruins, Virginia Water

Carshalton

Leaving Carshalton

The "Town Hall," Gatton

The Hollow Road, Nutfield .

An Iron Tomb-Slab

The Ancient Yew, Crowhurst

The Gatehouse, Hever Castle

Hever Castle

Chiddingstone

Sunset on the Eden

A Crest of the Sidneys

Shoeing Forge, Penshurst

Gray's Monument

The " Bicycle Window," Stoke Poges

At Burn ham Beeches

xu

List of Illustrations

Stone .....

Early English Doorway, Stone Church

Interior, Stone Church

High Street, Rochester

Temple Bar

Cough's Oak

Shenley Round-House .

The Church Bell, Shenley

Water End

Flamstead ....

Mackery End

The North Downs and Marden Park

The " Sackville Lodging," East Grinstead

Lewes ....

Barking ....

Eastbury House .

Hadleigh Castle .

Leigh Marshes and the Mouth of the Thames

Minster-in-Sheppey Church

Warden Point

Newington

The End ....

Sketch Maps to each Route.

PAGE 219 220 221 225

235 236

237

242

245 247

253 255 258 263 267 269 271 277 283 285

CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON

CHENIES AND THE MILTON COUNTRY

Sight-seeing with ease and comfort is the ideal of the cycling tourist, and this run into a corner of Buckinghamshire and the Milton country comes as near the ideal as anything ever does in a world of punctures, leakages, hills, headwinds, and weather that is either sultry or soaking.

Starting from Southall Station, which will probably strike the tourist as in anything but a desirable locality, we gain that flattest of flat highways — the Oxford road — ^just here, and, leaving the canal and its cursing bargees, together with the margarine works, the huge gasometers, and other useful but unlovely outposts and necessaries of civilisation, speed along the excellent surface, past Hayes End and the hamlet Cockneys are pleased to call " 'illingdon 'eath," until within a mile and a half of Uxbridge, where a turning on the right hand will be noticed, properly furnished with a sign-post, pointing to Ickenham, Ruislip, and Pinner. Here we

2 Cycle Rides round London

leave the dusty high road and its scurrying gangs of clubmen, whose faces, as they scorch along, are indicative of anything but pleasure. It is a pleasant by-road upon whose quiet course we have now entered, going in a mile-long descending gradient, past the grand old trees of Hillingdon Court overhanging the way, down towards Ickenham. It is a perfectly safe and thoroughly delightful coast down here, far away from the crowds, along a lane whose leafy beauty ancf luxuriant hedgerows might almost belong to Devonshire, instead of being merely in Middlesex. At Ickenham, one of those singularly tiny and curiously old-world villages that are, paradoxically enough, to be found only in this most populous of English counties, are a village green, a pond, and a pump. The pond is, perhaps, not so translucent as it might be, for the reason that the ducks are generally busily stirring up the mud ; and the green, being mostly loose gravel, is not so verdant as could be wished ; but the pump, occupying a very central position, is at once ornate and useful, and, in appearance, something between a Chinese joss-house, a County Council band-stand, and a newspaper kiosk. Also, it still retains on its weather- cock the tattered and blackened flag of some loyal celebration or another, which may mean loyalty in excelsis or merely local laziness. The very interesting old church, with whitewashed walls and with odd dormers in the roof, has some excellent windows and a little timbered spirelet that shows up white against a dense background of trees, and is, altogether, just such a place as Gray describes in his " Elegy," in whose churchyard sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet.

Chenies and the Milton Country 3

Suburbia has not yet disturbed this " home of ancient peace," and it is still worth the very earnest attention of the artist, as also is that grand old Jacobean mansion of Swakeleys, standing in its park, near by.

A mile onward is Ruislip, best reached by bearing to the right at the next turning, and then sharply to the

60UTHAU.

left. Round about " Riselip," as its inhabitants call it, they grow hay, cabbages, potatoes, and other useful, if humble, vegetables ; and, by dint of great patience and industry, manage to get them up to the London market. It is only at rare intervals that the villagers ever see a railway engine, for Ruislip is far remote from railways, and so the place and people keep their local character.

4 Cycle Rides round London

Two or three remarkably quaint inns face the central space round which the old and new cottages are grouped, and the very large church stands modestly behind, its battlemented tower peering over the tumbled roofs and gable-ends with a fine effect, an effect that would be still finer were it not that the miserably poor " restora- tion" work of the plastered angles, done by that dreadful person. Sir Gilbert Scott, is only too apparent.

Taking the Rickmansworth road, and presently crossing the road to Harefield, a desolate, half-ruined modern house of large size, apparently never yet occupied, is seen on the right. This is called St. Catherine's End. Beyond it, on the same side, presently appears an unobtrusive road, with an air of leading to nowhere in particular, and, in fact, abruptly ending on the banks of RuisHp Reservoir. The sound of "reservoir" is not a pleasing one to those who are

Chenies and the Milton Country 5

familiar with the ugly things of that name with which an unbusiness-like Legislature has allowed the water companies to destroy the beauty of the suburban Thames ; but there are reservoirs of sorts, and this is one of the picturesque kind. The Regent's Canal Company made it, many years ago, as a store for refilling that waterway, and it was doubtless more than sufficiently ugly then. But trees have since that time partly covered the hillsides sloping down to it, and that finest of all artists and best of landscape gardeners, Nature, has grown rushes and water-lilies here, and nibbled a bit out of the straight-edged bank there, until the place looks anything but artificial. Wild birds and wild flowers, too, render this a pleasant spot, and there are boats even, in which one may voyage down the mile, or less, of lake, at whose distant end the red-roofed villas of Northwood may just be seen, whimsically like some foreign port.

Returning to the road, the first hill of the journey presents its unwelcome front to be climbed or walked. Duck's Hill, as it is called, leads to an elevated tableland where the bracken and the blackberry briars grow, and shortly leads down again, by means of an exceedingly steep, though short, fall through a mass of loose stones and thick dust. The gradient and the quality of the road-surface render this bit particularly dangerous. Succeeding this is a more gradual descent, leading to a right and left road. The right-hand, on a down- grade, and one the tourist would fain follow, is not the route, which lies, instead, to the left, and goes deter- minedly uphill for half a mile. Just when you begin

6 Cycle Rides round London

to think this excursion is too much like taking a bicycle out for a walking tour, it becomes possible to mount and ride with comfort ; and then, entering Batchworth Heath and Hertfordshire simultaneously, the lodge gates of Moor Park are seen across a wide-spreading green surrounded by scattered houses. It is of little use to describe Moor Park, for the house cannot be seen by the casual tourist, and the cyclist is not allowed in the grounds. The place has passed through many hands, and now belongs to Lord Ebury. It was once the property of a certain Benjamin Hoskins Styles, a forerunner of the modern type of financier, who had grown suddenly rich by speculating in South Sea shares. He caused the hills that faced the house in either direction to be cut through, in order to provide " vistas." He secured his vistas at a cost of i^ 130,000, which seems a high price to pay for them ; but, according to Pope, he also let in the east wind upon his house, and the next owner, who happened to be Admiral Lord Anson, spent ;^8o,ooo in trying to keep it out again.

Gradual descents, and two or three sharper ones, lead for a mile in the direction of Rickmansworth, and then a C.T.C. danger-board shows its red warning face over a hedge-top, just as a beautiful distant view of the town unfolds itself below. There are those who, as a rule, disregard danger-boards : if such they be who wheel this way, let them be advised to make this an exception, for it is a long and winding drop down, and ends by making directly for a brick wall, some cottages, and a canal ; sufficiently awkward things to encounter on a runaway machine. Those who will not be advised.

Chenies and the Milton Country 7

and are accordingly run away with, are recommended to choose the canal.

But the wise walk down, and, nearing the level, mount again, and wheeling over a switchback canal bridge and a river bridge, come happily into Rickmansworth.

This old town resembles Watford, Ware, and Hert- ford, but is much prettier. They are four sisters, these Hertfordshire towns, with a strong family likeness but minor differences. Ware is the slippered slut of them, without doubt, and Hertford (if local patriotism will forgive the comparison) the dowdy ; Watford the more pretentious ; while Rickmansworth is the belle. All are alike in their rivers and canals, their surrounding meads and woodlands, and their breweries.

Green pastures and still waters, hanging woods and old-world ways, render Rickmansworth delightful. One comes into it from Batchworth Heath downhill, and, across its level streets, climbs up again for Chenies, reached past Chorleywood and its common, and a succession of the loveliest parks. Chenies is a place of pilgrimage, for the church is the mausoleum of the Russells, Dukes of Bedford ; and if one cannot, in fact, feel any enthusiasm for a family that has exhibited such powers of " getting on in the world," and has consistently used those powers of self-aggrandisement, while professing Liberal opinions, at least the long and splendid series of their tombs is worth seeing.

The Rozels, as they were originally named, came over, like many other Norman filibusters, with the Conqueror. They did not, for a long while, make any

8 Cycle Rides round London

great mark after that event, and history passes them by until 1 506. During all those centuries, the Russell genius for getting on lay fallow, and none of them did anything in particular. They just vegetated on their lands in Dorsetshire, at Kingston Russell, near Bridport, until that year, when a quite unexpected happening put the beginnings of promotion in their way. John Russell, heir of the uncultivated bucolic head of the house, had just returned from Continental travels, and had acquired polish and the command of the French, Spanish, and German tongues, accomplishments that would probably have been of no sort of use to him had it not been for the singular happening already hinted at. In the winter of 1506 the Archduke of Austria, voyaging from the Low Countries to Spain, was driven by the fury of the Channel gales into Weymouth. He was most unromantically sea-sick, and landed ; although England was at that time no safe place for one of his house. But he preferred the prospect of political imprisonment to the unkindly usage of the seas. Meanwhile, until the king's pleasure became known, he was sheltered by Sir Thomas Trenchard of Wolveton, near Dorchester ; and because Sir Thomas knew no tongue but his own robust, native English, he had his young kinsman, John Russell, over from Kingston Russell, to act as interpreter and entertainer to the distinguished foreigner. Young Russell proved himself so courtly and tactful that when the Archduke visited Henry the Seventh on a friendly invitation to Windsor — where, instead of being clapped into a dungeon, he was royally entreated — he spoke in such high praise

CHENIES AND THE MiLTON CoUNTRY 9

of this young Englishman that the king speedily found him a position in the Royal Household. Thus was a career opened up to this most fortunate young man. He was with Henry the Eighth in France, and fought in several battles, losing an eye at the taking of Morlaix and at the same time gaining a knighthood. Diplomacy, which, rather than fighting, is the Russell metier, soon claimed him. Diplomacy, it has been well said, is the art of lying for the advantage of one's country. Perhaps he had not learned the art sufficiently well, for his great mission to the Continent failed, and he returned, not in disgrace, but, with the inevitable Russell address and luck, to preferment. The times were fatal to honest men, and that Russell survived that troubled era and died in his bed in the reign of Mary, at peace, and ennobled by the title of Earl of Bedford, enriched with the spoils of confiscated religious houses and the lands of attainted and executed friends, is therefore no recommendation of his character, which was that of a cautious time-server and cunning sycophant. He lies here, the Founder of his house, his recumbent effigy beside that of his countess, who brought Cheneys into the family. It is a magnificent monument and the effigies evidently carefully executed likenesses, even down to the small detail of the earl's eyelid, represented as drooping over the lost eye.

The second Earl of Bedford was a man of greater honour and sincerity than his father, the Founder. His monument and that of his countess stands beside his parents' altar-tomb, and is of alabaster bedizened to extremity with painting and gilding. He was the

lo Cycle Rides round London

first Francis of the family. The last was the man (Francis, 9th Duke of Bedford) who poisoned himself in 1 891.

Earl Francis, perhaps, derived his sincerity from his mother. Both were sincere Protestants, while his father was anything you pleased, so long as he could keep his head on his shoulders and put more money in his pocket. The son's Protestantism was nearly the undoing of him, for the bloody Gardiner would probably have sent him to the stake had he not escaped to Geneva. When Elizabeth succeeded her sister, he returned and served his Queen well and truly, until his death in 1585. He was succeeded by his grandson, Edward, who in turn was followed by his cousin Francis ; " the wise earl," they call him, perhaps because he found, after being released from his imprisonment in the Tower for his political opinions, that it was more peaceful and profitable to busy himself about the draining of the ill-gotten Russell lands at Whittlesea and Thorney, than to contend with Parliament against the Crown. This is indeed wisdom, and worthy of a Russell and a lawyer; for as a lawyer he had been trained before his succession to the earldom had been thought of. His son William reproduced the shiftiness of the Founder, and luke- warmly sided first with King, then with Parliament, and so continually back and forth during the Civil War. They made him a duke before he died — they, that is to say, the advisers of William the Third — and the price paid for it was the blood of his eldest son. The title was given as a kind of solace for the loss

Chenies and the Milton Country i i

of that son, and must have been a bitter kind of plaister to salve grief. That son, William, had not the canny caution of his race, and deserves to be honoured for the self - neglecting enthusiasm for the Protestant religion which brought him to the block in 1683 for his alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot.

The most elaborate monument here at Chenies is that to his father and mother, but more truly to himself ; for that fantastic pile of theatrical statuary, exhibiting the Duke and Countess contorted with paroxysms of grief, leads up, as the central point of this stony emotion, to the portrait head of this unhappy patriot who fell under the headsman's axe.

There are other Russell monuments here, for the family has rarely been averse from post-mortem glorification ; but to make a catalogue of them would be wearisome. Among the latest, and the most un- assuming, is the plain slab to Earl Russell, — the Lord John Russell of earlier political struggles, — who died in 1878.

Chenies village, let it at once be said, is utterly dis- appointing, after one has heard so much of its beauties. " A model village," no doubt, but how depressing these model villages are ! And, indeed, the Russells rule " Chaineys " (as it should be pronounced) with an iron rule. The country in which it is set is beautiful, and at the centre of the village a group of noble trees, with a pretty spring and well-house, may be noticed ; but that anyone can admire the would-be Tudor architecture of the cottages, almost all rebuilt by a Duke of Bedford about fifty years ago, is surprising. Yet there are those

12 Cycle Rides round London

who affect to do so. The village lies just off tHe road, to the right ; and at its farther end stand the church and the manor-house, close to one another.

" Isenhampton Cheneys " is the real name of the place, but the Cheynes who once were paramount here are long since extinct, and the insistent " B " is now on every cottage, gate-post, and weathercock. The church, rebuilt, has the whole of its north aisle appropriated as the Bedford Chapel, so that, even here, you see how the Russells maintain the feudal idea. Froude, indeed, says the gorgeous monuments here are second only to the tombs of the Mendozas, the proudest race in Spain ; but true though that be, he is grossly fulsome when he praises the Russells for their " Liberal " ideas. Truth to tell, the family has ever been content to wear the Liberal mask and yet to treat its unfortunate tenants in a manner that many an old Tory race would have neither the courage nor the wickedness to adopt. Ask of the Russell tenantry what they think, and, receiving your answer, the wonder arises how that family can keep up their curious pretence of being " friends of the people."

Leaving Chenies, and regaining the highway to Amersham, we wheel along until, passing under the Metropolitan Railway at Chalfont Road Station, we take the second turning to the left, leading to Chalfont St. Giles. These three miles form the most exquisite part of the whole tour, from the purely rustic point of view ; for they lead down through sweet-scented woodlands where the perfume of the pines and the heavy scent of the bracken (strongly resembling that of ripe strawberries) mingle with the refreshing odour of the

Chenies and the Milton Country 13

soil itself. Nothing breaks the stillness in the daytime save the hoarse " crock-crock " of the pheasants, and, when night comes, the feathered choir from the well- named neighbouring Nightingale Woods tunes up.

Chalfont St. Giles lies down in the valley of the Misbourne, across the high road which runs left and right, and past the Pheasant Inn. It is a place made famous by Milton's residence here, when he fled London

MILTON's cottage, CHAI.FONT ST. GILES,

and the Great Plague. The cottage — the " pretty cot," as he aptly calls it, taken for him by Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker — is still standing, and is tho last house on the left-hand side of the long village street. The poet could only have known it to be a "pretty cot" by repute, for he was blind.

