Part 11
No less beautiful than Hever, but with a beauty of quite a different character, it stands in a hollow at the gates of Chiddingstone Park, whose magnificent elms and chestnuts overhang in summer a row of old timbered houses, sketched many hundreds of times on paper or canvas by enthusiastic artists. The quaint house next the park gates, in the accompanying sketch, is the ideally placed “Castle Inn,” that might, both as regards its situation and its cosy, old-fashioned interior, have inspired a Washington Irving to transports of eloquence. Everyone who has been to the Royal Academy any year knows Chiddingstone, although he may never have visited it; for artists are continually painting this loveliest of Kentish villages, as it is called, and its embowering trees and quaint timbered houses. Behind these houses, in a field, is the “chiding stone,” a large boulder of red sandstone, outcropped from the underlying geological formation, and said to have been a Druidical seat of judgment or place of exhortation.
The roads grow lonely and degenerate (this expression purely from the cyclist’s point of view), into wooded lanes and tracts between Chiddingstone and Penshurst. If, however, you have that which many cyclists have not—that is to say, a real love of natural woodland and copse, where the hazels grow and the bracken and undergrowth are dense—then the walk of two miles by footpaths through the coppices will be not the least enjoyable part of this trip. This brings one to the scattered and very beautiful old village of Penshurst surrounding the ancient baronial home of the Sidneys, Penshurst Place. On three days in the week—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays—the house is shown at an admission fee of one shilling. It is said that these fees amount in the year to over £300, which gives the annual number of visitors at more than six thousand. The Barons’ Hall is the chief point of interest, and is the oldest part of the historic building, dating back to the fourteenth century.
Most famous of all the warlike and polite Sidneys who owned Penshurst was Sir Philip Sidney, who fell at the siege of Zutphen, and is the hero of that chivalric action, the giving up, when wounded to death, the cup of water for which he thirsted, so that a wounded soldier might quench his thirst. “He has more need of it than I,” said this chivalric soul.
Among the historic pictures here is the remarkable portrait of Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 on Tower Hill. He met death in characteristic Sidney fashion:—
“Are you ready, sir?” asked the headsman, when he had laid his head on the block; “will you rise again?”
“Not till the general resurrection. Strike on;” and his head was severed from his body.
In the background of the portrait you see the Tower of London and the headsman’s block and axe.
But to complete the round; on good roads, again from Penshurst to Pounds Bridge, through secluded country, and thence to Speldhurst. At Pounds Bridge there is a quite astonishingly quaint and old-world inn, gabled and timbered, and with a sixteenth-century device and monogram on it. From Speldhurst we go through more forest country, and then turn left for Southborough, where we are within hail of Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells and the great settlements of modern country residences created by the healthy air and fine scenery. Coming down Quarry Hill into the town, the tourist finds Tonbridge more interesting than “the Wells,” because it is quainter and not so fashionable. There are some impressive remains of Tonbridge Castle yet to be seen in the grounds of a park near the end of the High Street, and in that street is the old “Chequers,” a house that no artist nor any amateur photographer can resist.
Crossing the Medway, there now comes a long five and a half miles to Sevenoaks, with only one village; a very little village with the very long name of Hildenborough. Thence it is a climb up the very steep River Hill to Knole Park, bordering the right hand of the road into Sevenoaks. Park and house, the property of Lord Sackville, are open to the public; the park always, the house on Thursday and Saturday afternoons, from 2 to 5 o’clock; on Fridays and Bank Holidays 10 to 5. Single visitors, 2s.; parties of four, 6s.; of seven, 10s. There are Reynolds and Gainsborough pictures among the great art collections, and there are as many rooms in the house as there are days in the year; but only seventeen of them are shown.
From the town to Sevenoaks there is a very long and steep run down to the station and to Riverhead. The station is convenient for a return to town, but if it is desired to complete the circle, there are the interesting villages of Sundridge and Brasted to see, on the excellent road to Westerham, with the long array of the North Downs continually in sight.
TO STOKE POGES AND BURNHAM BEECHES
A glance at the accompanying chart might give the impression of this being a somewhat complicated route; but as a matter of fact, although the outward journey is almost wholly off the high roads, there should be no difficulty in finding the way to Burnham Beeches along this itinerary. The distance to be covered between Egham and Hounslow is, allowing for all possible deviations for exploring, thirty-five miles. Egham is selected solely as a convenient starting-point whence to reach the riverside road to Old Windsor, and by no means for its own sake; for the half-mile or so of high road between the railway station and the point where we turn sharply to the left for Old Windsor is probably the vilest piece of macadam in the Home Counties; if, indeed, the mile-long continuation of it on to Staines is not even worse. The river road is fortunately altogether different, being a long sandy stretch passing through the level of Runnymede, and after the first half-mile affording delightful views of the Thames. To the left hand rises the wooded height of Cooper’s Hill from the water meadows, and over to the right is Magna Charta Island. Where the sandy road dips down to the water just before reaching the village of Old Windsor, notice that old-world inn, the “Bells of Ouseley,” with its sign, displaying five bells, picturesquely swinging from an ancient elm. This sign is a puzzle to the wayfarer. It derives from the once-famous bells in the tower of the long-vanished Osney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated for their sweet tones.
