Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOLDINGHAM.

The first turning to the left, past this church, along the road we have been following, almost immediately opens up a wide-spreading view down to the level Weald, lying outstretched with very much the look of a great map. Here, on this plateau overlooking half a county, the Woldingham settlers aforesaid have built their villas, and are with infinite pains and touching pathos trying to induce gardens to grow amid the flints and the thirsty chalk soil. No one can doubt that they will, with constant care and great expenditure, be delightful gardens—a hundred years hence.

There is an uninterrupted view beyond the last of these villas, at Botley Hill, where we are at a height of 868 feet above sea-level. Down below, the railway is seen, like a toy line, and the villages of Oxted and Limpsfield on either side of it, with yellow and green chequers of fields and white ribbons of winding roads gradually losing themselves in the indeterminate distance, where earth meets sky in a vague haze. Here, looking right and left, one sees at its best the characteristic sheer drop of the chalky North Downs into the levels of the Weald, and notices the care with which the villages are ranged under the shelter of these mighty shoulders.

The road between this point and Tatsfield is excellent, following the crest of the hills, and giving a good switchback course.

In less than a mile from this view-point we reach a junction of roads: one on the left to Croydon; our own, ahead to Tatsfield; the road to Limpsfield, down beautiful, but steep and doubly danger-boarded, Titsey Hill; and a lane leading by a back-way to Limpsfield. Titsey Hill’s woods and coppices, open to the road, make a fairy-like halting-place. Tatsfield Church, a mile onwards, beside the road, is a supremely uninteresting building commanding the finest prospects. The village not worth seeing, lies half a mile off the road, to the left, along breakneck lanes of the most homicidal character.

Passing Tatsfield Church, a down gradient leads to several branching roads. The one that goes ahead to the right is our route, and is the Pilgrims’ road. At this point we descend into a pebbly and curving hollow, and climbing up out of it cross the Surrey border and enter Kent. At the next junction of roads to Westerham, Bromley, and Knockholt Beeches keep straight on along the Pilgrims’ road beneath the shoulders of the hills, until brought up against a “No Thoroughfare” gate into Chevening Park.

The rustics here are of the most dunderheaded kind. If you inquire the way to Chevening they don’t know it, whether you try it with a long “Che” or a short; or else gaze, tongue-tied, at you. The proper way, however, is to turn to the right, and, on reaching another barred road marked “No Thoroughfare,” at the end of a half-mile’s run, to turn left along a flat, splendidly surfaced road for another half-mile. Turning then to the left, the grey church tower of Chevening is seen in front.

There is no village, only a few cottages outside the park wall. House and park are the property of Earl Stanhope. Should the tourist wish to explore the course of the Pilgrims’ road, running across the park, he must ask permission as a favour, for in 1780 one of my lord’s ancestors was allowed to stop up the right of way that had existed from time immemorial, and it has been closed ever since by virtue of that special Act of Parliament.

The house is a stately but gloomy building designed originally by the inevitable Inigo Jones, but altered and added to at different periods. Among the notable collections here is the manuscript of the Earl of Chesterfield’s famous (or rather infamous) letters to his son, formulating a course of conduct aptly said to be a vade mecum to perdition. There is one very notable object in the church—a building, to judge from their monuments, expressly devoted to perpetuating the fame and name of the Stanhopes. This is the remarkably beautiful white marble recumbent group representing Lady Frederica Louisa Stanhope and her child; the work of Chantrey, and perhaps his best. It is a touching and very human monument, and a fitting pendant to that other fine work by Chantrey, the “Sleeping Children,” in Lichfield Cathedral.

Lady Frederica Stanhope’s many virtues are hinted at in no uncertain manner on the other side of the monument, in the epitaph to the lady’s husband, “Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable James Hamilton Stanhope,” which says, “His afflicted relatives would have found a melancholy satisfaction in commemorating the many talents and virtues which adorned him, but in laying him by the side of his beloved wife, with no other record than that he was not unworthy to be her husband, they obey his last injunctions.” Could praise be of a more negative kind or uxorious post-mortem compliment farther go?