Americans, perhaps more than Englishmen, make this a place of pilgrimage ; and serious offers were made, not so long since, to purchase the little gabled brick and half-timbered dwelling, and to transport it to the United States. Happily, all fears of such a fate are

14 Cycle Rides round London

now at an end ; for the parish has purchased the freehold, and has made the cottage a museum, where the literary pilgrim can see the veritable low-browed room where Paradise Lost was written and Paradise Regained suggested, together with the actual writing-table the poet worked at. An interesting collection of early and later editions is to be seen, with Milton portraits, and cannon-balls found in the neighbourhood. No one will grudge the modest sixpence charged for admission by the parish authorities to all who are not parishioners.

The parish church still remains interesting, although three successive restoring architects have been let loose upon it ; and there are some really exquisite modern stained-glass windows, as well as some very detestable ones. Their close companionship renders the good an excellent service, but has a very sorry effect on the bad. ~ Notice the very beautiful carved-oak communion rails, which came from one of the side chapels of St. Paul's Cathedral, given by Francis Hare, Bishop of Chichester and Dean of St. Paul's. This spoiler of the metropolitan Cathedral is buried here, and a tablet records his dignities. Among other posts, he held that of Chaplain to the great Duke of Marlborough, whose courier, Timothy Lovett, by the way, who died in 1728, aged seventy years, lies in the churchyard, beneath the curious epitaph —

" Italy and Spain Germany and France have been on E^arth my weary Dance. So that I own

Ye Graves my greatest Friend That to my Travels all has put an end."

Chenies and the Milton Country 15

Timothy, it is evident, was not of the touring kind by choice.

Having seen these literary and other landmarks, we can either regain the road, and, passing through Chalfont St. Peter and its picturesque water-splash, where the Misbourne crosses the road by the church, come to the Oxford road, and by the turning to Denham through Uxbridge into Middlesex again ; or else, braving a very steep, stony, and winding lane, make for Jordans, that lonely graveyard and meeting-house of the early Quakers, where lies William Penn, founder of the State of Pennsylvania, with many another of his sect. A left- hand fork in the road leads toilsomely in a mile and a half to the solitary shrouded dell where Jordans lies hid, embosomed amid trees. It was precisely for its solitude and comparative inaccessibility that Thomas EUwood, the friend of Milton, with others of the Society of Friends, purchased Jordans in 1671. They bought it of one William Russell with the original intention of making it merely a burial-ground, but the building of the meeting-house soon followed.

This is the humble, domestic-looking, red brick building the pilgrim suddenly catches sight of when wheeling along the darkling lane. Hepworth Dixon, writing in 185 1, says, "the meeting-house is like an old barn in appearance," but that is scarcely correct. As a matter of fact, it greatly resembles a stable, and indeed is almost precisely identical in appearance with the still- existing range of stables facing Old Palace Green, Kensington ; buildings erected at the same period as this.

1 6 Cycle Rides round London

The stern, austere character of the original Quakers— Cobbett calls them " unbaptized, buttonless blackguards " — is reflected in the look both of their burial-ground and their meeting-house. Nothing less like a place of worship could be imagined. Many in style — or in the lack of style — like it are to be seen in the New England States of the United States of America, to whose then desolate shores many of the early Quakers carried the creed that made them outcasts in their native land ; and the American citizens who throng here in summer must often be struck with the complete likeness of the scene to many Pennsylvanian Quaker places of meeting.

The plot where Penn and many others lie is just an enclosed field, and not until recent years were any memorials placed over some of their resting-places. A dozen small headstones now mark the grave of William Penn, the Founder of the State, and others of his family.

Twice a year is Jordans the scene of Quaker worship, on the fourth Sunday in May and the first Thursday in June, when many of the faith come from long distances to commemorative services.

Leaving Jordans, and striking the road into Beacons- field, we reach that quietly cheerful town in another two miles, coming into it past Wilton Park, on the Oxford road. The little town that gave Benjamin Disraeli his title is a singularly unpretending place, and is less a town than a very large village. Passing through its yellow, gravelly street, and turning to the left, when a mile and a half out, down the Oxford road, at the

Chenies and the Milton Country 17

hamlet of Holtspur, the way to Wooburn Green and Bourne End lies downhill, along the valley of that little- known tributary of the Thames, the Wye, which, some miles higher up, gives a name to High Wycombe. Bourne End has of late years grown out of all know- ledge, being now a place greatly favoured by those outer suburbanites who more especially affect the Thames ; so that new villas plentifully dot the meads and the uplands towards Hedsor Woods and Clieveden. And so across the Thames into Cookham and Berkshire. Frederick Walker discovered Cookham, and painted the common and the geese cackling across it, long before Society had found the Thames. He died untimely, and is buried in the old church close by ; and since then Cookham has become more sophisticated — pretty, of course, and equally, of course, delightful, but not the Cookham of the seventies. But if, on the other hand, you did not know the village then, and make its acquaintance only now, you will have no regrets, and will enjoy it the more. There is an odd effort at poetry on a stone in the churchyard, which, perhaps, should not be missed. It tells of the sudden end of William Henry Pullen in 1813, and among other choice lines says —

""Well could he drive the coursers fleet, which oft he'd drove before; When, turning round a narrow street, he fell — to rise no more. No one commanded more respect, obliging, kind, and fair ; None charged him with the least neglect, none drove with greater care. He little thought when he arose the fatal fifth of June That mom his life's career would close and terminate so soon."

Three parts of the road from Cookham to Maidenhead are exceedingly dull and uninteresting ; let us therefore

2

1 8 Cycle Rides round London

take the towing-path, and cycle along that, ignoring, like everyone else, the absurd prohibition launched a few seasons ago by the Thames Conservancy. Not hurrying — that would be foolishness ; for although the river is well-nigh spoiled by Boulter's Lock, it is still lovely all the way to Cookham, with the most glorious views of Clieveden Woods, rising, tier over tier, on the opposite shore. Here too, of course, have been changes since first Society, and then the Stage, discovered the river a few years ago, and bungalows are built on the meadows; but we must needs be thankful that they were built in these latter days, now that the hideous villas of forty years since are quite impossible.

Nearing Maidenhead, and coming to the Bath road, running right and left, we turn to the right and then down the first road to the left (Oldfield road), then the next two turnings in the same direction, when the old tower of Bray Church comes in sight ; that Bray celebrated for its vicar immortalised in the well-known song, who, when reproached with being a religious trimmer and inconstant to his principles, replied, " Not so ; for I always keep my principle, which is to live and die the Vicar of Bray." Simon Alleyn was the name of this worthy, who lived, and was vicar, in the reigns of Henry vill., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth.

First a Papist, he kept his place by becoming a Protes- tant, recanting when Mary came to the throne, and again becoming a Protestant under Elizabeth. Called apostate, renegade, turncoat, and denier of Christ, modern times would give him the kindlier name of " opportunist." At anyrate, his opportunism was successful, for he held office

Chenies and the Milton Country 19

from 1540 to 1588. The ballad originated in 17 12, in a song entitled " The Religious Turncoat ; or, the Trimming Parson," which refers to no particular place or person, and has no fewer than eighteen verses, quite distinct from the modern ballad. Thus they run, for example : —

"I lov'd no king in 'Forty-one, When Prelacy went down ; A cloak and band I then put on, And preached against the Crown.

When Charles returned into the land,

The English Crown's supporter, I shifted off my cloak and band

And then became a courtier.

When Royal James began his reign,

And Mass was used in common, I shifted off my Faith again,

And then became a Roman."

These verses, it will be noticed, place the trimming story a hundred years later.

The churchyard is entered by a lich-gate with a curious old house over it. In the church itself is a monument to William Goddard, the seventeenth-century founder of Jesus Hospital, and Joyce, his wife. That celebrated old almshouse stands on the road as we leave Bray for Windsor. It is a quaintly gabled, red brick building, with a statue of the founder in an alcove over the entrance. A central courtyard has little dwellings ranged round it, and a rather striking chapel, familiar in Frederick Walker's famous picture, the " Harbour of Refuge," painted here in 1871-72. Unfortunately, those who are familiar with that beautiful picture (now in the

20

Cycle Rides round London

National Gallery) will be disappointed on seeing the real place, for the painter has quite idealised Jesus Hospital, and has imagined many details that have no existence.

Beyond the hospital, a turning to the left leads to Windsor, past Clewer. Windsor bulks hugely from these

JESUS HOSPITAL, BRAY.

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. Only at Windsor these things take higher ground ; here for persuasion in this era read diplomacy.

Chenies and the Milton Country 21

where it had used to be a blood-boltered performance, in whose dramatic course axe and chaplain took prominent parts. The castle survives, its medietval defences restored for appearance sake, but its State Apartments filled with polite furniture, dreadfully gilded and tawdry. It makes a picture, this historic warren of kings and princes ; but alas for picturesqueness, Henry the Eighth's massive gateway is guarded to-day — not by an appropriate Yeoman of the Guard, but by a constable of that singularly unromantic body — the police !

If one is wise, one does not visit Windsor for the sake of the State Apartments, but for the external view of the castle, set grandly, like a jewel, amid its verdant meads. The meads form the most appropriate fore- ground ; the proper time, either early morning or evening, for then, when the mists cling about the river, and the grass is damp with them, that ancient palace and stronghold, that court and tomb of Royalty, bulks larger than at any other hour, both on sight and mind. And, having thus seen Windsor aright, you cannot but return well pleased.

SURBITON TO LEATHERHEAD

SURBITON, that great modern suburb of Kingston, can conveniently be made the starting-point of many pleasant runs through Surrey. Let us on this occasion start from Surbiton Station, and, making for the high road that runs to Ripley, turn to the left at Long Ditton, where the waterworks are, and so in a mile to the first semblance of rusticity at that well-known inn, the "Angel at Ditton," as it is generally called by the many cyclists to whom for years this has been a rallying - place ; although this is not Ditton at all, and its real name the not very romantically-sounding one of " Gigg's Hill Green." We pass the " Angel " on the left ; on the . right hand stretches the pleasant Green, with roads running away in the same direction to the village of Thames Ditton, a mile away, and worth seeing for those who have the exploring faculty well developed.

But to continue straight ahead, we pass Gigg's Hill Green only to come to other and larger commons — Ditton Marsh and Littleworth Common respectively — along a road straight and flat for a considerable distance, passing under the long tunnel-like archway of the London and South- Western main line, and emerging from it to a full view of beautiful Esher Hill, a mile and a half away, while away on the left stretch miles of open country.

22

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 23

Notice outside a modern, dry, and dusty-looking inn, called the " Orleans Arms," a tall, circular stone pillar about ten feet in height, with names of towns along the road, and the distances to them, carved on it. This is familiarly known as the " White Lady," and dates back to the coaching age ; for this was the old road to Portsmouth, and was once crowded with traffic.

From this point it is a mile of continuous, though gentle, rise to Esher village — Sandown Park racecourse on the right, under the hill. Notice the very highly ornamental iron gates and railings of the park : a romantic history belongs to them. They came from Baron Grant's palatial mansion of Kensington House, built but never occupied, and then demolished, which stood in Kensington Gore.

Kensington House is now quite forgot, and on its site rise the stately houses of Kensington Court. It was in 1873 that Baron Grant, bloated with the money of the widow and the orphan, plundered from them in his Emma Mine and other rascally schemes, purchased the dirty slum at Kensington then known as the " Rookery," and set about building a lordly pleasure-house on its site. Just as it was finished, his career of predatory finance was checked, and he never occupied the vast building. For years it remained tenantless, and was then demolished. " Grant," as he called himself, died obscurely in 1 899. He had in his time been the cause of the public losing over ^20,000,000 sterling. The Daily News spoke of him as an Irishman, but it will readily be conceded that his real name of Gottheimer is not strikingly Hibernian. He was, it is true, born in

24

Cycle Rides round London

SURBITOr*

Dublin. So was Dean Swift: but, as the Dean himself remarked, to be born in a stable does not prove one to be a horse.

Although " Grant " died obscurely, and his name and his schemes had long before that time become discredited, it must not be supposed that he was personally ruined with the wreck of his projects. Not at all. He lived and died very comfortably circumstanced, while many of his creditors remained unsatisfied. He could pay

debts when he chose, but when he chose not to, there were no means of compel- ling him. Where have we heard the same story in recent years ?

Esher, up along the hill, is a pretty village, with many and varied associations and an extraordinary number of curious relics. It is a charm- ingly 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. They are huge jack-boots closely resembling the type worn by Marlborough and his troopers at Blenheim, Ramilies, and Malplaquet.

STOKt: ■D'ABER^fON

LEATHERMEfl'D

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 25

" Mr. Smith " — for under that plebeian disguise the Citizen King fled from Paris — resided at Claremont by favour of Queen Victoria, and died there two years later.

Claremont is an ominous place, with a tragical cast to its story. Most of those connected with it have been unfortunate, if not before they sought the shelter of its ill - omened roof, certainly afterwards. Clive, the "heaven-born general," who built it, shot himself; the newly married only child of George the Fourth — the ill-fated Princess Charlotte — died there, under somewhat mysterious circumstances ; and the Duke of Albany, who had not long been in residence, died untimely in the south of France, in 1884.

The old church of Esher, long since disused and kept locked and given over to spiders and dust, has a Royal Pew, built for the use of the Princess Charlotte and the Claremont household in 1816. It is a huge structure, in comparison with the size of the little church, and designed in the worst possible classic taste ; wearing, indeed, more the appearance of an opera -box than anything else.

The authorities (whoever they may be) charge a shilling for viewing this derelict church. It is distinctly not worth the money, because the architecture is con- temptible, and all the interesting monuments have been removed to the modern building, on a quite different site, across the road.

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the death of the Princess Charlotte in her eighteenth year made a vast difference in English history — or, at least, English Court history. Had she survived, there would

26

Cycle Rides round London

have been no William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria would never have been queen. Think of it ! No Victorian Era, no Victoria Station, no Victoria Embank- ment, no Victoria in Australia, no Victoria in Vancouver Island ; and, in short, none of those thousand things and places " Victoria " and " Victorian " we are surrounded

ESHER OLD CHURCH.

with. None of those, and certainly no Albert Halls, memorials, streets, and places commemorative of that paragon of men.

The reflections conjured up by an inspection of Esher old church are sad indeed, and the details of it not a little horrible to a sensitive person. There is an early nineteenth-century bone-house or above-ground vault attached to the little building, in which have been stored coffins innumerable. The coffins are gone, but

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 2']

many of the bony relics of poor humanity may be seen in the dusty semi-obscurity of an open archway, lying strewn among rakes and shovels. To these, when the present writer was inspecting the place, entered a fox- terrier, emerging presently with the thigh-bone of some rude forefather of the hamlet in his mouth. " Drop it ! " said the churchwarden, fetching the dog a blow with his walking-stick. The dog " dropped it " accordingly, and went off, and the churchwarden kicked the bone away. I made some comment, I know not what, and the churchwarden volunteered the information that the village urchins had been used to play with these poor relics. " They're nearly all gone now," said he. " They used to break the windows with 'em." And then we changed the subject for a better.

The "new" church — new in 1852 — is a very imposing one, also with its Claremont Royal Pew, very like a drawing-room, built on one side of the chancel, high above the heads of the vulgar herd, who often, when the church is open, climb up the staircase to it, and, .seating themselves on the chairs, go away and boast of having sat on the seats honoured by the great — thereby proving the vulgarity aforesaid.

