Part 14
There is no lack of ways to Brighton. Every cyclist knows _the_ way. _The_ way is, of course, that by Croydon, Merstham, Horley, Crawley, Hand Cross, Albourne, and Bolney; but there are several ways of reaching London-on-Sea along good roads. The classic route already named measures 51½ miles, and, like every other way, is measured from the south side of Westminster Bridge. Let us, by way of a healthy change,—for change is the spice of life,—elect to go down by East Grinstead, Uckfield, and Lewes; a route not within the ken of the scorcher, and for that reason the more attractive. This “back way” is but six miles longer than the orthodox route, and has the advantage of being the most picturesque of all. It is identical with the other as far as Croydon and Purley. At that last-mentioned place, rural but a few years since, but no longer so, the route forks to the left, going past a compendious sign-post, large enough for an advertisement hoarding, whereon we may read as we run the notice: “To Riddlesdown, the prettiest spot in Surrey.” If we think that to be something quite apart from the County Council business of properly sign-posting the roads, and due rather to private enterprise, we shall be correct; for it points the way, as a matter of fact, to a paradise of bean-feasters, and was doubtless placed here by some enterprising caterer.
The days when local bodies shall be found charged with the æsthetic mission of guiding to pretty or historic scenes are not yet.
For five miles the road climbs up and up, on its way to the crest of the North Downs and Marden Park, past aforementioned Riddlesdown, where we joyfully leave the swings and the cocoa-nut shies behind, past Kenley and Warlingham stations, with the Downs on the left and a lovely valley on the right, and through Caterham, where there is a military depôt, and where at the ranges the “recruity” is taught the business of shooting. There are many Tommies in the making at Caterham, inchoate guardsmen who have not yet quite lost the shamble of the civilian or acquired the carriage of the soldier and the nice conduct of a swagger-stick.
On the height above Caterham we are on the crest of the North Downs, 777 feet above sea-level, and after admiring the widespread view southward, may reap the reward of the long climb in a breathless coast down two miles of road, past Marden Park, into Godstone, an old-world village rejoicing in the possession of a village green, a pond, and an ancient and picturesque hostelry, recently renamed the “Clayton Arms,” but really the “White Hart,” established in the reign of Richard the Second, whose badge it was.
Bane and antidote succeed on this route with unfailing regularity, and the hamlet of Godstone left behind, the frowning and tremendous ascent of Tilburstow Hill confronts the explorer, who may indeed find a slightly more circuitous and very much less hilly route for the next three miles by taking the left-hand road past Godstone Station, so called perhaps because it is three miles from Godstone and only one and three-quarters from Blindley Heath. This easier way falls into the treadmill route half a mile short of Blindley Heath, which is a modern hamlet arisen on a scene once famous, in Regency days, together with the adjoining Copthorne Common, for prize-fighting contests; notable among them, that famous battle in 1819 between the “Nonpareil” and the “Out-and-Outer,” for whose details the curious reader must be referred to the classic pages of _Boxiana_.
New Chapel, a hamlet beyond Blindley Heath, is succeeded in four miles by the imposing old town of East Grinstead, a stone-built town of Tudor architecture where assizes were formerly held. Interest is divided between the old “judge’s lodgings,” the noble quadrangular group of almshouses known as “Sackville College,” founded in 1609 by the then Earl of Dorset, and that ancient hostelry, the “Dorset Arms,” over whose doorway there has for some years past appeared a quotation from the present Poet Laureate’s “Fortunatus the Pessimist,” placed there by some landlord more appreciative of the poetry of Mr. Alfred Austin than is commonly the case. It reads—
“There is no office in this needful world, But dignifies the doer if well done.”
The bearing of this “lies in the application on it,” as Captain Cuttle remarks. Whether it is intended to convey to the stranger that those of the “Dorset Arms” are all little emperors, from the landlord down to “boots,” or whether it be a hint that they do you well in the matter of accommodation, does not appear.
