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 uninteresting character of its long street, does not bulk largely in the affections of the outward-bound wheelman, 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 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-like half-lights? If such there be, surely he merits the Tennysonian 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 unpractised 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, bearing the legend, “Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Crown Point,” and 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.
CROWN POINT.
The scene—the old inn, with the smoke curling 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 few 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 amateur Red Indian, or one of the robber chiefs suitable for such a spot.
SIGN OF THE "SIR JEFFREY AMHERST."