A choice of roads here confronts the tourist. The pleasantest way to Old Windsor is by the easily rideable towing-path for three-quarters of a mile, bringing one to a narrow lane, looking like a private road, leading to past the little church of that village. Old Windsor Church is a prettily situated building, itself of little interest, although there may be those who will find food for reflection in a sight of the last resting-place of “Perdita” Robinson, the discarded early favourite of the “First Gentleman in Europe.” Her career can at least serve to point a moral, if it cannot adorn a tale. “Perdita” died December 26th, 1800; Florizel lived and flourished for close upon thirty years longer. Grown old, wheezy, and corpulent, drawn about Windsor Great Park in a pony-carriage in his last days, and morosely shunning the sight of his fellow-creatures, the once gay Florizel died in 1830, as George the Fourth. _He_ lies in the Royal Vault, but his pretty wanton’s bones moulder, all but forgotten, near the Thames-side towing-path.
Leaving Old Windsor Church behind, the second turning to the right leads into Windsor town. But instead of making for the Royal Borough, we will take the right-hand fork, duly sign-posted, and crossing the Thames by the Albert Bridge, enter Buckinghamshire. In half a mile’s run by the river bank, Datchet is reached by turning to the right and so over the level crossing by Datchet railway station. This is a very much rebuilt village, which in another hundred years (when its modern Elizabethan villas have weathered a little) will begin to be picturesque.
We now take the left-hand road for the old-fashioned hamlet of Upton, the mother parish of Slough, that modern suburban town, the “Sloughforwindsor,” familiar to travellers on the Great Western Railway. It may, perhaps, be remembered that the Slough people, anxious at one and the same time to show their loyalty and to suppress the unlovely name of their town, proposed a few years since to change its title to “Upton Royal,” but nothing came of the project.
Upton, so near that populous place, is singularly retired. It has an ancient and highly interesting Norman and Early English village church, which shares with that of Stoke Poges the honour of being the scene of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”; but the tourist who follows the wheelmarks of the present writer will doubtless, like him and the vast majority of visitors to both places, prefer to think Stoke Poges churchyard the original. In any case, and however well its “ivied tower” answers to the description in the poem, it would be impossible nowadays to deprive Stoke of its fame.
Let not the cyclist by any means omit to look for a singularly puzzling epitaph on a broken flat stone on the north side of the church, whose meaning has been utterly obscured by lapse of time. It runs thus:—
Here Lies the Body of SARAH BRAMSTONE, of Eton, Spinster; a person who dared to be just in the Reign of George the Second.
* * * * *
Obijt Jan. ye 30th, 1765. Ætat 77.
This is, indeed, strange, for it is impossible to believe that law and order were so hard to preserve in the days of the second George that for a person to “dare to be just” should be so notable a thing. A popular hymn urges us to “dare to be a Daniel,” but what lions lurked in the narrow path that Sarah Bramstone trod? It must be confessed that this sorely piques the curiosity. We know what befell Solomon, Julius Cæsar, William the Conqueror, and hundreds of other highly important historical characters, and know also that even they did not always dare so much; but we shall never know the secret of this tombstone.
Notice, also, on the north side of the church the white marble tomb of George Fordham, the jockey, who died, aged fifty, in 1887, with the odd and significant quotation, “’Tis the pace that kills.” Those who did not know the amiable George might well take that as an aspersion upon his character; but Fordham was the gentlest of jocks and a model husband and father, and this is but a singularly unhappy phrase in such a connection.
Leaving Upton Church, we take a road that leads from opposite it to George Green, crossing the old Bath road, and over the Great Western Railway. A direct road runs thence to Langley Park, through whose recesses there is an entirely unhindered right of way for self and cycle. Black Park is alone worth the ride; a vast stretch of solemn pine-woods, where the breezes die away in hollow murmurs, or sink to absolute silences amid the clustered giant trunks. The sunlight filters down in scanty patches to the carpeting of pine needles, on whose yielding bed you walk with silent footsteps, save for the occasional breaking of a dry twig, whose destruction sounds with startling distinctness in this solitude. Few ever come to these woodlands, and it is likely enough that you will have them all to yourself, excepting, indeed, the wood-pigeons, breaking now and again into a weird chorus of cooing.