The explorer who elects to stay the night at East Grinstead, and so continue quietly down the road on the morrow, will find the town and neighbourhood delightful, and—what is more to the point for the jaded Londoner—restful as well. Should he, however, desire to push a little more forward, the smaller and still more quiet townlet of Uckfield, some fourteen miles onward, will fit his whim. From half a mile on the other side of East Grinstead we have been in Sussex, and now the scenery grows even bolder and the roads more lonely. At a mile and a half beyond the old assize town, in a hollow of the hills and beside a stream on the skirts of Ashdown Forest, the little settlement of Forest Row—a Bret Harte-ish, Californian-looking place—is gained. A path to the right, however, by the post-office, leads across meadows to something that California does not, but would be only too proud to, possess—the picturesque ruins of an ancient mansion. Brambletye House, which has sheltered no inmate since the close of the seventeenth century, when a Compton, the last of its owners, married a Spanish heiress and left his country for ever, to reside in the land of the Dons, is the subject of many legends and has given a title and a motive to a romance by one of the Smiths, authors of the _Rejected Addresses_.
The road, leaving Forest Row, makes its winding way up to Wych Cross and the high tableland of Ashdown Forest, and gives some occasion for the use of the cyclist’s muscles. For “forest,” let long, long plantations of oaks and firs, with gorsy and heathery stretches between, be understood, the whole very solitary. The ironstone of the district renders the road-surface hard and excellent for cycling along. This desirable district is left behind at Nutley, which we leave rapidly behind on the down grade, and so come to Maresfield, standing at a parting of the ways. The left-hand road leads to Uckfield’s long, descending street, whose chief feature is that quaint, old-fashioned coaching inn, the “Maid’s Head,” with an immensely long old ballroom provided with an odd minstrels’ gallery at one end. Uckfield was once a thriving place, and its handsome seventeenth and eighteenth century mansions along the one street proclaim that it possessed a cultured society of its own, quite distinct from its bucolic population. London on the one side and Brighton on the other, together with the swiftness and cheapness of modern travel, have filched away the social circle of Uckfield, alike with that of many another townlet.
Onward to Lewes, the county-town of Sussex, the distance is eight miles; the road beautiful and lonely, with but one village—that of Little Horsted—on the way, until quite close to Lewes itself, when the suburb village of Cliffe is passed. Lewes, with its castle, its memories of the great battle in the long ago, its quaint old churches and quainter old houses, piled up against one another along the steep streets, is a place not to be hurried through or properly seen in an hour. There is plenty to see in Lewes, which is a town of closely huddled together old brick houses, several churches, and a grim old castle keep, under which a railway tunnel is now pierced. There is a monument to that doughty seaman, Sir Nicholas Pelham, who died in 1559, to be seen in St. Michael’s Church. He successfully defended Seaford against the French, and the fact is recorded on his tomb, together with a horrible pun on his name—
“What time the French sought to have sack’t Sea-Foord, This Pelham did repel ’em back aboord.”
The cautious cyclist does not put on too much pace in these precipitous ways. Rather, being well-advised, and with the promise of exertion to come, in the great wall of the South Downs that rises before him and seems to forbid farther progress in the direction of Brighton, does he halt and refresh awhile.
Only one village stands along the eight miles on to Brighton. Falmer is the name of it, and it is reached half-way from Lewes. Brighton itself is entered from the north-east, past the cavalry barracks and by its least attractive outskirts.