The church was built chiefly from the accumulated funds of a bequest anciently left to Esher. This was the piece of land now called Sandown Park and the site of the well-known racecourse, let to the racecourse company at an annual rent. Not until 1899 did it occur to the Vestry that for the Church to be the landlord of a racecourse was a rather scandalous state of affairs, and the sanction of the Charity Commissioners was

28

Cycle Rides round London

then sought and obtained for a scheme to sell the land outright for ;^ 12,000, this sum to be invested in Consols. These tender consciences obscured the business side of the question, for the land, if not already worth more than that sum, very shortly will be, considering the spread of London's suburbs. It is rather singular that this freer hold, bequeathed so long ago, was once the site of the forgotten Priory of Sandown, which would appear never

HORSESHOE CLUMP,

to have been revived after its Prior and all the brethren perished in the great pestilence, the Black Death, that almost depopulated England in the Middle Ages,

Leaving the village behind and pursuing the Portsmouth road, the woodlands of Claremont Park are left behind as we come downhill towards Horse- shoe Clump, a well-known landmark on this road. This prominent object is a semicircular grove of firs on

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 29

the summit of a sandy knoll, looking over the valley of the Mole, the "sullen Mole" of the poets, flowing in far-flung loops below, on its way to join the Thames at Molesey. This is a switchback road for cyclists thus far, for the ridge on which Horseshoe Clump stands is no sooner gained than we go downhill again, and so up once more and across the level " fair mile," to descend finally into Cobham Street, where the Mole is reached again. Here turn to the left, along a road marked by a sign-post " Church Cobham," the original village, off" the main road, of which Cobham Street on the Ports- mouth road is only an offshoot developed by the traffic of old road-faring days. Church Cobham has, besides its ancient church and ** Church Stile House," a picturesque water-mill and mill-pond beside the road. Beyond, in two miles, the tiny village owning the odd name of Stoke D'Abernon is sighted ; village in name only, for the church and a scattered house or two alone mark its existence. The Norman family of D'Abernon gave their name to this particular Stoke, originally a primitive British stockade, or defensible camp, at a ford on the Mole.

For the happily increasing class of tourists who are interested in archasology, let it be noted here that the chancel of this church contains the earliest monumental brass in the kingdom, the mail-clad effigy of Sir John D'Abernon, dated 1277.

Many of his race, before and after his time, lie here. The life-sized engraved figure of this Sir John, besides being the earliest, is also one of the most beautiful. Clad from head to foot in a complete suit of chain mail,

30

Cycle Rides round London

his hands clasped in prayer, heraldic shield on one arm, his pennoned lance under the other, and his great two- handed sword hanging from a broad belt outside the surcoat, this is a majestic figure. His feet rest on a

writhing lion, playfully repre- sented by the engraver of the brass as biting the lance-shaft. A second Sir John D'Aber- non, who died in 1327, son of the first, also has his life-sized memorial engraved on brass.

Stoke " Dabbernun," as the rustics call it, is at once ex- hausted of interest when its church has been seen.

The road now crosses the Mole by an old red brick bridge, and leads up a gentle rise to Slyfield Farm, a very picturesque old farmstead of red brick, designed in the classic style prevailing in the reign of James the First. This was once the manor- house of the now extinct Sly- field family. Fair speech and presentation of a visiting-card may generally be relied upon to secure the courtesy of a glimpse into the hall of this interesting old house, where an ancient massive carved -oak staircase may be seen, still guarded by the original " dog-gates "

BRASS TO SIR JOHN d'aBERNON,

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 3 1

that in the times of our forebears kept the hounds in their proper place below stairs.

THE HALL, SLYFIELD HOUSE.

The road now winds pleasantly through the valley, but not within sight of the river until past the outlying houses of the little village of Fetcham. On gaining the point where the road from Great Bookham to Leather- head falls into the one we are following, look out for an unassuming left-hand turning past the railway arch, leading in a hundred yards to Fetcham mill-pond. This is a lovely spot, where the wild-fowl congregate, and well worth halting at on a summer's day, but tucked away so artfully that it will scarce be found save by asking. It is a long sheet of water, with reeds, and an island in the middle, and a peep back towards Leatherhead from the farther end, where the church tower peers above the trees. Flocks of moor-hens, a few couples of stately swans, and some domestic ducks form

32

Cycle Rides round London

the invariable feathered company of the pond, and not infrequently the coot takes up his quarters here, with myriads of dabchicks ; the great swans and little dab- chicks, swimming together on the water, forming the oddest of contrasts : the swans like warships and the dabchicks like little black torpedo-boats.

Cycles can be walked along the path to the far end of the pond, where the road is reached again.

THE " RUNNING HORSE.

Leatherhead itself lies off to the left, less than half a mile distant, reached by a many-arched bridge straddling athwart the Mole, here a divergent and sedgy stream broken up by osier aits. On the other side of the bridge stands that crazy old inn, the " Running Horse," claiming a continued existence since the fifteenth century and

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD

33

to have been the scene of the celebrated " tunning of Elynor Rummyng " ; but, like the silk stocking so long and so often darned with worsted that no trace of the original material remained, the " Running Horse " has in all these six centuries been so repaired here and patched there that he would be a bold man who should dare swear to a fragment of that old house remaining.

Elynor Rummyng was a landlady who flourished in the time of Henry the Seventh. Skelton, poet-laureate

EI.YNOR RUMMYNG.

of that day, in a long rambling set of rhymes, neither very elegant nor very decent, describes her and her customers at great length. As for Elynor herself, he says she was so ugly that

" Her visage it would assuage A man's courage. Her loathly leer is nothing clear, But ugly of cheer, droupy and drowsy, Scurvy and lousy, her face all bowsy," —

with much else in the uncomplimentary kind. 3

34 Cycle Rides round London

She was, Skelton goes on to say, " sib to the devil " ; she scraped up all manner of filth into her mash-tub, mixed it together with her " mangy fists," and sold this hell-broth as ale —

" She breweth nappy ale And makes thereof port-sale

To Travellers and Tinkers, to Sweaters and Swinkers And all good ale-drinkers."

There is no accounting for tastes, and, reading Skelton, it would seem as though the whole district crowded to taste the unlovely Elynor's unwholesome brew, bringing with them all manner of goods —

" Insteede of quoine and mony, some bring her a coney, And some a pot with honey ; some a salt, some a spoone, Some their hose, some their shoon ; some run a good trot, With skillet or pot ; some fill a bag full Of good Lemster wool ; an huswife of trust When she is athirst, such a web can spin Her thrift is full thin.

Some go straight thither, be it slaty or slidder, They hold the highway, they care not what men say. Be they as be may. Some, loth to be espied, Start in at the backside, over hedge and pale, And all for good ale. Some brought walnuts,

Some apples, some pears, and some their clipping-shears ; Some brought this and that, some brought I wot ne'er what, Some brought their husband's hat," —

and then, doubtless, there was trouble in the happy home. Why the crowd resorted thus to tipple the horrible compound does not appear : one would rather drink the usual glucose and dilute sulphuric acid of modern times. The pictorial sign of the old house still proudly declares —

" When Skelton wore the laurel crown My ale put all the alewives down,"

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD

35

To do that, you would think, it must needs have been both good and cheap. Certainly, if the portrait - sign of Elynor be anything like her, customers did not resort to the " Running Horse " to bask in her smiles, for she is represented as a very plain, not to say ugly, old lady with a predatory nose plentifully studded with warts.

Leatherhead is a still unspoiled little town, beside its " mousling Mole," as Drayton calls that river. " Mousling," probably because of the holes, or " swallows," as they are called, into which this curious river every now and again disappears, like a mouse, as the poet prettily expresses it.

P £v,i,Lij::) M! L. . ■ : , SIGN OF THE "RUNNING HORSE."

IGHTHAM MOTE AND THE VALE OF MEDWAY

From Sevenoaks, on the South-Eastern Railway, let this tour be begun ; from that Sevenoaks Station rejoicing in the eminently cricketing name of " Bat and Ball." There are reasons sufficiently weighty why the starting-point should not be fixed nearer London, chief among them being the hilly nature of the way. Sevenoaks itself, quite apart from the rather unin- teresting character of its long street, does not bulk largely in the affections of the outward-bound wheel- man, for to reach it one has a more than mile-long climb. But, setting our faces eastward, and avoiding Sevenoaks town, an easier beginning presents itself along the road to Seal, where, leaving behind the trim gardens and modern villas that form a kind of suburban and secular halo around the railway, we plunge into a woodland district.

Seal village is a harbinger of the Thoreau-like solitudes that succeed along the road to Ightham, standing as it does at the gates of Seal Chart, where, away from the road on either hand, stretch such crepuscular alleys of murmuring pines that even Bournemouth itself never knew. Does there exist a cyclist who can hurry along this road and not linger here, to rest his trusty steed

36

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 2>7

against the corrugated stem of one of these aromatic giants of the forest, and listen to the intoning of the wood pigeons in the cathedral - Hke half-lights? If such there be, surely he merits the Tennyson ian description, " a clod of thankless earth." The far- spreading woods are unfenced and quite open to the road for one to wander in at will, and never a sound in their solitudes but belongs to the woodlands themselves ; the cooing of the pigeons, and the rustling of some " sma' wee beastie " disturbed by the crackling of the dry twigs under your feet. The squirrels themselves are noiseless and, to the un- practised eye, invisible; but there are many of them overhead, running with lightning speed along the red-brown branches of the pines that so accurately match the rust-red hue of their fur, and so help to conceal them from casual observation.

Following the road and the woods for two miles, the highway dips sharply, and takes a left curve just where you glimpse the blue smoke rising from the rustic chimneys of a wayside inn, down on whose lichened roof you look in descending. To dismount here, just as the view begins to disclose itself, is the better way, for only thus will you be in full receipt of the beauty and the exquisite stillness of the scene. The woods recede, like some clearing in a Canadian forest, and, standing back from the road, you see the inn whose roof-tree was first disclosed. On the other side of the highway, swinging romantically from the branches of a great Scotch fir, is the picture-sign of the house, bear- ing the legend, " Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Crown Point," and

38 Cycle Rides round London

showing the half-length portrait of a very determined- looking warrior, clad in armour and apparently deep in thought ; while in the background is a broad river, across whose swift current boat-loads of soldiers, in the costume of two centuries ago, are being rowed.

The scene — the old inn, with the smoke curling

CROWN POINT.

peacefully upwards against the blue-black background of the pine-woods, and the picturesque sign swinging with every breeze — is a realisation of the places pictured in the glowing pages of romantic novelists. If one were only a (ew years younger, and conventions had not come to curb one's first impulses, there would be no more suitable spot than this where to become an

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 39

amateur Red Indian, or one of the robber chiefs suitable for such a spot.

The place has rather a curious story. " Crown Point," as it is generally called, is so named after a place in Canada where Sir Jeffrey Amherst gained a great victory over the North American Indians early in the eighteenth century. Amherst eventually became

S^JtFfRtV AMHERST.

SIGN OF THE "SIR JEHREY AMHEKsT

Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief to the Forces, and, retiring and settling in Kent, founded the family of whom the present Earl Amherst is the head. The scenery here is said to greatly resemble that of Crown Point in Canada. The sign of the inn is repainted and kept in repair by Earl Amherst.

It may be worth noting that an historical relic is

40 Cycle Rides round London

preserved in the immediate neighbourhood of this place ; no less important an one, indeed, than the skull of Oliver Cromwell, now in the possession of Mr. Horace Wilkinson. Much discussion has arisen respecting it, but there seems no room for doubting that this is the veritable skull (or, rather, mummified

C RO M WE L L S SKULL,

head) of the Protector. The relic has a pedigree that traces it back to the stormy night when it was blown off the roof of Westminster Hall, where it had been exposed on a spike after the Restoration. The rusty spike still transfixes it, and on the dried cranium the reddish brown hair is yet to be seen. It has had many odd adventures. Picked up by a sentry on duty at

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 41

Westminster Hall, it was concealed under his cloak, and afterwards secretly disposed of to some of Cromwell's descendants, coming, many years later, into the pos- session of a travelling showman, from whom it was purchased by a relative of the present owner.

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

SEAL

Cn>wri ^i

IGHTHAM

iSeuf/rpa/fl Stat'^

ICHTHAM _

^°'^^ SHIPBORNE^

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. What will the artists do then? Meanwhile, one still has here just one of those characteristic scenes Morland and his school so loved to paint — the hollow road with its steep banks, in whose crumbling earth the great wayside trees have secured what looks like a precarious footing, and the sandy earth where the moles and the rabbits burrow deep amid the gnarled roots. Up on the hillside that looks down upon the road is Oldbury,

42 Cycle Rides round London

a Roman encampment, called by antiquaries the " Gibraltar of Kent " ; but we will take the tales of its strength on trust, for a bicycle is no aid in exploring hilltop fortifications.

Ightham is a village that looks as though it had at some time aspired to become a town, so urban in character are some of its houses ; urban, that is to say, in no ill sense. There is, for instance, the so-called " Town House," one of the most beautiful and dignified architectural compositions of that late seventeenth or early eighteenth century character which in its Renais- sance ideals makes so thorough a departure from the older English Gothic models. By " Town House " you are to understand a building devoted to public purposes ; what we should, nowadays, more grandiloquently term a " Town Hall." There was a time when Ightham bade fair to take on a new era of importance, in the early days of cycling, when it enjoyed a great popularity that was stolen away by Ripley, nowadays itself in the cold shade of neglect.

Turning to the right out of Ightham, through the pretty hamlet of Ivy Hatch, the Mote House is reached in two miles of shady lanes. Like many another old English house, Ightham Mote is tucked away coyly from the sight of the casual wayfarer. Looking dili- gently, you see it on the left hand, on coming down into a hollow, just a glimpse of its magpie black and white north front glimmering through the surround- ing woods. It is one of the earliest of the fortified manor - houses, something between a castle and a residence, built when people had greater ideas of

IGHTHAM MOTE.

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 45

comfort than obtained when the Edwardian strong- holds were erected, and yet before it was safe to build a house incapable of defence. Nowadays one finds a preference for an open, breezy situation ; in those times, if they did not build upon sites difficult of access in one way they did in another ; if they did not select a rocky crag they sought some oozy hollow, where, with some

THE COURTYARD, IGHTHAM MOTE,

little ingenuity, it was possible to form a broad moat by damming the surrounding streams. This was the resort adopted here, and in Ightham Mote to-day one sees the original idea of a watery girdle, from whose inner sides rise defensible walls enclosing a courtyard. The only way across this moat was by a drawbridge, now replaced by masonry, the drawbridge defended by the still- remaining entrance-tower. Originally the ornamental

46 Cycle Rides round London

part of the residence was strictly kept within the courtyard. The walls looking outward were either blank or else very sparingly provided with window openings. Later centuries have somewhat altered this, and the picturesque, half-timbered gables and outbuild- ings tell a tale of increasing security. There are those who will have it that Ightham Mote is the most picturesque old house in England, Perhaps it is, for its moss-grown stone walls, going sheer down into the clear water of the moat, its nodding, peaked gables, reflected in that beautiful ceinture, and the mellow red of the old brick entrance-tower, form a wonderful picture. Five hundred years have passed, and it is still a home. The tapestried hall, with its boldly timbered roof, yet forms the central point of the house, and the bedrooms where the Selbys, the old-time owners, slept for many generations are in use in these latter times. Modernity has crept in with regard to the essentials of comfortable living, but nowhere does it appear to mar the perfect old-world beauty of the place.

The imaginative may yet, without much difficulty in the mental exercise, people the quaint paved courtyard with the conventionally fair ladies and gentle knights of the age of chivalry ; those ladies who, to judge by the works of the Old Masters, were so extremely plain, and those knights who could teach the tiger and the hyaena something in ferocity. Not that the old owners of Ightham Mote were men of this kind. Their old home plainly tells us they were not, desiring rather a peaceful seclusion than the ambitions and contentions of courts and camps. Defence, not defiance, was the

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 47

watchword of those who lived in this picturesque hollow, barred in at night from the chances, surprises, and alarums of the riotous outer world.

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. It is with a sigh that the Londoner turns away from a place whose loveliness fills him with a glorious discontent.

Many of the Selbys lie in Ightham Church, and some have their memorials in the little domestic chapel attached to the Mote House. Dame Dorothy Selby was a very phcenix of all the virtues, if we may believe her epitaph, wherein she is compared with a number of notable biblical characters, all very edifying.

