from virginia water up to the crest of shrub’s hill, sunningdale, is a distance of a mile and a quarter, and beyond, all the way into bagshot, is a region of sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied by newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of cobbett’s detested stock-jobbers and other business men from the ‘wen of wens’ have set up country quarters. and away to right and left, for miles upon miles, stretches that wild country known variously as bagshot and ascot heaths and chobham ridges.
the extensive and dreary-looking tract of land,{96} still wild and barren for the most part, called bagshot heath, has during the last century been the scene of many attempts made to bring it under cultivation. these populous times are ill-disposed to the continued existence of waste and unproductive lands, which, when near london, are especially valuable, if they can be made to grow anything at all. one thing which, above all others, has led to the beginning of the end of these old-time wildernesses, formerly the haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery of the country and of the benefits of fresh air. when the nineteenth century was yet young the townsman still retained the old habits of thought which regarded the heaths and the hills with aversion. he pigged away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the city, and thought the country fit only for the semi-savages who grew the fruit and vegetables that helped to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of which his daily bread was compounded. it has been left to us, his descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is that villa homes are springing up amid the heaths and the pines of this region, away from woking on the south to ascot in the north.
bagshot
one comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby grass, gorse, and fir-trees. the now quiet street faces the road in the hollow, across which runs the bourne brook that perhaps originated the place-name, ‘beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck. the many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in hants and surrey have this common origin, and are similarly{97} situated in the little hollows watered by descending brooks.
bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘king’s arms.’
image unavailable: bagshot.
bagshot.
the ground to the north of the exeter road, on the west of bagshot village, was once a peat moor. hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up there. then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. beneath the black sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very hard iron rust, or thin stratum{98} of oxide of iron, which prevents drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. this stratum of iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything will grow here.
there is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of bagshot an old inn called the ‘jolly farmer.’ this is the successor of a still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of william davis, the notorious ‘golden farmer,’ who lived here in the century before last.
the agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable practice of paying his bills in gold. he was never known to tender cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. but respect at last fell from mr. william davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on bagshot heath by a peculiar highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.
the ‘golden farmer’
bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted space before the entrance to the ‘king’s arms,’ when the gossips of the place recognised in him the well-known features of the{99} ‘golden farmer.’ a ferocious government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery, caused the ‘golden farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his own threshold.
the present inn, an ugly building facing down the road, does not occupy the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going westwards. a table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour of the ‘jolly farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. a tall obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads here—where the signpost is standing nowadays—has long since disappeared. it was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. a still existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘claude du vail’s cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some distance along lightwater lane, to the right-hand of the road. the cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with commonplace slates.
almost immediately after leaving the ‘jolly farmer’ behind, the road grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of cambridge town camberley, and york town. the exact point where one of these modern squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of tommy atkins joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.
cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby{100} line of military settlements little. coming up to ‘the wen’ in 1821, and passing blackwater, he reached york town, and thus he holds forth: ‘after pleasure comes pain’, says solomon, and after the sight of lady mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at hartley row) came that of the clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘royal military college of sandhurst!’ here, close by the roadside, is the drying ground. sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines covering perhaps an acre of ground! we soon afterwards came to ‘york place’ on ‘osnaburg hill.’ and is there never to be an end of these things? away to the left we see that immense building which contains children breeding up to be military commanders! has this place cost so little as two millions of pounds? i never see this place (and i have seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself this question, ‘will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing, created by money raised by loan; will this thing be upheld by means of taxes while the interest of the debt is reduced, on the ground that the nation is unable to pay the interest in full?’
it is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet simplicity of the three per cents’ has given place to very much reduced interest. but one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture. if cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new feature of the road, the lady cyclist.{101}
blackwater
there is a great deal more of cambridge town, camberley, and york town now than when cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more ‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more tommies, more drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. it is with relief that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon the country and descends into blackwater, where the river of that name, so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the entrance to the pretty village. over this bridge we enter hampshire, that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between hartley row and hook, called the whitewater from the milky tinge it has gained on coming down from the chalky heights of alton and odiham. this tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically chalky scenery of hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the great western road until basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.
blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the ‘white hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. but it remains, as ever, a village of old inns. climbing out of its one street we come to a wild and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as hartford bridge flats.