BARKING TO SOUTHEND AND SHEPPEY
Southend is a place that labours under many disadvantages. In certain circles, to acknowledge an intimate acquaintance with that salubrious and healthful resort is to be suspect of things unutterable in the Bank Holiday there and back for half a crown way; and the name of Southend—the “Sarfend” or “Soufend” of Cockney speech—certainly brings visions to the mind’s eye of crowded excursion trains or steamboats, where the holiday-making concertina is much in evidence, and the mingled odours of shrimps and water-cresses weight the air as heavily as the scent of the roses in the rose-garden of Omar Khayyam. I am self-condemned by these intimate touches, and indeed I know Southend, and know it in holiday-time and out. I have gone down by cycle and have come up with the concertina; have voyaged from the Port of London to the Port of Southend, and listened the while (however unwillingly) to the music of the band on board playing a once popular ditty called “Three pots a shilling,” or some such romantic title, until, overcome with the exertion, the rolling of the waves, or the effect of the beer they had imbibed—or by all three—they ceased, and a holy calm reigned where the strident cornet and the excruciating violins had but a moment before cast an added melancholy upon the sad sea waves.
Southend, however, is a very fine and a very picturesque place, and extraordinarily bracing; even though the sea of “Southend-on-Sea”—as it prefers to be styled—be indeed half composed of the filthy dregs of London. To it we will make our way by road.
It is the chief disability of this nearest of London’s seaside resorts that one must needs traverse the whole of the unlovely East End in order to reach it, and the cyclist who, like another Strafford, takes for his motto the proud word “thorough,” has no enviable journey before him in his effort to wheel all the way from town. From Whitechapel Church lies his way, down the Commercial and East India Dock roads, and on to Canning Town, where, having crossed the huge iron bridge that spans the Lea and certain of the docks, he finds himself in Essex and within eyeshot of such unpoetic landmarks as Plaistow Marsh, the Northern Outfall Sewer, and the distant pot-bellied gasometers of Beckton. Plaistow and East Ham now lie before him, and, passing these, he comes, across the little river Roding, into the old town of Barking, seven miles from Whitechapel Church and on the edge of the country.
There is a mingled agricultural and maritime air about the distant view of Barking that is not a little alluring; and foreground windmills and fields, and distant views of rust-red sails of barges, peering over ancient roofs, ill prepare the exploratory cyclist for the raw newness and meanness that many of its streets display on a closer acquaintance. Enshrined amid all these modern excrescences are the old Market House and the still older Abbey Gatehouse; this last the sole relic of the once rich and powerful Abbey of Barking, whose Abbess in far-off Saxon days owned a seat in the Witenagemote, the Parliament of that age. It is a mouldering old gateway, this of the old Abbesses of Barking, and oddly at variance with its surroundings; as indeed is the Elizabethan Market House, now the Town Hall. New and old at Barking jostle one another very curiously; the curfew bell still ringing, as a sentimental survival, during six months of every year, as it did in the bad old Norman days, eight hundred years ago.
Flat fields, chiefly serving the useful purpose of the market-gardener, constitute the scenery immediately next the road on leaving Barking; but beyond them, across the turbid estuary of the Thames, made by the witchery of the sunshine to glitter and sparkle as though its waters were of the purest—beyond them rise in the distance the Kentish hills, where the woods of Bostal look down upon busy Plumstead. One mile from Barking, and the traveller sees, rising before him on the right of the flat road, the dark clustered red brick chimneys of an ancient mansion: a furtive-looking, secretive place, for all its size and the fine Tudor style of its architecture. This is Eastbury House, long since abandoned by its owners as a fitting residence, and now occupied by a market-gardener. It was probably the solitary position of the old house and its peculiarly ominous air—as though it could tell a tale an it would—that originally procured it the reputation of being a meeting-place of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. Certainly no scene-painter could devise anything more likely, by the look of it, to have taken part in some dread conspiracy. The very bricks seem to ooze secrets, and in the low doorways and up the darkling staircases Catesbys and Digbys and Guy Fawkeses might reasonably have hidden—only we know they did nothing of the sort, and that the legends about Eastbury House are all fudge and flapdoodle, invented to take away the character of a poor old mansion with no friends of its own. Still, when, as you explore the place, a terrific hullabaloo is heard in one of the staircase turrets and a something black and explosive comes bounding out of a doorway, the incident has perhaps some little heart-shaking qualities, due directly to those legends. It is only when you discover that something to be a spitting and indignant cat, followed by a fox-terrier, that the incident resolves itself into the commonplace.