The monument to her "pretious name and honor" is still to be seen on the chancel wall of Ightham Church. She appears to have been a person of many accomplishments. Firstly, a needlewoman of consider- able parts —

" She was a Dorcas Whose curious Needle turn'd th' abused Stage Of this leud World into the golden Age ; Whose Pen of Steele, and silken Inck enroU'd The Acts of Jonah in Records of Gold."

48 Cycle Rides round London

Then it is claimed for her that she discovered the Gunpowder Plot, in these words —

"Whose Arte disclos'd that Plot, which, had it taken, Rome had tryumph'd and Britan's walls had shaken."

Moreover —

" She was

In heart a Lydia ; and in tongue a Ilanna.

In Zeale a Ruth : In Wedlock a Susanna,

Prudently simple, prouidently Wary ;

To th' World, a Martha : and to heauen, a Mary.

Who put on) . , r , (Pilgrimage 69 March 15.

^ ,. >■ in the yeare of her -{,, , / „

Immortality) (Redeemer 1641.

O rare and most estimable dame, paragon and phoenix, and very Gorgon of all the virtues, how little are your qualities hid in this, your epitaph !

She looks all those things and more, in her marble bust, that with thin, sharp-pointed nose, and with drawn- down mouth, gives her a very vinegary expression. There can be little doubt of it, the old lady was that terrible creature, the Superior Person.

There is, opposite this worthy lady's monument, the stone effigy of a very much earlier inhabitant of the Mote — Sir Thomas Cawne, who died in 1374. He is represented in armour, his calm face peering out of his hauberk and chain mail. The window to his memory, over his tomb in the north chancel wall, made according to the directions in his will, still remains.

There will, doubtless, be those who, resting content with Ightham Mote, will decline to follow these wheel- marks farther, for such a place is worth lingering over. For the insatiable sight-seer who will proceed, the

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 49

way lies as straight ahead as the winding lane will permit to Shipborne, where we turn to the left, passing through the village, and then, in little over a mile, to the right, at the cross-roads, going, with Frith Woods on the left and Dene Park on the right, for two miles farther, turning left where a sign-post points to Hadlow. Many hollows are descended into on the way, where tiny streams run across the wooded roads, and there are correspondingly sharp rises.

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, re- sembling 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. It is like a huge room, and is divided into nave and aisles by plaster pillars, painted and grained to resemble marble, with all the fittings in a correspondingly classic style. This objectionable building owed its origin in 1748 to the eighth Earl of Westmoreland, whose seat, Mereworth House, near by, is built somewhat in the same style. The only relic of the old church is the grand monument of his ancestor, the first earl. In the churchyard is the tomb of Evelyn Boscawen, Viscount Falmouth, who married (the epitaph tells us) Baroness Le Despenser. 4

50 Cycle Rides round London

Here we are come into the Vale of Medway, and two miles of a beautiful road bring us to Wateringbury, where little rills, trickling down to join the greater stream, nourish all these leafy hillsides into such dense growth. There is a curious relic in Wateringbury Church — an old wooden club or mace three feet and a half in length, known as the " Dumb Borsholder," belonging to the hamlet of Pizein Well, in the Manor of Chart. This was the central figure in the court-leet of the manor, and on those occa- sions was carried into the court by the head tything-man, or borsholder, as a symbol of authority, much in the same way as the Lord Mayor of London takes the Mace with him on state occasions. But the " Dumb Bors- holder " seems to have been regarded both as a symbol and as a person ; and, carried into court with a handkerchief passed through a ring at one end, had naturally to be answered for when called upon to put in an appearance. The other end of this club is provided with an iron spike, like a bayonet, with which to break open the doors of refractory tenants. Retired from active service so long ago as 1748, this formidable weapon is now chained up in the vestry. DUMB BORs- From here to Teston the way is bordered

HOLDER. , , , „, TT . 1 . ,

by hop gardens. 1 eston Bridge, crossmg the Medway in seven Gothic arches, is a beautiful old struc- ture, but Teston Church, although its shingled spire on

Igiitham Mote and the Vale of Medway 5 1

the hillside looks picturesque, does not improve on closer acquaintance, having been classically re-cast, something in the manner of Mereworth.

Here we turn left, with a three-miles' run to St. Leonard's Street and West Mailing, off to the right, where the ruins of Mailing Abbey are to be seen. Straight ahead is Offham, where one must look out for the quintain on the green, a modern replica of the old

THE QUINTAIN, OKFHAM.

English village jousting instrument, consisting of an upright post with a pivoted arm. One end of the arm is thick, and from the other was suspended a bag of flour, or some heavy object. The players in this old sport tilted on horseback at the thickened end. If their lance or staff struck it, and they were not nimble enough, the other end, swinging round, would hit them on the side of the head, unhorsing them. When the

52 Cycle Rides round London

hop-pickers are let loose upon the country, with every recurrent autumn, the quintain is taken in until they have gone home again.

A mile or so beyond this point our way crosses the Sevenoaks to Maidstone road, and goes in very hilly fashion to Wrotham, called 'I Rootam " by the natives. Notice a stone built into the wall by an inn, recounting how a Lieutenant-Colonel Shadwell was shot dead by a deserter, over a hundred years ago. From Wrotham it is a mile distant to Borough Green and Wrotham Station, whence train to Sevenoaks and London.

THE DARENTH AND THE GRAYS

Within this circuit of just upon thirty miles much that is characteristic of Kent, the " Garden of England," is to be found ; much that is busily commercial, a goodly proportion of beautiful, unfrequented country, old- world villages on unspoiled stretches of river, and other villages with many mills polluting the Darenth on its way to the turbid Thames. Kent, in short, is a very varied county, growing fruit and hops, and, by reason of its waterways and its nearness to London, dotted over with factories ; and this district here mapped out is a very good exemplar of the whole. Erith, which may be made the starting-point of this ride, is an interesting place, overlooking the Thames, here half a mile wide and crowded with all kinds of shipping ; a tarry, long- shore, semi-nautical village — or town, should it be called ? — with a crazy little wooden pier boasting a picturesque summer-house kind of building at its end, and with a puffing engine of a miniature kind noisily playing at trains along it all day long, and performing mysterious shunting operations in collusion with a few lilliputian trucks. Engine and trucks to the contrary and notwithstanding, Erith is very delightfully behind the times, and is much more in accord with the days of Nelson and Dibdin and the era of tar and hemp than

63

54

Cycle Rides round London

with our own period. Romantically decayed defences against the inroads of the Thames bristle along the foreshore, like so many black and broken teeth; over across the estuary is the Essex shore, and here, at the back, at Purfleet, are, actually, chalk cliffs, giving place along the course of the river to marshes. " R.T.Y.C." is the legend one reads on the jerseys of many

THE WATERSIDE, ERITH.

prosperous-looking sailormen lounging here, for Erith is the headquarters of the Royal Thames Yachting Club.

The two miles between Erith and Crayford need detain no one. Half the distance is an ascent, and the rest goes steeply down to the valley of the Cray, where Crayford, the first of the series of villages whose names derive from that little stream, is situated. With all the good-will in the world it is difficult, if not impossible,

The Darenth and the Grays 55

to say anything in favour of Crayford, which appears to afford congenial harbourage to all the tramps who per- vade that peculiarly tramp-infested highway, the Dover road. " A townlet of slums " sums up the place. But

"*ni'

ON THE THAMES, NEAR ERITH.

note the long rhyming epitaph to Peter Isnell, parish clerk, on the south side of the hilltop church —

"The life of this clerk was just threescore and ten, Nearly half of which time he had sung out ' Amen ! ' In his youth he was married, like other young men, But his wife died one day, so he chanted ' Amen ! ' "

and so forth.

The first turning out of the dusty high road to the right, and then to the left, for Bexley (not Bexley Heath, which is quite another and a very squalid place) leads to a pleasant road following the river. From it, on the left hand, within a mile, a glimpse is gained of Hall Place, a beautiful old Tudor mansion built in chequers of stone and flint. An excellent view of it may be had by dismounting and looking through the wrought-iron entrance gates. Then comes the long

56

Cycle Rides round London

street of Bexley and its curious spire, and a brick bridge by which we cross the Cray, turning sharply to the left, and soon afterwards as sharply to the right. Very pretty is the river scenery just by Bexley Bridge; millhouse and weir and tall clustered trees making a rare picture. North Cray, the next village of The Crays, as the group is locally known, is one mile ahead.

ERITH

VCRAYFO^D	DARTrORQ
/bexley	\
fHOKrn CRf\y	V suttok-at-howe;
fFOCfx'S CWY	\
/STPAUL'S CWS	/hortow KIR.BY
IsTMAKY CRAY	zr FAR^fl^(CHA^I
pORPIIiCTOti	Z' cmesFoj^D
GREEN iTRffTCIlEErJ 1	/

rSrtOI^£HA^\

OTFOR.D

Before entering it notice the long avenue on the left leading to Mount Mascal, and then the lengthy, low white house on the right at the beginning of the village. This is the house where Lord Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822. At the interval of another mile is Foot's Cray, where the road from Farningham to Sidcup, Eltham, and London crosses our route at right angles. The village chiefly lies at the side, along the

The Darenth and the Grays

57

London road, and the unpretending old church at the back.

A short interval of country road, and then the outlying houses of St. Paul's Cray, which, with the adjoining town of St. Mary Cray, forms one long street for the length of over a mile and a half, or, including Orpington, which practically joins on, of more than two miles and a half. They make paper on a large scale at St. Paul's

PURFLEET, FROM THE DARENTH MEADOWS.

and St. Mary Cray, and the mills are very prominent objects. Much too prominent at St. Mary Cray is a hideous Congregational temple with a verdigris-coloured dome, and just as prominent and as ugly is the railway viaduct that straddles at a great height over the absurdly narrow street.

Orpington was the scene of the publication of Ruskin's works during a long series of years before they were published in the usual way in London. It is a pretty

58

Cycle Rides round London

village, with an Early English church, a tree-shaded wayside pond with miniature waterfalls, and a general air of " something attempted, something done " to realise Ruskinian ideals. A mile and a half beyond Orpington we come down to the cross-roads leading, right to Farnborough, and left to Sevenoaks. In front, on its hillside, is a great red brick house. This is High Elms, Sir John Lubbock's place. Turning to the left, we reach the hamlet of Green Street Green, and then, in another mile, Pratt's Bottom, There is a continual four

'.^•"Z"

miles and a quarter ascent from here to the crown of Sepham Hill (or Polhill, as it is now generally called) to give the wheelman pause, and to make him wish he had come the other way round. From the Polhill Arms at the summit the average touring cyclist will observe that he has rather a nerve-shaking descent to make, judging from the elevated position he has reached and from the little world of landscape unfolded before him. Caution and a good rim-brake, to keep control over the machine, are, however, all that are necessary, even

The Darenth and the Grays 59

though the descent be winding. A tree-covered bank on the right hand, flanking the hill with a certain solemnity, would be more impressive still to the cyclist did he know that this is the site of one of the great circle of forts now building for the defence of London. But the stranger is not cognisant of the fact, and so, unhappily, misses a patriotic thrill in passing.

Continuing the wooded descent towards the Weald, look out for a road on the left leading to Otford, a steep and stony mile and a half. Here, intrepid adventurers that we are, we have crossed the watershed and achieved the valley of the Darenth. Otford was the site of one of the sixteen palaces of the Archbishops of Canterbury. It was built just before the Reformation, by Archbishop Warham, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and resigned by Cranmer to that very masterful monarch. The ruins of it are still to be seen by the church.

Leaving Otford, turn to the left at the cross-roads, and so, beside the railway, to Shoreham Station. The village lies on a by-road to the left. They make paper there also. It was the birthplace of that not sufficiently appreciated African explorer, Commander Lovett- Cameron, untimely dead. In the church are the flags he carried with him on the Livingstone search expedition. Like " Bobs " — who, according to Mr. Kipling, " don't advertise" — Lovett- Cameron cared nothing for the reclame that makes reputations with the many-headed ; unlike him, he missed his proper meed of recognition.

The valley of the Darenth here is very beautiful, and the river at Shoreham expands into the likeness of a great lake. Here is a choice of routes : direct, beside

6o Cycle Rides round London

the railway, to Eynesford, or through Shoreham to Eynesford by way of Shoreham Castle and LuUingstone. There is little to choose either way, because the " castle " at Shoreham exists no longer, and LuUingstone Park is forbidden to cyclists. Let us reserve our enthusiasm for Eynesford, an old English village of truly Elizabethan spaciousness, set down in its valley beside

c;<j«AH^^^

EYNESFORD.

the Darenth, with an ancient, eminently sketchable and paintable old bridge spanning the ford that originally conferred the termination of the place-name; with a highly interesting Norman and Early English church, with lofty spire dominating the scene ; and with a ruined castle tucked away in a builder's yard. Little stress need be laid upon Eynesford Castle, because it is now, in short, only a little piece of rubble wall, and therefore to be taken very largely on trust. But the

The Darenth and the Grays 6i

village — to recur to it — is a very beautiful and aesthetically satisfying fact.

Farningham, to which we come after Eynesford, is only moderately interesting. Also, for the benefit of those who may follow in these tracks, it may be noted that it is in a hop-growing district, and when the hop- pickers are let loose upon it the society is not of the choicest. The village lies on the left-hand road ; we pursue our way to Horton Kirby, where are more mills and crooked streets, and thence to South Darenth, where there are many factories and curving roads. Turn acutely (and warily) to the left, and, crossing the river, make for Sutton-at-Hone. Darenth lies off to the right. The church is Norman and Early English, and the walls have a plentiful admixture of Roman tiles. See the church, by all means, but do not take that way to Dartford. Return to the point where the road was left, and go by way of the hamlet of Hawley.

Dartford is a town of flour-mills, paper-mills, powder- mills, and factories where they make chemicals and compound drugs. They do not smoke, these great commercial structures, for the most part, but are cleanly, white-painted, boarded structures that find their motive power in the waters of the Darenth. Here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was at Dartford, in the reign of Elizabeth, that John Spielman, a settler on these shores from Lindau, in Germany, introduced the process. Not only that, but he was granted the sole licence for a period often years of collecting rags for the making of his paper withal. If you step into the quaint old church of Dartford, you

62

Cycle Rides round London

will see, so soon as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom of that crepuscular interior, his tomb with the efifigies of himself and his wife, together with shields of arms bearing the fool's cap, said to have been his crest, and certainly the original watermark of the particular size of paper which from that circumstance has acquired the name. There are many things for the stranger to see at Dartford ; among them the Bull Inn, one of the very few remaining of the old galleried coaching inns, with its sign, the great black effigy of a bull, aloft among the chimney- stalks, a most whimsical position. It was on Dartford Green, opposite this old house, that Wat Tyler dashed out the brains of the tax- gatherer who had insulted his daughter. There is no Green now — only a narrow, dingy street ; and there are those who would have you believe that Wat Tyler is a myth ; that there never was such a man, and that con- sequently there was no daughter, and no tax-collector whose brains were so summarily scattered. But let us keep our illusions, O scientific historians !

From Dartford to Cray ford Station is two miles. Let those who will, cycle the dusty high road to complete the circle; but Dartford Station will serve as well, or better, for returning to town.

THE fool's cap crest OF SIR JOHN SPIELMAN,

CROYDON TO KNOCKHOLT BEECHES AND THE KENTISH COMMONS

Croydon, where this trip is begun, is fortunate among towns, for it is set amidst, or within reach of, great stretches of wild and open common lands, for the most part beautifully wooded and entirely free for the rambler to come and go as he will. Besides these far-spreading open spaces, which, extensive as they are even now, are but the remains of the commons enclosed by the iniquitous Enclosure Act of 1797, good, if hilly, roads lead in almost every direction to quaint and interesting places. Croydon itself, prosperous, handsomely rebuilt of late years, and largely residential, is an example of sudden growth ; for its population of less than 6000 persons in 1801 is now reaching nearly to 130,000; These facts, which speak of crowds, and the additional feature of tram-lines running from end to end of the main street, are perhaps not altogether admirable from the point of view of the passing cyclist ; but for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear withal, the story of modern Croydon, its enlightened and up-to-date Corporation, and the sight of its palatial Town Hall, the altogether adequate centre of a vigorous municipal life, speak of romance. It is largely owing to this Corpora- tion, composed chiefly of residents and professional men,

64 Cycle Rides round London

instead of the gang of local tradesmen who usually bedevil the councils of a town, that the surroundings of Croydon are so pleasant and well kept.