But its great lake of about thirty acres is, perhaps, the chief feature of Black Park. Seated by its shore, with the close ranks of the great solemn pines overhanging the sullen water, you see with what appropriateness the park is named. It is a kind of place where you can readily imagine yourself a Robinson Crusoe. Little sandy beaches run out into the water; the inky recesses of the woods look as though they awaited the explorer to come and discover the savages and the big game that doubtless lie hidden there; and, in fact, all you want, to be completely happy, is a raft, a rifle, a suit of goat-skins, a Man Friday, and some enemies to shoot at. It is certainly a spot R. L. Stevenson would have revelled in.
If it were not that Burnham Beeches have to be reached, nothing could be more delightful than to stay here the afternoon, taking tea, perhaps, at the “Plough” at Wexham Street (which must not be confounded with Wexham village). Leaving the lake at the end where it borders the road, turn to the right. In half a mile you reach the pretty hamlet and turn left, then right, then left again. This brings one into the broad road leading from Wexham village to Farnham Royal and Burnham. On reaching this road (which runs right and left), instead of crossing it, turn to the right, and then to the left once more. This brings us into a tree-shaded lane, which dips downwards. On the right, on the edge of the meadow overlooking this lane, a momentary glimpse of a solemn, mausoleum-like monument is caught. This sufficiently notifies the fact that we are at Stoke Poges, for it is the memorial erected to the poet Gray by a descendant of William Penn, who once resided at Stoke Park. The park, of which the great, odd-looking mansion may be seen from Stoke Poges churchyard, has belonged to men of light and leading. It is now the residence of Mr. Bryant, of Bryant & May, who purchased it of Mr. Jeremiah Colman, of Colman’s Mustard.
The melancholy looking monument, looking like a tea-caddy or biscuit-box on a pedestal, bears verses from Gray’s mournful muse—from the “Elegy,” and from the “Lines on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Having inspected this, walk a few yards down the lane. Here a white gate on the right, with an old lodge absolutely covered from the ground to the topmost bricks of the chimneys with ivy, appears to lead into the park. This is, however, the entrance to Stoke Poges churchyard. Leaving the cycle here, by the cottage fence, we walk to this place of pilgrimage through a very beautiful modern lych-gate in carved oak. The spire and “ivy-covered tower” of the church appear beyond; the whole, strange to say, quite as beautiful as one expects it to be; with the sole exception that the churchyard is now too large and too crowded with staring white marble monuments to fully realise the rural note of the famous poem. But that is a detail. Under the east window, in the churchyard he has immortalised, Gray is appropriately laid to rest, in a quiet, unpretending tomb, with his mother and his aunt.
Thomas Gray, who has come down to us chiefly as the author of the “Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard,” as he himself entitles that famous poem, was born at the close of 1716, the son of Philip and Dorothy Gray. Philip appears to have been a “law-scrivener,” and would seem to have always been on the verge of madness. He died when his son was twenty-five years of age. The poet, educated at Eton and at Cambridge, weakly all his life, and cursed with a melancholy that was partly real and partly affected, was the only one of his mother’s twelve children who survived their infancy. Never more than slenderly provided with the means of living, he dallied through his fifty-four years of life with the classics, projecting many things but completing few. His English poems are very few in number, and like the small total of his writings, few even of these are more than fragmentary. His morbid nature may perhaps be guessed from the fact that it was almost only the death of a relative or friend that would inspire him to write. Thus the famous Elegy, begun in 1742 and only completed in 1750, owes its conception and its several slow stages to successive bereavements; and the “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” originated in the same doleful manner. Save to scholars, Gray’s whole career and repute as a poet are comprised within those two poems, both in the very front rank of English song.
Gray’s muse is unhealthy and ill-assorted with the thought of modern times. Nor was it much better matched with that of his own. His physique influenced his temperament; his narrow and inactive life rendered him morbid, and finally shortened his days. He died in 1771. It is credibly said that he never in his life received more than one single payment of forty guineas for literary work. For the “Elegy,” on which his deathless fame rests, he never received, nor would accept, any pecuniary remuneration. He allowed Dodsley and the other publishers to print it, which they did, reaping fortunes thereby. It is, perhaps, scarce necessary to add that this kind of poet is quite extinct. Gray, who refused the offer of Poet Laureate on the death of Colley Cibber in 1757, was of opinion that it was beneath the dignity of a gentleman to accept payment for his “inventions.” How he would have despised Tennyson, who could drive a very shrewd bargain with his publishers, built up a fortune on his writings, and went into the milk trade!
By the way, it is interesting to read a contemporary “review” of the “Elegy.” Here it is: “An Elegy wrote in a country churchyard, 4to, Dodsley 6d., seven pages. The excellency of this little piece more than compensates for its lack of quantity.” Who wrote that “review”? Was it some draper or grocer, whose objections to short measure were overcome by the excellence of the goods?