At Rainham—whose beauties and points of interest, if they exist at all, only reveal themselves to those who have much time to seek them—we do not call a halt, but pass on to Wennington, similarly circumstanced. Beyond this place, instead of taking the Purfleet road, we bear left, and go uphill to Aveley, along a more secluded way than that by the waterside. Interesting old churches here and at Stifford will repay examination and give an interest that the scenery now begins to lack. For here we are come again to the levels and now find ourselves in a tract of country that still retains its old-time name of “Orsett Fen,” even though the fen itself be gone and long level fields take its place. Orsett village itself partakes of this market-gardening and cabbage-growing character, and is distinctly rural, with crazy, weather-boarded cottages a feature of its street. Here our road turns sharply to the right, and again, at the “Cock Inn,” as sharply to the left along a very straight, flat, and dreary highway, whose forbidding character is, however, mitigated by the lovely views of the Essex hills at Laindon and Horndon-on-the-Hill, on the left hand, forming a green and well-wooded range almost at right angles with our course. We have met those hills before in these pages, and somewhat more intimately, and know, therefore, that the distant view of them from these levels is the better part.
Stanford-le-Hope now comes in view, on the other side of a hollow where a little stream flows to the Thames, two miles away, past the suggestively named village of Mucking. Away across the flats comes the bellowing of the great steamships making for Thames Haven, or passing up to or down from London; and when night has come, the red eye of a lighthouse, screwed to piles set in the fathomless mud, winks solemnly at you from out of the vagueness.
We will pass Vange and Pitsea, on their elevated sites, without comment, the last-named leading on to Hadleigh without any intervening village; for Thundersley, midway between the two, is placed half a mile off the road. Thundersley is a very small and very inoffensive little place, in spite of the terrific dignity given by its name. From the high-placed churchyard of its beautiful but dilapidated little Early English church, the eye ranges over Benfleet and Cauvey Island, and over a world of waters and muddy creeks, perhaps not particularly lovely to read about, but beautiful beyond expression in the sunshine.
But Hadleigh, two miles distant, on its steep hillside, presenting a stern and rugged upland to the old pirates who infested the estuary of the Thames in the long ago—Hadleigh takes the palm for historic interest and beauty. Nothing shall be said of Hadleigh Church, fine though it be, and nothing of the Salvation Army’s “Home Colony” for the “submerged tenth,” or the born-tired, or whatever may be the fit and proper title for “General” Booth’s unlovely pets who farm the surrounding fields; Hadleigh Castle only shall be touched upon in these pages. Hubert de Burgh, who built it, built well and truly when he raised its walls, nigh upon seven hundred years ago, and so terrible was the forefront of his fortress, set here on the hilltop,—the first object that attracted the eye of the would-be invader sailing up the Thames,—that the foreign foe on sight of it generally turned tail and fled whence he had come.
Thus it is that Hadleigh Castle has no history in the warlike sort. Its very presence was sufficient. Two hundred years after its towers had been set here to diadem the green hill, the castle was deserted and left to decay, as having served its turn; and since then it has been a quarry to which everyone in the neighbourhood who wanted stone has resorted, so that only the ruined walls of two circular towers are left. But they form a striking and memorable picture, whether you take them for a foreground and gaze thence to Leigh and Southend and the mouth of the Thames, or look upon them and the hill from the pastures below. Constable painted Hadleigh Castle so long ago as 1829, and, truly enough, described its situation as “vastly fine.”
Leigh, that looks so picturesque from this hilltop, keeps that quality even at close quarters. It is a shrimping, winkling, cockling, and whelking town, and all along its maritime street, where beery fishermen, very deliberate in their movements, and broad and patchy in the stern, lounge and gossip, are the most perplexing little cottages and taverns and bothies, with spaces large and spaces small in between; and over all a generous and penetrating scent of shell-fish in process of being cooked. It is a smell that will not be denied, and no wonder, since in almost every one of these little sheds and bothies, and indeed often in the open air, shell-fish and shrimps are, in fact, being cooked by wholesale. That is the business of Leigh, as evidenced by the mountain ranges of winkle and other shells along the foreshore; permanent and indubitable evidence of the success of the local industry.