From East Croydon Station in the centre of the town, a ride or walk to South Croydon and the turning to the left where a sign-post marks the way to Sanderstead and Warlingham, among a number of other places, will show the inquiring stranger what manner of town this is, and will astonish those who, having known the shabby

CaOVDOK	, Hayes
	1 Keston
^ SrtNDERSTE'^P	I DowK£
	\ CUDHAM
\^Vln^l.l^fCHfl^l	\ KKOCKHOLT
yfoVSUHCHw/
	Tatsfield.

Croydon of the past, have not been here of late years. Such an one, however well acquainted with the place of old, must needs ask his way through Croydon's streets to-day, so changed are they, and so utterly vanished the most of the old landmarks. When Mr. Jabez Balfour comes out of prison, he, the one-time Mayor, will need a guide.

Once past the turning, and Sanderstead reached, along a gently rising gradient, we are in comparatively rustic surroundings. Near the road is the typically countryside church, with blunted shingled spire and sombre yews.

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 65

In the churchyard lies Sir Francis Head, who died in 1875, whose book, Bubbles from the Brunnen, created a vogue for the German spas and ruined the older Continental resorts. Gradually ascending, the road goes straight ahead to Warlingham, a somewhat bleak and shivery-looking small village, ranged round a more or less ragged and threadbare green at the intersection of several roads. Here we are on a high tableland. The small church, chiefly of Early English date, is seen standing lonely in a flat field, to the left. A modern stained-glass window records the fact that the Book of Common Prayer was first used here in the short reign of Edward the Sixth.

A welcome down gradient now leads along a good road for a mile, and then we turn to the right for Woldingham, to come immediately to a steep descent, followed by an equally steep rise. After a mile and a half of these experiences Woldingham is reached, and with it a high plateau whence there are magnificent views down to the dense woods of Mardon Park and the Caterham valley,

Woldingham has a big and impressive name, a name perhaps descriptive of its geographical position — "the home on the wolds" — but it is a very small and particularly mean and scrubby hamlet. A number of stalwarts live here who do not mind the weary, continuously steep ascent from the station, a mile and a half away. The air is of the freshest and strongest, and healthful in the extreme ; but when winter comes

and it blows great guns ! When the stormy winds

do blow this is, in short, no place for those likely to be 5

66 Cycle Rides round London

nervously apprehensive of their roofs. For this is at the summit of the North Downs, whose steep southern scarp is reached a mile away, along the road marked by a sign-post to Titsey. This is a flat stretch, passing near the modernised tiny church, one of the many claiming to be the "smallest" churches in England. In the little churchyard is the tomb of a suicide, with what seems to be the very uncharitable quotation — "Charity covereth a multitude of sins." The rugged lane beside

THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOLDINGHAM.

the church is a part of the old Pilgrims' road from Winchester to Canterbury, and the building itself is the mean and unworthy successor of a Pilgrims' Chapel.

The first turning to the left, past this church, along the road we have been following, almost immediately opens up a wide-spreading view down to the level Weald, lying outstretched with very much the look of a great .map. Here, on this plateau overlooking half a county, the Woldingham settlers aforesaid have built their villas, and are with infinite pains and touching

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 67

pathos trying to induce gardens to grow amid the flints and the thirsty chalk soil. No one can doubt that they will, with constant care and great expenditure, be delightful gardens — a hundred years hence.

There "is an uninterrupted view beyond the last of these villas, at Botley Hill, where we are at a height of 868 feet above sea-level. Down below, the railway is seen, like a toy line, and the villages of Oxted and Limpsfield on either side of it, with yellow and green chequers of fields and white ribbons of winding roads gradually losing themselves in the indeterminate distance, where earth meets sky in a vague haze. Here, looking right and left, one sees at its best the characteristic sheer drop of the chalky North Downs into the levels of the Weald, and notices the care with which the villages are ranged under the shelter of these mighty shoulders.

The road between this point and Tatsfield is excellent, following the crest of the hills, and giving a good switch- back course.

In less than a mile from this view-point we reach a junction of roads : one on the left to Croydon ; our own, ahead to Tatsfield ; the road to Limpsfield, down beautiful, but steep and doubly danger-boarded, Titsey Hill ; and a lane leading by a back-way to Limpsfield. Titsey Hill's woods and coppices, open to the road, make a fairy-like halting-place. Tatsfield Church, a mile onwards, beside the road, is a supremely uninteresting building commanding the finest prospects. The villagov not worth seeing, lies half a mile off the road, to the left, along breakneck lanes of the most homicidal character.

Passing Tatsfield Church, a down gradient leads to

68 Cycle Rides round London

several branching roads. The one that goes ahead to the right is our route, and is the Pilgrims' road. .At this point we descend into a pebbly and curving hollow, and climbing up out of it cross the Surrey border and enter Kent. At the next junction of roads to Westerham, Bromley, and Knockholt Beeches keep straight on along the Pilgrims' road beneath the shoulders of the hills, until brought up against a " No Thoroughfare " gate into Chevening Park.

The rustics here are of the most dunderheaded kind. If you inquire the way to Chevening they don't know it, whether you try it with a long " Che " or a short ; or else gaze, tongue-tied, at you. The proper way, however, is to turn to the right, and, on reaching another barred road marked " No Thoroughfare," at the end of a half- mile's run, to turn left along a flat, splendidly surfaced road for another half-mile. Turning then to the left, the grey church tower of Chevening is seen in front.

There is no village, only a few cottages outside the park wall. House and park are the property of Earl Stanhope. Should the tourist wish to explore the course of the Pilgrims' road, running across the park, he must ask permission as a favour, for in 1780 one of my lord's ancestors was allowed to stop up the right of way that had existed from time immemorial, and it has been closed ever since by virtue of that special Act of Parliament.

The house is a stately but gloomy building designed originally by the inevitable Inigo Jones, but altered and added to at different periods. Among the notable collections here is the manuscript of the Earl of

Croydon to Knockholt Beechp:s 69

Chesterfield's famous (or rather infamous) letters to his son, formulating a course of conduct aptly said to be a vade mecum to perdition. There is one very notable object in the church — a building, to judge from their monuments, expressly devoted to perpetuating the fame and name of the Stanhopes. This is the remark- ably beautiful white marble recumbent group represent- ing Lady Frederica Louisa Stanhope and her child ; the work of Chantrey, and perhaps his best. It is a touching and very human monument, and a fitting pendant to that other fine work by Chantrey, the " Sleeping Children," in Lichfield Cathedral.

Lady Frederica Stanhope's many virtues are hinted at in no uncertain manner on the other side of the monument, in the epitaph to the lady's husband, " Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable James Hamilton Stanhope," which says, " His afflicted relatives would have found a melancholy satisfaction in commemorat- ing the many talents and virtues which adorned him, but in laying him by the side of his beloved wife, with no other record than that he was not unworthy to be her husband, they obey his last injunctions." Could praise be of a more negative kind or uxorious post-mortem compliment farther go?

Returning to the road, which runs eastward for half a mile, and then climbs from these levels up the steep, un- rideable Star Hill to the summit of the Downs, we reach Knockholt, obtaining views on the way including the hollow on the extreme right hand, whence the clouds of blue smoke, rising like a column, indicate Dartford and its chemical works, with Shooter's Hill in front, and the

70 Cycle Rides round London

heights of Penge to the left. Passing the hamlet of Knockholt Pound, obtaining its name from an old pound for strayed horses, cattle, and sheep that formerly stood here, we enter Knockholt village, passing a hideous, unfinished freak - building of gigantic size, looking like some prison or barrack, with the addition of a chimney-shaft resembling an observatory. This piling up of stones and mortar on a colossal scale, and in the most disapproved manner — the very negation of style, with sheer walls and plain, rectangular windows — appears to be the amusement of a wealthy gentleman, who is alike his own builder and architect. " Vavasour's Folly" is the uncomplimentary name by which it is locally known.

Knockholt Beeches, a favourite Saturday afternoon and Sunday holiday- ground for bean-feasters and the like, are most conveniently reached by a lane at the side of the " Crown Inn " ; but the machine will have to be lifted over a couple of stiles, unless you like to leave it outside the inn for the bean-feaster to play monkey- tricks with it. For themselves alone the beeches are distinctly not worth seeing, being just a grove of not particularly old nor especially fine trees. The attraction is the view from them towards London ; and, standing as the trees do on very high ground, the view is sufficiently remarkable. The Tower Bridge, it may be added as an inducement to visit the spot, can be distinctly seen from here — although the cynical might say that it can be seen better and with less trouble on Tower Hill — and that tiresome, eternally insistent Crystal Palace, from which it seems almost impossible

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 71

to get away in cycle runs round the south of London, is seen scintillating in the sun as clearly as though it were quite close at hand, instead of being eleven miles distant. A feature of Knockholt Beeches is the Cockney abandonment of the merrymakers here, when 'Enery and 'Enrietta exchange hats and dance to the inspiring strains of the concertina. There are artists who paint the Beeches and the view thence, and to them these corybantic revels are sad stumbling-blocks ; which

KNOCKHOLT BEFXHES.

only serves to prove (what we already know) that the days of classic landscape are dead, with Salvator Rosa, Claude, and Turner. Any one of that artistic trio would have seized the grand opportunity, and have composed a picture of Knockholt Beeches in which 'Enrietta would become a sylph and 'Enery a wood-faun. We have now just the return journey to indicate. Taking the second turning to the right on leaving Knockholt, a road is reached which affords a safe coast to Cudham. Just at the little church of that place,

72 Cycle Rides round London

however, a sign-post and a danger-board give us pause, and dismounting, we discover that our road to Downe Hes along a sudden, short, and sharp drop, well meriting that warning. A little way on, we can safely mount again for another grand coast, carrying us half-way up the next hill, and then a walk up the remainder brings us through plantations to the hill-crest, whence we drop comfortably into Darwin's picturesque village. This is the evolutionist's place of pilgrimage, and Downe House, for forty years the residence of that great man of science, a much-observed retreat. Truth compels the admission that it is an extremely ugly house. Darwin died in 1882, a victim to scientific enthusiasm, having caught a cold on the damp grass of his lawn one night, on going out with a dark lantern to study the domestic arrangements of the earthworms.

From Downe pretty lanes lead to Keston, passing Holwood Park, a lovely estate now belonging to the Earl of Derby, but noted as having been the scene of William Wilberforce's determination to devote his life to the abolition of slavery, so long ago as 1788. A stone seat, a few hundred yards within the park, marks the spot, and bears an explanatory inscription ; and a hoary oak, its decrepit limbs chained and fastened elaborately together, overhangs the scene.

In the pretty churchyard of Keston, situated in a secluded hollow not far from this spot, and removed by a long way from that bean-feaster's paradise, Keston Common, lies Mrs. Craik, who, when Dinah Muloch, wrote the once-popular John Halifax, Gentleman.

Proceeding, we come to Keston Common, where

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches

1Z

" Caesar's Well " and the charming ponds near it may be sought, unhindered by the bean-feasters aforesaid, who do not roam far from the pubHc-houses. Keston is thought to have been a Roman station on the old Watling Street, hence the name given, in allusive fashion, to the pool — fre- quently dry in summer — called Csesar's Well.

Bordering the Common is the " Fox Inn," where, on the left hand, down in the hollow, are the twin settlements of " Paradise " and " Purgatory " — the first not particularly desirable, and the second, perhaps, the more preferable of the two. Purgatory is at the bottom of an extraordinarily steep road, which, if not indeed broad, certainly will lead the unwary to destruc- tion. The two places are just groups of labourers' cottages, and their names are their only remarkable feature.

Glance at the ugly "George Inn" on passing through Hayes. Its sign was painted, many years ago, by Sir John Millais, with a picture of the half-mythical " George and the Dragon " contest ; but it hung outside, exposed to the weather, until it became faded, when a former

CililSAR's WELL.

74 Cycle Rides round London

landlord had it repainted, "as good as new," by a "local artist " !

Through Hayes and Bromley there is a fine broad road, eminently suited for a speedy ending of this somewhat hilly run. Bromley Common, like the adjoining Commons of Keston and Hayes, may be overrun with the week-ender, but not even the raucous van-loads, yelling the latest " comic " songs, can succeed in vulgarising these healthy uplands. From Bromley it is desirable to proceed home by train.

IN OLD-WORLD ESSEX

Few cyclists know how old-world the neglected county of Essex really is. So unknown is this part of eastern England that its ill-earned reputation for flatness and want of interest has lasted since the first guide-book writer made the initial mis-statement until the present day. A great gulf separates the West-Ender and the Central Londoner from Essex ; a gulf filled with crowded streets and rendered dangerous to the cyclist by the granite setts and tram-lines that characterise the main roads leading from Whitechapel to Bow, Stratford, Ilford, and Romford, beyond which last town only can the country be said to commence. Nor do railways afford so ready a means of inter- course between east and west as could be desired. For the sake, however, of seeing what kind of country this may be, let us, greatly daring, get on to the Great Eastern Railway at Liverpool Street, and take train to Chadwell Heath, following the course indicated by the sketch map. This gives a run of a little over twenty miles, and shows Essex in its most characteristic vein.

Gaining the main road to Romford from Chadwell Heath Station, we follow it for three-quarters of a mile, turning off to the left where a sign-post points the way

7i

76

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to Havering-atte-Bower, along a good-surfaced, sandy lane. Here we come immediately to pretty, pastoral country, with spreading views in every direction across the many-patterned fields. 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

THE STOCKS, HAVERING-ATTK-BOWKK.

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

In Old-World Essex ']•]

red brick house in a park on the right hand. This is the so-called Bovver House, the comparatively modern successor of the palace built by Edward the Confessor. Here, in the surrounding park, it was, according to the tradition, that the saintly king, disturbed in his orisons by the song of the nightingales, prayed that they might never sing again at Havering ; and so it is (quite incorrectly) said that, even now, the nightingale is a stranger to the surrounding woods. The legend, true or not, does not raise our opinion of the Confessor. Does not the poet finely say, " He prayeth best who loveth best all things, both great and small "?

Although Havering has a long, long history as a royal domain and as the dower - house of queens, little or nothing is left to show the tourist its former importance, A few mounds near the rebuilt and uninteresting church alone bespeak the site of the palace.

As you come up the hill to the tiny village and turn to the left by an ancient elm, whose hollow trunk has been bricked up to help preserve it, notice the old stocks on the green, designed for the accommodation of two. Down a gently sloping road, take the first turning to the right after passing the entrance to Pyrgo Park, and then the first to the right again and past a red brick chapel. Two miles and a half along a pleasant, sandy lane, and then the way divides left and right, beside a pond. Across a broad common, away to the right, are seen the houses of Navestock village ; but the church lies half a mile onward, down the left-hand road. This

78

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rYFlELD

CREEKSTEAD

. WlLLlMCi^LE SP/\it< 'VYILLINC^LE t>0£

Kelyeoon Hatch

is one of the most curious and one of the most prettily- situated churches in Essex, standing on a hilltop and surmounted by groups of graceful wych elms, with the waters of a broad lake, belonging to an adjoining park, seen beyond. Essex is a county entirely devoid of building-stone, and this fact very largely influenced the building of its ancient churches, erected as they

were in times when to bring stone from great distances was practically impossible. Flint, being found locally, was often made use of; but the county having practi- cally been one vast forest, timber was the readiest building ma- terial, and so we find wood entering largely into the construc- tion of many Essex churches. That of Navesto.ck is an instance, and here it is the tower that is timbered. Massive oak beams form the framing, and are as perfect now as they were when originally erected, over four hundred years ago. The white-painted, weather-boarded exterior is, of course, more recent. The whole is surmounted by a slender shingled spire, and the effect is remarkably like that of a Norwegian church. Patched and altered by many

Hmlhinc -atte-Bowzp

CHABWtll. M£/^TM

In Old-World Essex

79

succeeding generations since its first Norman and Early English days, the body of the building is of many styles ; and it is plain to see, from the fragments of Norman mouldings and the blocked - up Early English lancets, how utterly without reverence were the old men for the work of their forebears. In the Decorated and Perpendicular periods they inserted the lovely traceried windows whose mouldering

NAVESTOCK CHURCH.

mullions yet remain, and in order to do so they cut away without the slightest compunction the "narrow slits of the Norman window-openings that merely rendered the darkness of the interior more apparent, and did the same by the larger but still inadequate Early English lights. Inadequate, that is to say, for lighting the building ; and it was just for this practical purpose that the men of later periods ruthlessly swept the original work away. That their own work was in

8o Cycle Rides round London

the highest degree artistic is but an accident ; but this should afford no excuse to the purists among restorers, who have wrought the most widespread havoc in old churches like this by " restoring " buildings to the one uniform style in which they were originally built, and tearing down the traces of all the intervening periods, which, besides being worthy of preservation for their artistry, are really an integral part of the history of such old structures. It is to be hoped that the restorer will not be allowed to wreak his will upon Navestock Church.