Here, at Stoke, Gray spent his vacations with his mother and his aunt. His mother died in 1753. She, good soul, thought this rickety son of hers—as infirm of purpose as he was of body—engaged in reading for the Law, and went to her grave unconscious of his odes. He loved his mother, and on the lichened slab that covers the unpretending red brick altar-tomb in the churchyard you may yet read the epitaph he wrote—“ ... beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.”
The “yew tree’s shade” is cast over the south porch from a very ancient tree of that species, and the scene generally accords well with the poem. In this connection, as an additional proof that Gray referred to Stoke Poges, it may be noted that the spire, surmounting “yonder ivy-mantled tower,” is an addition since his time, being little over a century old. This would appear to finally dispose of the claims put forward for Upton Royal by the sticklers for absolute accuracy of description, who have held that if Gray were writing of Stoke, he would have written “spire” instead of “tower.”
The church is very picturesque, and the interior worth seeing for the sake of the ancient architecture and for the curious little fragments of stained glass set in one of the windows, among them one representing a nude angel, or wingless cherub, with a monastic tonsure, blowing a trumpet and bestriding a veritable “hobby-horse,” or primitive bicycle. There is no questioning the antiquity of the fragment, for the date, 1642, appears on another portion of the glass, and so the mystery of the bicycle is unexplained. Every visitor to Stoke Poges visits Gray’s tomb, and no less a matter for pilgrimage has the so-called “Bicycle Window” become of late years. Indeed, to those who have no literary sympathies, this undoubtedly takes the first rank as an object of interest.
Having seen everything, we retrace our steps to the road, and, turning to the left, make for Farnham Royal, where there is a very beautiful modern church, and in the churchyard an extraordinary monument to a Mr. Henry Dodd, who died in 1861, “brickmaker and contractor. Began life as a ploughboy within a mile of St. Paul’s.” On the south side of the churchyard is the grave of Sarah Hart, victim of George Tawell, who administered prussic acid to her, in 1845, at Salt Hill. He had been carrying on an intrigue with the woman and made her an allowance; but fearing that his wife would hear of the connection, determined to put her out of the way. Tawell himself lived at Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire. His was an evil career. Living in his youth a secret dissolute life, he had been sent to penal servitude in Australia for forgery. Released after a time, he amassed a fortune out there in business, and retired. Dark rumours, however, were current that he acquired a great part of his fortune by poisoning his partner.
The unhappy woman’s grave is unmarked by any stone, but is the nearest mound to the door in the churchyard wall. Tawell was the first criminal arrested through the agency of that then novelty, the electric telegraph. He rushed off to Slough Station after committing the crime, and just succeeded in catching the train to Paddington. He was clad in Quaker dress, and the telegraphist sent a message up to detain “a man in the garb of a Kwaker,” the original code not containing the letter Q. He was duly arrested and hanged.
From the church we retrace our steps to the village, and taking the middle one of three roads, past the ornamental well-house in the centre of the street, make for that famous woodland, Burnham Beeches, along a very winding lane, taking every left-hand turning. Along a strip of common land, bordered by refreshment houses, we come downhill to the first glade, where the giant beeches crowd together in a dim light. The purchase of Burnham Beeches, unquestionably the finest piece of natural woodland in England,—finer than anything in the New Forest or in Savernake Forest,—was a noble work of the City of London Corporation, which has thus preserved the spot for ever.
The peculiarly sturdy, stunted, and fantastically gnarled character of Burnham Beeches is due to their having been pollarded at some unknown period. Legends have it that this was done by Cromwell’s soldiers. The inner recesses are weird enough to suggest warlocks and wizards, or Puck at the very least, and Queen Mab herself could find no fitter place wherein to hold her Court than in the crepuscular glades where, amid that purple shade which is the especial glory of Burnham Beeches, a chance patch of sunlight falls, more golden by contrast, on the more than emerald green of the moss, or where the moonbeams filter through on cloudless nights to light Her Majesty’s midnight masques. I would not, being no courtier and unequipped with fairy passwords, adventure alone in the depths of these woodlands at midnight for anything you could promise me. At midday it is another matter.
It is difficult to decide at what period of the year this spot is most beautiful. It has one peculiar glory of the summer and another of the winter, when in the short November and December days the brown leaves that carpet these alleys give out a mist that mingles strangely with the coppery glow of the sinking sun. Amid this impressive coloration the contorted ashen-coloured trunks stand forth strangely ghostlike.
Gray, of course, knew Burnham Beeches very thoroughly. His uncle lived at Burnham when the poet was a youth, and we find Gray writing to Walpole in 1737, in a lively manner quite unexpected of him who was already, in his twenty-first year, the affected prey of melancholy.