To reach this part of Leigh—having come from Hadleigh, and carefully negotiated the descent of Bread and Cheese Hill—we turn to the right in midst of the hilltop portion of the village, by the parish church, whose tower is so prominent a landmark, and then walk down the precipitous descent to the fishing community. Between the seashore of Leigh and that of Southend is Westcliff—Westcliff-on-Sea as it is proudly styled, or (still more proudly) “the New Eldorado.” Why styled by so auriferous a name only those responsible for the alluring advertisements of this newly developed building estate can tell; even supposing that they can give a reasonable explanation. Who that has waited weary half-hours at London railway stations has not seen coloured pictorial advertisements of Westcliff; the trees very green, the houses very red, the sea of a more cerulean blue than the Mediterranean in the Bay of Naples, and all the roads as yellow as fine gold? Well, here is the place itself, for comparison.
Southend—maligned Southend, curiously regarded by superior persons as being throughout the year infested with crowds of the worst type of tripper—lies basking in the sunshine, sheltered from northerly winds by rising ground, and looking southward, across where the Thames and the sea mingle, to the Kentish shore and Sheppey, six miles away. Excursion trains and steamboats notwithstanding, Southend, apart from Saturdays in summer and the usual Bank Holiday rush, is not the Cockney pandemonium it is generally represented to be, but a goodly sized and cheerful watering-place, greatly in favour as a residence with many City men, and, with its mild and dry air, one of the healthiest of places for children. The cautious scribe would be afraid to state how far the sea recedes here at the ebb, and certainly one would not like to say how long Southend Pier is now. Some years ago it was a mile and a quarter in length, but since then it has been lengthened, for the purpose of giving a landing-place for steamers at the pier-head at all times of the tide. A pilgrimage from end to end of this structure—doubtless the longest of its kind in England—would be a weariness but for the electric railway that runs its length.
We have now journeyed forty-three miles from London, but if the summer days be long and weather propitious, there is no reason why the tour should not be extended, to include that Isle of Sheppey whose shores are visible from here. Steamers constantly make the passage between this and Sheerness.
Comparatively few cyclists know Sheppey, which is, in fact, very much of an unknown member of the British Isles, even to those who are in a favourable position for reaching it. Does the average man, indeed, stop to consider that the British Isles, all told, large and small, number considerably over two hundred? Of them Sheppey is one of the least remote in point of mileage, but among the loneliest in actual fact, even although its capital—Sheerness—is a large and growing dockyard town.
It is a redundancy to talk of the “Isle of Sheppey,” because its name, deriving as it does from the Saxon “Sceapige” (the “Isle of Sheep”), includes the designation of “island.” It is eleven miles in length, and five miles across its broadest part, and includes the two so-called “isles” of Harty and Elmley, which, once divided from it by slimy creeks, are now practically joined, since modern drainage works have been in progress. Sheppey is a place of the very greatest interest. Its scenery, divided into the marshes that border the Swale, which separates it from the mainland, and into a high ridge or backbone that runs the greater length of the isle, from Sheerness to Warden, is of a peculiarly weird quality, whether you are looking at the low-lying marshlands or at the dull-hued clayey cliffs that face the North Sea, and are continually crumbling away. Trees are few, and grow only in the more sheltered parts of the island. Landing at the jetty by Sheerness railway station, under the guns of the guardship swinging at anchor in the roadstead, and well covered by a circular iron fort springing out of the water, we are in the dockyard town and maritime port of Sheerness, a place, like most towns of the dockyard kind, squalid and mean, coal-gritty and unlovely. There is, it is true, another and a better quarter, Bluetown by name, where the dignified heads of departments and their kind reside, but it does not lie on our line of exploration.