Retracing our course from here, and going up the road by which we came, the way to Kelvedon Hatch — or Kelvedon Common, as it is sometimes called — lies up a steep and stony, but happily short, rise, succeeded by one of those prettily - wooded winding lanes so characteristic of Essex, with sunlit peeps between the trees of sloping fields, golden-yellow with waving corn. Very much has been heard of late years of agricultural , depression in Essex, and of the impossibility of growing wheat at a profit anywhere in England ; but they either achieve the impossible here, or else (a thing inconceiv- able in a farmer) they grow wheat for the mere pleasure of seeing it grow. As a matter of fact, there is probably more wheat grown in Essex to-day than in any other county of its size.

In one mile, take a turning to the right, then the first to the left, and then the next two turnings to the right again, bringing the explorer to the scattered village of Kelvedon Hatch, a thoroughly Essex village, with the weather - boarded cottages and projecting

In Old-World Essex 8i

red brick chimney-breasts you will find scarce any- where else than in this county. Make straight through the long, flat village street, and then to the left, where a sign-post marks the way to Blackmore. In something like half a mile down this turning, notice the old stocks at " Stocks Corner," where a sign-post points right for Doddinghurst. Do not turn here, but continue ahead until a post is observed indicating the road to Blackmore to be down a turning to the left. In about two miles

BLACKMORE CHURCH.

from here, when you have been wheeling along a country lane until Blackmore appears to be unattain- able, and you have almost given up all hopes of finding it, the spire of the village church is glimpsed across the meadows to the right, and a pretty and easy run leads into the street of this exceedingly beautiful and old-world place.

At Navestock we saw one of the Essex timbered belfries, but at Blackmore we discover the finest example in the county, three-staged, and a very

82 Cycle Rides round London

forest of timbering within. A fine old red brick mansion facing the churchyard is known as " Jericho," and, although its appearance was greatly altered in the time of Queen Anne, really dates back to the days of Henry the Eighth, whose secret retreat it was. Here that Sultan carried on an intrigue with LadyElizabeth Talbois, who gave birth in 15 19 to a son, named Henry Fitzroy, created by his royal father Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Had that son lived, we should doubtless have possessed one more great peerage, left-handedly descended from Royalty, to keep company with those of the Duke of St. Albans, the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Munster, and others. But he died, in his seventeenth year, in 1536.

The Court was pretty accurately informed of the King's whereabouts on those occasions when he secretly visited Blackmore, and whispered that he had "gone to Jericho," There is, indeed, little doubt of that well- known phrase having originated in this manner. A stream running through the village is still called the Jordan.

Leaving Blackmore for the twin villages of Willingale Spain and Willingale Doe, cross the road at Blackmore, and, turning to the left, pursue a level course along a country road until reaching a solitary fork, which, of course, being solitary and puzzling, has no sign-post.

The right-hand fork looks the most likely, but it is the left, as a matter of fact, that should be taken. This leads past a hamlet where the sign-post vouchsafes a whole gazetteer-full of information ; after which, in half a mile, turn to the right (the left turning lands you in a

In Old-World Essex

83

farmyard, and into a duck-pond, very green and slimy). Then a horribly loose, dusty, and stony stretch for a mile, and, turning left, the two churches of VVillingale Spain and Willingale Doe are seen, standing in one churchyard. An absurd legend tells how they were built by two sisters who could not agree as to the style of a church they had proposed to build between them. One losing patience and saying that she would build a

TWO CHURCHES IN ONE CHURCHYARD : THE SISTER CHURCHES OF WILLINGALE SPAIN AND WILLINGALE DOE.

church of her own, the other is supposed to have answered, "If you're willing, girl, do ! " History, how- ever, disproves this ridiculous story and tells us that Willingale Doe obtained its second name from the old lords of the manor, the family of D'Ou.

There is a curious epitaph in Willingale Spain churchyard to one Charles Davis, who was killed in his thirty-eighth year " by a fall from the elm tree near

84 Cycle Rides round London

which he is buried," as the inscription says. He lies, indeed, under the shadow of it.

But this is not the only thing worth note, for, just within the little doorway that leads into the chancel of Willingale Spain Church, may be noticed on the floor a curious monumental brass to Isaac Kello, who died, aged nine years, in 1614, "son to Mr. Bartholomew Kello, Minister of Christ's Evangell " —

"This godly child knew his Originall And though right young, did scorn base cells of earth, His soule doth Flourish in Heaven's Glistering Hall Because it is a divine plant by birth."

It is not very easy to discover precisely what Mr. Bartholomew Kello, who presumably wrote this, meant by it, but its general tone sounds pathetic enough.

From here a winding lane leads to Fyfield, whose rector has earned some notice by holding cyclists' parades and by entertaining passing wheelmen. Thence to Chipping Ongar it is an excellent road. From here it will be convenient to take train back to London ; first, however, paying a visit to Greenstead Church, a short distance beyond the town, to the right of the road. It lies at the end of a long avenue, and is remarkable for the walls of its nave being constructed of the trunks of oak trees, set upright. The exterior still exhibits the rude rounded surface of the original trunks, worn and furrowed by time; while the adze- marks by which the inner sides have been planed down to something like a flat surface are still visible, although the work dates back to Saxon times. When the church was restored in 1848 the decayed lower portions of

In Old- World Essex 85

these trunks were cut ofif — five inches of those forming the south wall, and one inch from those on the north side — and the rest preserved by being placed on a brick sill built to the ground level. At the same time the logs were tongued together with strips of oak to prevent dampness penetrating to the church.

The chancel is of late Perpendicular date, and is of red brick ; but the body of the church remains an eloquent survival of the ancient steading in a clearing of the green woods that once spread densely over old-world Essex.

The church is dedicated to that most famous of all East Anglian saints, St. Edmund the King and Martyr, who was seized by the Danes in the year 871 at Hoxne, and on his refusing to renounce Christianity, bound by them to an oak, and shot to death with arrows. And not only is it so dedicated, but it owes its very existence, in a curious way, to him ; having been originally built as a temporary shrine of logs for his body to lie in on the journey, when it was transferred to London from its gorgeous shrine at Bury St. Edmunds during the troubled years immediately preceding the Conquest. A fragment of stained glass, with a crowned head pictured on it, is let into a little window in the weather- boarded tower, and a portion of the ancient Hoxne oak is preserved at the Rectory, where there is an old painting representing him. It is a singular coincidence that the oak — St. Edmund's Oak, as it was named — fell at the very time in 1848 when the little church was being restored. The absolute truth of the legend was proved by an ancient arrowhead being discovered almost in the heart of the famous tree.

AMONG THE ESSEX HILLS

The title given above to this particular tour is one eminently calculated to astonish those who have derived their ideas of Essex from guide-book writers. It has long been the fashion to describe Essex as a flat and monotonous county. Probably the compilers of those miscalled " guides " have known Wanstead Flats and Barking Level, and have ventured along the Thames marshes ; but that anyone who has travelled Essex through could still describe it as flat is simply incon- ceivable. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex well would deny its much more than undulating general character.

This tour is frankly planned for the purpose of visit- ing the most prominent among the hills of Essex, and so, as some rough roads will be met at one spot, and as some walking, both up and down hill, will be necessary, the itinerary does not extend to more than thirty-four miles. Let it not, however, be supposed that, as a whole, this is a route of hill-climbing and bad roads. Starting at Brentwood, we are upon the main highway from London to Colchester, and on the crest of a steep hill which cyclists coming from London must needs climb. By training to the town we just escape it, and the succeeding five miles along this old coaching highway

88

Among the Essex Hills 87

are chiefly on the down grade. Brentwood is well worth exploring. Its fine broad High Street still retains the decayed trunk of the old oak marking the spot where the Protestant martyr, William Hunter, was burnt in 1555. The trunk is carefully bricked up to preserve it. A monument also serves to keep the martyr's memory green. The old galleried courtyard of that old-time coaching inn, the " White Hart," should be seen ; it is one of the very few examples now remaining of a bygone style of hostelries whose days ended when railways came in.

Brentwood, originally called " Burntwood," probably takes its name from a portion of the once dense forest of Essex, burnt at some indefinite period, on whose site the town arose ; and, sure enough, along the whole course of this tour — and, indeed, of many another one could make in Essex — relics of this vanished forest are encountered in almost every old church, built more or less largely of ancient timbers. Here at Shenfield, which we reach through a beautiful common, a mile distant from Brentwood, a portion of the nave arcade is of wood, and at Mountnessing, the next place on our itinerary, the tower is framed in massive oak. The name of Mountnessing presents difficulties to local tongues, and so it is known round about these parts as " Money's End." Ingatestone, succeeding to Mountnessing, is a decayed coaching town, with a name corrupted from " Ing-atte-Stone" — the Meadow by the Milestone, as some would say. By "stone," however, it is more likely that the old Roman stone- paved way is meant.

88

Cycle Rides round London

Turning off this high road here to the right, we make for Stock, along a hilly lane. Stock, a scattered village situated on high ground, commanding beautiful views southward toward the valley of the Thames, is of little

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CHADWELL

interest for itself; but here, again, we find a very remarkable church, with ancient timbered and weather- boarded tower, surmounted by a shingled spire, springing from a roofed lower stage with cavernous eaves, the whole dating back to the close of the fifteenth century, and restored, apparently, over two hundred years ago.

Among the Essex Hills

89

according to the inscription, " R R. E H 1683," still sharp and distinct, on the woodwork of the belfry. Like most of these Essex wooden churches, this of Stock is of curiously Scandinavian aspect, and own sisters to it may be found in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Even the elaborate tracery and the mullions of the windows in this tower are in wood, and, moreover, in excellent preservation.

From where Stock stands on its ridge, it is nearly

three miles to Billericay, very steeply downhill at first, then level, and again downhill to Billericay Station. Yet, after all these descents, one observes that the little town is itself on an elevated tableland. The name of this place is, by the way, a sad rock of offence and a stumbling-block to the stranger, who generally attempts to pronounce it " Bill-erry-cay," somewhat after the fashion of its spelling. The local shibboleth is, however, " Bill-ricky." The interior of the church is of the most

90 Cycle Rides round London

disapproved churchwarden order of architecture, and the exterior, with humpbacked roof and whimsical, squatty little red brick tower, — said to date back three hundred years, but not looking half that age, — is in a curiously debased Gothic ; while there can be no doubt about the mean Late Victorian of the 1897 Jubilee clock, bracketed out from the tower.

Billericay consists chiefly of a long street of non- descript houses, some very tiny, none very large, and few particularly new. A goodly proportion of the loose stones of Essex is strewn over the roadway, some of them large enough to make the ghost of Macadam writhe with disgust at the degeneracy of the times from those he knew.

It is downhill again from the little town to Great Burstead, a mile and a half away, on the left hand. This was the mother-parish of Billericay, but has now shrunken to a cottage or two and a fine old church, very much out of repair. After this come further descents, and then, where a modern inn faces up the road, nearly four miles from the little town of Billericay, turn left, and then first to the right. A little distance ahead appears the odd sight of a church standing solitary on a hilltop. This is the church of Laindon, and we are now coming to those Essex mountains in miniature, the Laindon Hills.

Leaving the cycle beneath the wayside hedge, climb the steep hillside, over hurdles and across grass fields, and then you arrive at one of the most singular churches in the country. Laindon Church is of Early English and later periods, and has the probably unique feature

Among the Essex Hills 91

of a priest's house, or anchor-hold, built on to the tower at the west end, and opening directly into the church. The priest who dwelt here in olden times must have had rather a cosy retreat, in spite of the fact that it is exposed to every wind that blows ; for the two rooms, forming a lower and an upper floor, look cheerful and comfortable. Four lattice windows give views away over many miles of beautiful scenery, and the structure

LAINDON CHURCH.

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.

Regaining the road, a hundred yards or so bring us

92 Cycle Rides round London

to a way (too execrable to call a road) running right and left. Turn to the right, and then the first to the left, along a track leading to Laindon Station. Over the railway, and then continuously uphill for a mile, along the worst possible tracks ; and then the summit of the Laindon Hills is reached. Passing the post- office it will be noticed that the postal authorities are at variance with most people over the orthography of the place, for it is spelled in a most aggressively prominent and permanent fashion, on an enamelled iron sign, " Langdon." The London, Tilbury, and Southend Railway adopts the more usual form.

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. Other widespread views of sea and land and river are to be found in England, but nowhere else anything to exactly compare with this ; for here, enlivening the scene, and conveying some idea of the commercial activity of the Thames and the Port of London, are the great steamers, the sailing vessels, and the lumbering barges, going back and forth so numerously as to convey the idea of fleets. You may read in many books figures of the most painstaking kind, set forth in an

Among the Essex Hills 93

endeavour to give an idea of the commercial status of the Thames, but they will not serve to convey anything like the impression you receive from this eyrie. The cycle, after all, is one of the greatest among educational forces.

The road-surveyors who have this particular district of Essex under their control do not appear to have been educated in the gospel of good roads, for as you turn to the right, past the " Crown Inn," and to the left after passing the modern and ugly church of Laindon Hills, a quite unrideable descent of over half a mile suddenly presents itself. It would be possible to cycle this in comfort and safety were it not for the condition of the road, which bears in its thick and loose gravel a very close approximation to Brighton beach. Having per- force walked this, a sharp turn to the left brings one to a very welcome, good, though hilly road, ascending direct to Horndon-on-the-Hill, a place which has been visible for the last two miles, situated in much the same fashion as the more familiar Harrow - on - the - Hill. Horndon looks impressive from afar, and you approach it expectant ; but when you reach it the first thought is that it is a place by no means worth seeing, being just a dusty, gritty, draggle-tailed village that has been making up its mind to be modern for the last half- century, and so has provided itself with some very unlovely shops and houses. The best thing in Horndon- on-the-Hill, a cynic might say, is the view from it of other places : of Laindon, of Vange, and Bowers Gifford, along the high ridge of wooded country to the north- east.

94 Cycle Rides round London

From here we descend gradually to the Thames-side lowlands. Making for Chadwell, and turning to the right on passing the church, a glance backwards will reveal Horndon at its best : the tree-surrounded old church, with the bright vermilion pantiles of the older houses, and the whirling sails of flanking windmills giving a singularly foreign and Dutch-like effect. Take the next turning to the left, and in half a mile to the left again, having previously withstood the specious invitation of a left-hand turn through a gate which only leads to a farm-track. Another mile, and you come to a right and left highway, opposite the " Cock Inn." Neither of these leads to Chadwell, but there is a lane leading straight ahead, beside the inn ; a very retiring lane, and quite difficult to see, if not previously warned of its existence. This leads, for a level two miles, to Chadwell Church. Turn to the right here, along the road to Grays. The other road, straight on, drops sharply to the marshes and to Tilbury Docks, and the surrounding industrial settlements. Tilbury Docks are very impressive, but when cycling you can obtain all the impressions of them that you have any use for from this Grays road, two miles away.

