By its Thames Street, Hampton straggles on towards Sunbury, where the river is broken by eyots, weirs, and a deep shady cut on the Surrey side. This village, too, contains good old-fashioned houses as well as new ones, stretching back from its Church on the bank to the station a mile behind, where another royal residence is believed to have stood in Kempton Park, now degraded into a race-course. Close to Sunbury is Upper Halliford, by which a road takes a straighter line into the neighbouring parish of Shepperton, cutting across a bend of the river opposite Walton-on-Thames. Shepperton is a more scattered place, containing several hamlets and strings of villas connected by roads that seldom want the true Middlesex wealth of hedgerow timber.
Here at last we seem to be getting into open country, and away from riverside villas. A summer encampment at the end of Walton Bridge left out of account, the next place reached on the river is the pretty group of houses and inns called Lower Halliford, a little above the bridge. This ford makes the scene of a hot antiquarian controversy as to whether or no Cæsar here crossed the Thames, fortified against him by the Cowey Stakes, which some take rather for an ancient fishing weir; and his point of crossing is variously maintained to have been at Brentford, Kingston, and Wallingford, while traces and traditions of Roman camps on either side the river help out the case for Halliford. Non nostrum tantas, etc. An authentic claim to note for Lower Halliford is as the home of Thomas Love Peacock, an author too little known to the general reader, though his humorous novels were spread out over nearly half a century, from the days when he caricatured Shelley and Coleridge, through the period of Brougham’s patronage of useful knowledge, to that when competitive examinations gave him a fresh target for ridicule. By an audience fit, though few, he is not forgotten; and for the sake of his wit he may be forgiven such thoughtless gibes as that “Scotchmen would be the best people in the world if there was nobody but themselves to give them characters.” There is reason to believe, indeed, that even before his deathbed this audacious writer repented the profanity with which he bespattered our modern Athens. The plan, at least, of Peacock’s books was revived for our generation in Mr. Mallock’s New Republic; but Peacock strikes a note of more farcical fun, and his satire seems seldom less jovial than the song put into the mouth of a character in Crotchet Castle:
After careful meditation
And profound deliberation
On the various petty projects that have just been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation
For the world’s amelioration
Has a grain of common-sense in it, except my own!
Higher up on the bank comes the church core of Shepperton; then Shepperton Lock is higher still, opposite the Thames end of Weybridge. The village seems to have shifted its centre of gravity towards the station and Shepperton Green, which stand further back, but best known to strangers are the riverside inns and boathouses. To the right of a road cutting across to Laleham by Shepperton Green lies the small parish of Littleton, making perhaps the prettiest spot in this district, with its ancient Church and timbered park, which once enclosed a celebrated mansion destroyed by fire. This backwater of woodland, shading surely the tiniest of Britain’s Exe or Esk streams, is pleasantly reached by a field-path from the end of Chertsey Bridge; then the road by Littleton goes on to less taking scenes about Feltham or Ashford.
At Shepperton Lock the tow-path crosses from the Surrey side, and henceforth one can walk along the Middlesex bank, access to which has hitherto been precarious. Truth to tell, one thus gains little beyond a prospect of the stream flowing quietly between broad meadows, its bends making an idle round off the straight road, by which little more than a mile brings the cyclist from Shepperton to Chertsey Bridge. The green flats have a beauty of quiet amplitude, which is at least a change after Richmond’s manifold prospects and the tangled groves of Hampton; and here a fine background is formed by the pine-bristled heights of Surrey, edging the arena in which the Wey meets the Thames. William Black’s rhapsodical pen can make no more of this scenery than “a peaceful landscape, very English-looking; in the distance there was a low line of wooded hill, with here and there a church spire appearing among the trees.” A thunderstorm would get a good stage here, as did Mr. Wells’s Martian giants when they came stalking across from Byfleet.
Beyond Chertsey Bridge the tow-path is joined by a road that leads on along the wall of Lord Lucan’s Park to Laleham Ferry, opposite the site of that once renowned Chertsey Abbey. The pretty village of Laleham, with its much-patched church, is notable as the home where Dr. Arnold took pupils in his early life. Matthew Arnold was born here, and is buried, beside other members of the family, in the churchyard to which his heart and his father’s always turned fondly.
Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles, and then
Both are laid in one cold place.
The Rugby head master had to wrench himself away from Laleham, where, indeed, his special admiration was called forth on the Surrey side by the striking contrast of heath scenery mingling with rich valley lands. He could no longer rejoice in the bank up to Staines as a walk “which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it which makes it in many places as public as the highroad.” Nowadays one must search far up the Thames for an unstirred reach.
Arnold’s roomy house has vanished, and the quiet amenities of Laleham seem threatened by architecture of another school, though it stands a good two miles from either Shepperton or Staines station. But the builder is hardly needed to populate the river banks in summer, as we see after crossing the neck of Penton Hook, a most childish vagary of a mile or so in which hoary Father Thames thinks fit to indulge himself so far on in his career. This loop, on the Surrey side, is buckled by an extraordinary gathering of bungalows, house-boats, tents, and shanties that give airy and watery shelter to an encampment of respectable gipsies from London, a sort of amphibious picnic life come into favour in late years. Past this, the tow-path brings us round to the more permanent riverside quarters of Staines, reached, as usual, less deviously and pleasantly by a flat, straight road.