to the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but the old coachmen simply revelled{102} in it, for here was the best stretch of galloping ground in england, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it for all they were worth, through hartley row and hook, and well on towards basingstoke.
the famous (or infamous let us rather call them) hartford bridge flats are fully as dreary as any of the desolate californian mining flats of which bret harte has written so eloquently. salisbury plain itself, save that the plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather. excessively bleak and barren, the flats are well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black, open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. the road runs, a straight and sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. the cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely to forget hartford bridge flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.
hartford bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country, is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and rabbits uncountable. the place is interesting and unspoiled, because its development was suddenly arrested when the exeter road became deserted for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. even more eloquent of old times is the long, long street of{103}
image unavailable: roadside scene (after rowlandson)
roadside scene (after rowlandson)
hartley row
hartley row which adjoins. hartley row was absolutely called into existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling, inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative of such roadside settlements. half a mile to the south of the great highway is the parent village of hartley wintney, unknown to and undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as it was in the middle ages. the well-named ‘row,’ on the other hand, sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. what brayley, the historian of surrey, wrote of bagshot in 1841, applies even more eloquently to hartley row: ‘its trade has been entirely ruined by the opening of the southampton and great western railroads, and its numerous inns{104} and public-houses, which had long been profitably occupied, are now almost destitute of business. formerly thirty stage coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off the road.’ the ‘southampton railroad,’ referred to here, is of course the london and south-western railway, which has drained this part of the road of its traffic, and whose winchfield station lies two miles away.
image unavailable: roadside scene (after rowlandson).
roadside scene (after rowlandson).
before the crash of the ’40’s hartley row possessed a thriving industry in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one fagg, who was also landlord of the ‘bell inn,’ holborn, and in addition horsed several stages out of london.
some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his chapter on travel, cite hartley row as the typical coaching village, which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel of life. all the houses{105}
image unavailable: roadside scene (after rowlandson).
roadside scene (after rowlandson).
old travellers
of a village like this, which lived on the needs of travellers, faced the road in one long street, and almost every fourth or fifth house was an inn, or ministered in some way to the requirements of those who travelled. it is remarkable to find so many of these old inns still in existence at hartley row. here they still stand, ruddy-faced, substantial but plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness, a certain air of distinction. the wayfarer, well read in the habits of the times when they were bustling with business, can imagine untold comforts behind those frontages; can reconstruct the scenes in the public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the interval between their being set down here by the ‘defiance’ or the ‘regulator’ exeter coach and the arrival of the odiham and alton bye-stage, could warm themselves by the roaring fire; can sniff in imagination the coffee of the breakfasts and the roast{106} beef of the dinners; or perceive through the old-fashioned window-frames the lordly posting parties, detained here by stress of weather, making the best of it by drinking of the old port or brown sherry which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching inn could then produce. not that these were the only travellers familiar to the roadside village in those days. not every one who fared from london to exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or stage coach, or of the good cheer and the lavender-scented beds just glimpsed. for the poor traveller there were the lumbering so-called ‘fly-vans’ of russell and co., which jogged along at the average pace of three miles[3] an hour—the pace decreed by scotland yard for the modern policeman. the poor folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked with greater advantage, ‘save for the dignity of the thing,’ as the irishman said when the floor of his cab fell out and he was obliged to run along with the bottomless vehicle. certainly they paid more for the misery of being conveyed thus than the railway traveller does nowadays for comfort at thirty to fifty miles an hour. numbers did walk, including the soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside sketches of that period by rowlandson and others. the poor travellers probably rode because of their—luggage i was about to write, let us more correctly say bundles.
picturesque old days
when they arrived at a village at nightfall, they{107} camped under the ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.
image unavailable: roadside scene (after rowlandson).
roadside scene (after rowlandson).
those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, rowlandson and morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did not invent those roadside scenes. here, for instance, is rowlandson’s charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘half moon.’ i cannot tell you where this ‘half moon’ was. probably the artist imagined it; but at anyrate the kind of place, and scenes of this description, must have existed in his time. here, you will observe, the landlord has come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown october’ for the thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to{108} market, if we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the conveyance.
scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time, nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of the engaging appearance of this family party. the human form divine was wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years ago, according to rowlandson and gillray. legs like the trunks of contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example forms no exception to the general rule.