All the way from here to Rainham — some nine miles — is a splendid object-lesson in Thames-side shipping and industries. It is not sufficient to know the Thames only in its fashionable and holiday aspects. To know it as a whole you must also have made some sort of acquaintance with what .sailor-men call " London River " — that is to say, the Thames below bridge, where all the business is done. This is not, of course, to say that

Among the Essex Hills 95

these succeeding nine miles are ideal from the cyclist's point of view. The busy and growing town of Grays with the Thurrocks on either side, scarcely to be dis- tinguished from it by the stranger, is only picturesque to those who can find a romance in the riverside work ; but the road surface is not so bad. Notice on the right, immediately after leaving Grays, the sham castellated building in a park now in course of being destroyed by the chalk quarries. This is called Belmont Castle. The chalk-pits here, and along the road to Purfleet, are nothing less than stupendous. Railways run between them and the river, where the chalk is shipped, or manufactured as cement on the spot. Purfleet, to which we now come, is a somewhat pleasing old-world river- side place, with a pretty, tree-shaded road running beside the river, where it is pleasant to halt and watch the world's commerce float by ; the passenger steamers, the "ocean tramps," the fruiters, the wool-ships, the unmistakable oil-tank steamers, and all the very varied traffic coming from or going to distant parts.

Across the river is Erith, and immediately opposite are the hospital ships, off Crayford Ness. One of these — the Castalia — was originally a twin-ship built for the Channel traffic, with the idea of abolishing sea- sickness. Nearer at hand is the old wooden man-o'- war Cornwall^ now a training ship, and beside the road, just here, is a disused hillside chalk quarry turned into a botanic garden.

Purfleet has a picturesqueness all its own, not utterly destroyed by the gunpowder magazines nor by the huge tanks — like gasometers — where oil is stored. So long

96

Cycle Rides round London

as the busy perspective of the waterside remains, with the " toil, glitter, grime, and wealth " of the tide, the place cannot fail of interest.

Beyond, through Wennington and Rainham, the marshes spread out on the left, kept from being drowned out by the Thames by the aid of those earthen river walls said to have been originally made by the Romans. Passing through the uninteresting town of Rainham we turn off to the right at Rippleside for the old-world

village of Dagenham, set upon a hilly site overlooking the miry flats. Down there, on the inland side, lies Parslowes, the old seat of the Fanshawes, islanded in midst of ploughed fields ; riverward trail the smoke- wreaths against the burnished sunset, and as we blunder along the winding lanes for Dagenham Station we meet the agricultural labourer, clumsy and stupefied with long hours of physical toil, slouching off to his evening fuddle at the " Blue Pig."

ABINGER, LEITH HILL, AND DORKING

EWELL is a convenient starting-point for this trip for South Londoners, and has the additional advantage of being served by two railways. Only in the spring of the year, when the Epsom races are on, and the Derby brings riotous crowds down by road as well as rail, do Ewell and Epsom wake out of their customary quiet. For the rest of the year they are old-fashioned places, even in these villa-building latter days. Ewell, as its name in some sort implies, is a place of springs and running waters, with crooked streets and with an ancient ivy-mantled church tower, all that is left of the old parish church, standing solemn beside the modern building. Just inside the churchyard gate notice a stone to one who lost his life by falling from a horse at Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxon ; and, close by, a monument with urn and a kneeling figure in relief on a pedestal to James Lowe, born 1798, who " met his death from an accident the 12th October 1866. He was the inventor of the segments of the screw-propeller, in use since 1838, and his life, though unobtrusive, was not without great benefit to his country. He suffered many troubles, but bore them lightly."

Epsom, " town " we should presumably call it, a mile and a half down the road, hints little or nothing to the 7

98

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passing cyclist of its horse-racing fame, save perhaps for stray glimpses gained of the great Grand Stand perched upon the windy Downs, more than a mile away to the left ; and if little be told by external appearances of this intimate relation with the foremost classic race in England, still less would the stranger gather that

Epsom is a Place with a Past ; a past, as a fashionable Spa, scarce inferior to Bath in the days of good Queen Anne. Epsom wells and Epsom salts have had their day and ceased to be.

Suburbia is extending its frontiers in this direction, and breezy Ashtead, two miles farther on, down a pleasant road, is now set within the marches of the

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 99

suburbs, where the opposing camps of market gardeners and speculative builders are pitched cheek by jowl, and bricks and plaster are banishing the broccoli and the peas. At Leatherhead the incursions of villadom are lost in the intricacies of the old-fashioned little town and in the embowering foliage that owes its

EwtlT,

Epsom

ASHTtAD^

GRGATUoOKHAfI

ErFiNCHAl«\

AtitiGtK^

COLOft^l^BOUl^

density to that beautiful stream, the Mole. Leatherhead is situated at the junction of many roads. It is what military men would call a "strategical point," and, touring on a cycle through the southern and south- western districts outside London, you come to it, whether you will it so or not, again and again. And, just because it is a pleasant place, you do not regret the necessity. The streets of Leatherhead are narrow.

loo Cycle Rides round London

and slope steeply towards the river Mole ; also, they curve in somewhat puzzling fashion. Our way, however, lies straight ahead, passing that queer old inn the "Running Horse" on the right, where the landlady, Elynor Rummyng, gave short measure in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and was rolled in a barrel for her pains. A very old painted sign, fixed on the front of the house, and now glazed to protect it from the weather, shows a portrait of this iniquitous person, who, if the artist is to be credited, was a phenomenally ugly specimen of humanity, with predatory beak-like nose, covered with warts. Here we cross the Mole by a long bridge, and presently, keeping straight ahead, ascend a sharp rise, which leads on to the rather exposed upper road to Great Bookham and Effingham, those places being singularly provided with parallel roads less than a quarter of a mile apart. A cross-road to the right, when two miles out of Leatherhead, gives access to Great Bookham village. The church, which is interest- ing, appears to be generally locked up, except during service. In the churchyard notice the very beautiful modern churchyard cross to the memory of Guy Cuthbert Dawnay, killed by a buffalo in Masailand.

Regaining the upper road, Effingham is reached in a mile. The church will be noticed standing, with the tiny village, off to the right. The place gave a title to Lord William Howard, created by Queen Mary " Lord Howard of Effingham," and it was the son of this nobleman who, as Lord High Admiral, commanded the little fleet that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Know- ing this, the tourist approaches Effingham with due

Abinger, Leitii Hill, and Dorking ioi

reverence and great expectancy. Unhappily, there is nothing whatever in village or church to connect them with the Admiral or others of the Howards. The church itself is utterly modernised.

At the roads that here run right and left stands a large inn, the " Prince Blucher." Turn to the left, and then, after proceeding for nearly a mile, take the second to the right. We are here on very high ground, having cycled for a long while almost imperceptibly uphill. Away to the left the successive hills of the North Downs are seen : Box Hill and the others towards Reigate, with their wooded crests and the characteristic chalky scars on their southern face, softened to a Corot- like mellowness in the golden sunshine of an autumn afternoon. At the turning to the right, at which we have now arrived, the road goes suddenly down and deteriorates alarmingly, being knobbly and narrow, and partly overgrown with grass. This is Effingham Hill, and unless you would acquire reasons for vividly remembering the place in the way of being thrown off", it is distinctly advisable to walk some way down. This descent leads to a farm in a deep hollow. Through the stony farmyard, and walking up an equally stony rise on the other side, a straight flat road is reached, running for half a mile. Then, where roads right and left appear, turn to the right, and so downhill to where a sign-post stands at the bottom. Turn at this point to the left, along a secluded road through copses which lead presently to the crest of a hill marked by the red danger-board of the Cyclists' Touring Club. These are the so-called White Downs, and this White Down Hill.

I02 Cycle Rides round London

There are, as every cyclist knows, degrees of danger on hills so marked by the C.T.C. Some are so little dangerous that this red warning - board is often dis- regarded ; but this particular hill is a mile long, very steep, rough, and strewn with flints and lumps of chalk, and with a sharp curve when nearly at the bottom. It is, therefore, superlatively dangerous, and no one should on any account attempt to ride it. 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.

When this descent is accomplished, the road leads over a railway bridge, whence, to the left, the most beautiful views of the Downs, with the spire of the church on Ranmore Common above and that of Dork- ing Church below, are spread out. Notice a brick- field on the right, and look for a green road, also on the right, a few yards beyond. This leads to a piece of common land, known as " Evershed's Rough," the scene of the fatal accident to Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, on 19th July 1873, when, riding horseback, he was thrown by his horse stumbling. The place is marked by a granite cross ten feet high, simply carved with the initials " Si W." and a shepherd's crook, in relief, with the date inscribed in smaller letters. The rebuilt parish church of Dorking, whose lofty spire can

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 105

be seen from near this spot, is also a memorial to that energetic prelate, whom men called in life " Soapy Sam." Some day, doubtless, when our civilisation and its records have alike perished, say a thousand years hence, the antiquaries of a new era will be disputing as to the origin and meaning of this lonely cross, with its weatherworn initials and shepherd's crook.

Cross-roads presently appear down the road. 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.

It is a steep and tiring ascent along a sandy lane to Abinger, where a little church on one side of the road, the " Abinger Hatch Inn " on the other, and a few cottages, comprise the village. Three miles straight ahead is Leith Hill, the tallest in the south of England, rising to a height of close upon a thousand feet. The route lies past Abinger Common, with its well and picturesque well-house in the Norman style, built and dedicated to St. James by Mr. Evelyn of Wotton in 1893. The way to the summit of Leith Hill is through pine-woods and along a road of such excellent surface and so gradual a rise that this hilltop expedition is not

io6 Cycle Rides round London

at all fatiguing. It leads by degrees half round the hill, and brings one to a point where the road is crossed by a white gate, directly under the tower that crowns the hilltop. To leave one's cycle here against a tree- trunk, and to clamber up the chalky final ascent to where the tower stands on its flat plateau, is the best plan. Those who are not already high enough can ascend this tower at the cost of a penny a-head, and some six thousand persons annually avail themselves of the privilege. It was originally built in 1766 by a Mr. Hill, of Leith Hill Place, who, dying in 1772, was, according to his injunctions, buried here, under the flooring, when the interior of the tower was filled up with cement and stone. The stone tablet recording that he " led the life of a true Christian and rural philosopher " still remains, and so does the legend (true or untrue) that he was of opinion that the world would be reversed on the Day of Judgment, and so directed that he should be buried head downwards.

The tower, having become ruinous, was restored by Mr. Evelyn, who added the staircase turret. By the sight of it, crowning the summit, Leith Hill can be identified many miles distant, and the view from this hilltop is extraordinarily widespread. The whole of the counties of Surrey and Sussex, as far as the South Downs, is stretched out flat like a carpet, to where the wall of the South Downs alone prevents the sea being disclosed along the length of the Sussex coast. At one point, indeed, it can be seen, and that directly in front, where a notch in those distant hills discloses a something that may be sky and may be water, you think. But as

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 109

you look, on a sunny afternoon, and continue looking, the sunlight streams down momentarily and wakens a million facets to life, all flashing like diamond-points or flecks of fire. They are the ripples of the English Channel, transfigured by this radiance, and the notch through which you see them is Shoreham Gap.

There are nearer stretches of water that thus mirror the sun's rays. Frensham Ponds, away in the west, eighteen miles away as the crow flies, glitter like burnished steel, and in sharp contrast with black and sullen Hindhead, Down below, somewhere amidst the woods that are set round about this hill of hills, is another lake, and near it the clustered chimneys of a great mansion. For the rest, the weald at the foot of the tumbled masses of the North Downs is vague, formless, inchoate. There are towns there, we know, and villages, hamlets, roads, and railways ; but they are all lost in immensity. Perhaps, if you take literature in your pocket when cycling, the reading of Tennyson's " Vastness " is appropriate here, for it echoes the sense that comes to one on this hilltop of the littleness of one's self. (Mem. : If you wish to retain a good conceit of yourself, keep to the plains !)

Clambering down to the road again, and through the gate already mentioned, a beautiful downhill road leads to the hamlet of Coldharbour, nestling amid the foothills and the Alpine valleys in miniature that surround Leith Hill. All the way hence to Dorking are trees : planta- tions of Scotch firs, larches, and other trees that give an added mountainous character to the scenery. And lonely withal, and steep. Redlands Wood is passed

no Cycle Rides round London

through, and a long, steep hill, danger-boarded. With caution, however, and a reliable brake, there is no reason why this should not be ridden. So, coming swiftly down into the flatlands, we are in Dorking before we know that town is so near.

Turning to the right and through the main street, we are soon out in the open country again, and turning to the left at Betchworth Park, and under the shadow of Box Hill, and in view of the line of yews marking the course of the Pilgrims' Way, reach the left-hand turning for Burgh Heath and Ewell. Toilsome is the ascent of Betchworth Hill, by which the summit of the North Downs is gained, but beautiful the backward view when this excelsior business is done. Downhill again, how- ever, into Pebble Coombe, and up to Banstead Downs, whence — oh, happiness ! you may coast, feet up, with or without a following wind, nearly all the way down into Ewell ; some four miles, that is to say, along the best of roads, through open heaths that, whether they are called Burgh Heath, Banstead Downs, Walton Heath, or Epsom Downs, are only portions of one vast high-lying plateau dipping towards the valley of the Thames. Sign-posts are not wanting on these heights — a fortunate circumstance, because the wayfarers are not many.

RIPLEY AND THE SURREY COMMONS

The Londoner of the southern and western suburbs is fortunate in the many breezy and picturesque stretches of wild commons that form a more or less continual girdle around those districts, at a distance of from fifteen to twenty miles from town. The Surrey Commons, more than those of Kent, are secluded and free from the bean-feast parties that render Keston and Hayes Commons somewhat less desirable than they would otherwise be. It is true that in the neighbourhood of Esher and Oxshott those who have the conduct of the extensive Crown lands that border the commons are beginning to exploit their healthy sites for villa-building ; but although this red rash of " desirable residences " among the dark green of the pine-woods is looked upon with disfavour by the rambler in these hitherto unfre- quented spots, what cannot be cured must be endured with the best grace at command.

Esher Station is the key to this district for those who hail from town, and sets you down on a common to begin with. In fact, the London and South-Western Railway runs along " common or commonable lands " — as the Parliamentary Bills of the railway companies express it — from Surbiton, and practically cuts Ditton

Common in half: more shame to the Parliamentary

111

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Cycle Rides round London

Committees that ever permitted the deed. But then the South- Western has, for some reason or another, always been allowed to cut up and practically destroy the open spaces along its route, so that there is scarce a common in the south-western suburbs but that line has a cutting through or an embankment across it, with level cross- ings innumerable, at which those who use the roads

XtHerSfufion

1^ Prioy

Oxsfiotl

TxTCHAn

CREAT BOOKHAM lITTLE BOOKHAA1

must needs wait the pleasure of the railway, until the crowded traffic of passenger and goods trains has passed by!

We gain the old Portsmouth road in a few hundred yards from Esher Station, and, turning to the right, climb the hill to the village, through Littleworth Common. Reaching Esher, the way to Oxshott lies to the left, past that old coaching inn the " Bear," and the old and long-disused parish church that modestly hides itself behind the inn.

The lodge gates of Claremont Park, beside the road,

Ripley and the Surrey Commons i 1 3

on the lovely common of Esher, are now passed, and within this, perhaps the best- wooded park near London, stands the great classic mansion begun by Lord Clive in 1768. Macaulay tells with dramatic effect how "the peasantry of Surrey looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the

CLAREMONT.

walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily." Clive made an end by committing suicide in his gloomy mansion in Berkeley Square in 1774. Claremont is now, of course. Crown property ; but the arms of Clive still remain on the pediment of the mansion.

From here the road goes straight across Esher and Arbrook Commons, with glimpses into the well-kept 8

1 14 Cycle Rides round London

park on the way, in sharp contrast with the wilderness of bracken, just turning an " old gold " tint with the first touch of autumn. A rugged, sandy hillock will be noticed on the right hand, amidst the bracken and the blackberry brambles. It is known as Round Hill, and, although apparently and actually of no great height, commands exquisite views. Safely leaving the cycle down below in this unfrequented spot, it is distinctly well worth while to scramble to the summit for the views of the surrounding country. Telegraph Hill — the wooded ridge between Oxshott and Leatherhead — is prominent, and recalls the days before the advent of the electric telegraph in 1838, when this height was one of a series between the Admiralty in London and Ports- mouth Dockyard, and fitted with semaphores for sig- nalling. More prominent still, peering over the wood- lands of Ruxley Lodge at Claygate, is the castellated outlook tower built by Lord Foley ; while dense woods and billowy expanses of gorse-clad commons complete the picture, save on the clearest days, when, faintly to be seen over the ridge of the North Downs, is Chancton- bury Ring, the great hill near Worthing.

From here to Oxshott Station the way still lies through commons. Around the station the builder is busy on the Crown lands, and is creating a modern village. Avoiding a knobbly road on the right, which a sign-post informs us is the way to Stoke DAbernon, we continue ahead, more by token that in doing so there is a fine road and a good coast downhill. In another mile a sign-post appears directing to Woodlands and Stoke DAbernon. Here we will leave the Leatherhead

Ripley and the Surrey Commons 115

road, whose course we have been travelling, and turn to the right, coming in less than a mile, still gently down- hill, to another post. Instead of turning to the right here we keep on for half a mile along the road, which now begins to wind about and to take on the character of a country lane. Then look out for a right-hand turning at the corner of a park enclosed by a new red brick wall. This is Randalls Park. Turning down here a hundred yards or so, along a lane where the local authorities delight to blast the scenery by tipping all the potsherds and domestic refuse of the district, the explorer, after enduring much, comes at last to a pretty scene on the river Mole, which here runs in two branches : the first spanned by a substantial bridge, the second bridged by a very long and narrow structure of wood intended for foot passengers only. Wheeled traffic goes through a picturesque water-splash ; but the cyclist must perforce dismount and walk his machine over the wooden bridge. From this point, crossing a road running right and left, the way lies ahead, up a sharp rise through Fetcham village and along the road to Great and Little Bookham. At the last-named place we turn off to the right for the four miles' run to Ock- ham, famous as being the Waterloo of the Bloomer women ; for \\ was here, at the " Hautboy," that Mrs. Sprague, the champion of convention, withstood the breeched Lady Harberton, with complete success. Why is there no monument to this historic event ?

The route to Ockham is almost wholly through Effingham Common and Blackmore Heath, past solitary Effingham Junction, and thence through woods to

ii6 Cycle Rides round London

Martyr's Green, where we turn to the left, and so to the " Hautboy " and the village built under the shelter of Ockham Park, the seat of the Earl of Lovelace. The church, standing in the park, is worth seeing. Nailed to the gallery front is the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Purse worn by Lord Chancellor King, who held the office in the reign of Queen Anne.

Among the eccentric epitaphs often quoted, that on John Spong of Ockham should surely be numbered. He died 17th November 1736, aged sixty years. The lines on his tombstone were written by Daniel Wray, F.R.S. Spong was a carpenter —

" Who many a sturdy Oak has laid along, Fell'd by Death's surer hatchet, here lies Spong. Posts oft he made, yet ne'er a Place could get, And liv'd by Railing tho' he was no Wit. Old Saws he had, altho' no Antiquarian, And Stiles corrected, yet was no Grammariatt. Long liv'd he Ockham^s Premier Architect, And lasting as his fame, a tomb t'erect In vain we seek an Artist such as He Whose Pales and Gates are for Eternity. So here he rests from all life's toils and follies: Oh spare, kind Heaven ! his fellow-lab'rer Hollis."

Hollis was a bricklayer friend of Spong's, and appears, at anyrate, to have been spared long enough to escape being a post-mortem butt for Mr. Daniel Wray's wit.

From Ockham village, roads lead round either side of Ockham Park into Ripley, a mile distant. It is worth while to linger round Ripley for half a day, for the village itself is pleasing and the surroundings are exquisitely pretty. Ripley is a great deal more interest- ing now to the cycling tourist than ever it was in the

Ripley and the Surrey Commons i 1 7

days of its cycling popularity. For there is no doubt whatever that the days are gone, never to return, when cycles were stacked by the hundred in the broad village street on Saturdays and Sundays. Ripley has been called the Mecca of every good cyclist, and for some fifteen years its popularity was great among London clubmen, to whom the twenty-three miles from town, and the run home again across the commons that border the Portsmouth road from London, formed a delightful day's cycling. Indeed, so exclusively was this a place of pilgrimage that the road to it was generally known among cyclists as the " Ripley road," although, as a matter of fact, Ripley is but an incident along the old coaching highway that stretches a long course of seventy-three miles between London and Portsmouth. So devoted was this class of cyclist to Ripley that many never ventured beyond it, but made that remarkably picturesque old inn, the " Anchor," and the village green opposite, their lounging and gossiping places, until it was time to start again for home. Ripley was first " discovered " by cyclists in the dawn of the '70's, when the very few who wheeled on what were then called velocipedes found a welcome at the rustic " Anchor " at a time when the riders of such new-fangled contrivances were generally looked upon as pariahs, and refused accommodation or even ordinary civility. Such unwonted consideration made the fortunes of the " Anchor," of the Dibbles who then occupied it, and of the village of Ripley in general ; for it became known that here, at least, was a place where the weary wheel- man, who trundled his hundredweight or so of old iron

ii8 Cycle Rides round London

painfully along the roads, and called it " pleasure," could take his peculiarly well-earned rest. Thus the fame of Ripley grew, and with the growth of cycling clubs attained really great proportions. Such early racing cyclists as Cortis, the Honourable Ion Keith Falconer, and "Jack" Keen were the first comers. They have all passed into the Unknown, and so have "the Dibbles," as the genial family who once occupied the "Anchor" were collectively spoken of; and to-day the tourist may see the memorial windows to Cortis and the Dibble sisters in the ancient chapel of Ripley, hard by the inn, windows erected by club - cyclists who knew them well.

Now that the cycling club is an unnecessary and rapidly decaying institution, Ripley is almost as deserted as it was before its sudden popularity. Not quite, for of course the roads are more frequented nowadays ; but it has taken on again something of the old look it wore when it was just the typical decayed coaching village.

Coming into the old-world street, with that truly countrified scent — the scent of the wood-fuel burnt largely instead of coal — the place is delightful. Away on the north side of the road stretches the so-called " green," in reality a broad and beautiful common, the ideal spot for many a ramble by the winding Wey, with its picturesque weirs and mills and background of solemn firs. Such rambles to be taken preferably without the cycle, to be left conveniently in the village. Or a pretty cycle ride lies across the village street to Newark Priory and Pyrford, two miles distant. It is an unmistakable route, and, coming to the humpbacked

Ripley and the Surrey Commons 119

bridge across the Wey at Newark Mill, the grey ruins of the Priory are prominent in a meadow on the right hand. The place is quite solitary. No guide to chatter ; most probably not even another cyclist. Nothing to pay; only just to lift your machine over a field-gate, and there you are. The fragment of a bridge or an

e^imfi^

NRWARK PRIORY,

entrance gate may be seen on approaching ; a fine piece of work, with alternations of stone and knapped flints. Beyond stand the ruins in romantic solitude, in that low-lying watery situation the old monks loved so well. Indeed, the Wey and its rush-fringed tributaries, that wander so lazily through the level meads, form a very maze. The monks' fish-ponds are all uncared for now,

I20 Cycle Rides round London

and their Priory roofless and stripped of almost every fragment of worked stone ; but the tall lancet windows remain to show the Early English character of the building, and the sturdy flint walls may last many centuries yet, if only one great ominous fissure, extend- ing almost to the ground, is looked after. There is a quite wonderfully effective view of the ruins from the road to Pyrford, just where the Wey crosses it ; but for a grand comprehensive view of the Priory, and the vale in which it stands, one must climb the slight rise to Pyrford itself.

Good roads lead thence to Byfleet Station, two miles distant, for those who desire to return by train ; but the more enjoyable course, should daylight last, is to return to Ripley, and to cycle thence back to Esher through Cobham Street, along that splendid highway, the old Portsmouth road. Commons are almost continuous along this route — Ockham Common, Wisley Common, and that of Fairmile — and the scent of the surrounding pine-woods is over them all.

RURAL MIDDLESEX

How rural and secluded still are some parts of Middlesex let this run show. To roam far from the madding crowd in this essentially " home county " might seem impossible, but those who summon up the not very great amount of energy required for following the course of this tour will see many places sleepier and more retired than in Devon or Cornwall. They will not remain so very much longer ; which is an inducement to see them without delay.

There are many ready ways of beginning this trip ; from London to one of the Ealing stations by train — Ealing on the District Railway for preference — or the cyclist resident at Richmond, Kew, or Ealing can start without depending upon outside aid. Starting, say, from Kew, the way lies over the bridge, and thence towards Gunnersbury along the wood-paved road. In half a mile look out for what still, at the time of writing, remains a countrified lane on the left — " Gunnersbury lane," as it is called — where a sign-post directs to Acton. Past market gardens we go, and come, in little over half a mile, to a turning right and left. Here a left-hand turn, and then the first to the right, which is a long, straight road, planted with

121

122

Cycle Rides round London

Stanmo

iEdgware

young trees, leading direct on to Ealing Common, and straight across it to Hanger Hill.

From here it is a steady rise of a mile up the country road, with dairy farms here and there. Then a somewhat steep descent, with one or two tricky curves and loose patches of gravel where rains have made channels across the road. With caution, therefore, the descent should be made to the valley of the Brent, the more particularly as the dairy farms aforesaid

are responsible for many strayed cows generally to be found wandering in the road, and as at the bottom, where a rustic inn '"^* "'^ stands, our route lies I Wembley Qff tQ l-he left, along

a lane to which there is a very acute turn- ing, up a quite short but sharp rise. It is necessary to have the machine well in hand to negotiate this corner without dis- mounting. A mile and a quarter of narrow, winding lane, quite flat but with tall hedges on either side, like a Devonshire lane, brings us to Perivale.

Now Perivale is one of the queerest little places it is possible to set eyes upon. " Little " is said, and the fullest sense of the adjective is to be understood ; for besides the church — one of those claiming that curious wrong -end -of- the -telescope kind of dignity as "the smallest in England " — there is only one other building

Northolt

AJperton

Greenford

Rural Middlesex

123

at hand ; and that the rectory ! Indeed, in the entire parish of 626 acres there are but five houses and thirty-four inhabitants ; and this, let it be impressed upon the reader, well within nine miles of London's five millions of population. Perivale, save for this church and those scattered farmsteads, is just a geo- graphical expression, nothing more ; for there is no

THE LITTLE CHURCH OK PERIVALE.

village, no hamlet, no village shop, and no public- house. All around are the low-lying water-meadows bordering the river Brent.

There are those who refer to Perivale's ancient alias of " Greenford Parva," and say its present name is but a corruption of the " Parva " in its old style ; and certainly Parva is a description descriptive enough.

124 Cycle Rides round London

even though its neighbour, Greenford Magna, be of scarce sufficient size to warrant that adjective of bigness.

Perivale Church is now well cared for, after a long period of spiritual starvation ; a whimsical period when the then rector was in the habit of offering a pot of beer to the two or three rustics who alone used to attend service. " It is scarcely worth while to read service for so few," he would say ; " would you like some beer at the rectory instead?" That formula became so well known that the sole reason why even these few appeared so regularly was the chance of being bribed in this manner with a drink. A little later, however, it became so much a matter of general knowledge that thirsty and impecunious souls began in summer time to make Perivale the goal of a pleasant Sunday morning's walk from Ealing and the neigh- bouring villages, and the thing grew scandalous. But at this point the congregation had grown so large that the rector, in defence of his cellar, had to resort to his service again, greatly to the disgust of the thirsty throng.

In winter no one came at all, because the Brent had a habit (and has it still) of flooding roads and meadows alike, and leaving church and rectory isolated. At such times the old parish clerk (whose name was the unusual one of Cain) would take up a commanding position overlooking all approaches, and would call out, " Can't see no one a-comin', sir ; may I put the books up?"

It was this rector who had an incorrigible habit

Rural Middlesex 125

of transposing portions of words ; quite unconsciously, of course, but with the most grotesquely laughable results. Local gossip still keenly relishes the re- collection of his announcing a hymn, " Kinkering congs their titles take," and a little later, in his sermon, saying, " My friends, we all of us have our little bits of cuppiness." It was presumed from the context of his discourse that he really meant " cups of bitterness." The story goes that this habit became contagious, and that a lady, finding a stranger in her pew, ex- claimed, " Excuse me, but you're occupewing my pie!"

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 reper- toire.

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 christen- ings 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.

126 Cycle Rides round London

Notice the very, very ancient and massive timbering of the belfry, also weather-boarded outside, and look- ing 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 Green- ford 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 ex- quisitely weathered and stained and patched little

Rural Middlesex

127

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

<r<;««v>\.

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.

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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 MYSTERIOUS MONUiMENT.

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

Rural Middlesex 129

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 sOi 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 grow- ing 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 melo- dious 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 9

130 Cycle Rides round London

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, exer- cise 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, a propos of the title of this paper, that no one should clirnb 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

181

132 Cycle Rides round London

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 hill- tops and become disillusioned. Thus it is to be an

CHILW0;\TM

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

Under the North Downs 133

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,

BUCKWND -REICHILL

JIORKlMG

YToTTOrt Hatch ABI«C£R HAMMER,

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 char- acteristic 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 con- ducted on the 14th of September 1880, and has been

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continued regularly on every Sunday since. The reason for this singular conversion was purely senti- mental, 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

jj««^

REIGATE HEATH.

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 dis- appeared, 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 mat- ting, the great beams painted and here and there

Under the North Downs 135

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 ; P'or 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

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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

%i^.

WESTCOTT.

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

Under the North Downs

^2>7

his planting yet flourish. Wotton Hatch, a lonely- hamlet, overlooks the scene.

THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOTTON.

At Abinger Hammer and Gomshall, the trickling streams that have followed the valley are dammed

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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 interchange- able 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 tame- ness 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,

Under the North Downs

141

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'

M^ ^^	HOBP^wf* ^VSMK^^^^
	"^^
1 ■ """---

AN OLD WEIR ON THE WEY,

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, wood- lands, 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

142 Cycle Rides round London

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 GUILDHALL AND HIGH STREET, GUILDFORD

Under the North Downs 145

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 10

146 Cycle Rides round London

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,

Under the North Downs 147

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 un- acknowledged 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 Morlcy in the late seventeenth century, and those of recent years, have preserved the place as a residence at the expense of archaeology. Even so, the picture made by the long and varied front looking down upon

148 Cycle Rides round London

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

Under the North Downs 149

" 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

150 Cycle Rides round London

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 Scale 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. With- out that scenic backing it would be nothing remark- able.

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

Under the North Downs

151

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, Hke 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 common- place, not to say ugly, and was rebuilt in i860, when

PUTTENHAM.

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

152 Cycle Rides round London

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, Braboeuf 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

Under the North Downs 153

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

154 Cycle Rides round London

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 show- ing 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, cross- ing a bridge that spans the Mole. Hersham, a hamlet where four roads meet, is in summer a by no means

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156 Cycle Rides round London

unpleasing place, but the contemplative wayfarer, think- ing 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

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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 1 773, when it was thrown down by a party of ad- venturers who, possessed by the singular idea that there was treasure buried at the base, ex- cavated it, and found — nothing. The stones then occupied a neglec- ted corner in a London stonemason's yard for many years, until, in- deed, they were pur- chased in 1822 by the inhabitants of VVeybridge 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.

THE SEVEN-DIALS PILLAR, VVEYBRIDGE.

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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 froUc 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,