Returning to the road, which runs eastward for half a mile, and then climbs from these levels up the steep, unrideable Star Hill to the summit of the Downs, we reach Knockholt, obtaining views on the way including the hollow on the extreme right hand, whence the clouds of blue smoke, rising like a column, indicate Dartford and its chemical works, with Shooter’s Hill in front, and the heights of Penge to the left. Passing the hamlet of Knockholt Pound, obtaining its name from an old pound for strayed horses, cattle, and sheep that formerly stood here, we enter Knockholt village, passing a hideous, unfinished freak-building of gigantic size, looking like some prison or barrack, with the addition of a chimney-shaft resembling an observatory. This piling up of stones and mortar on a colossal scale, and in the most disapproved manner—the very negation of style, with sheer walls and plain, rectangular windows—appears to be the amusement of a wealthy gentleman, who is alike his own builder and architect. “Vavasour’s Folly” is the uncomplimentary name by which it is locally known.
Knockholt Beeches, a favourite Saturday afternoon and Sunday holiday-ground for bean-feasters and the like, are most conveniently reached by a lane at the side of the “Crown Inn”; but the machine will have to be lifted over a couple of stiles, unless you like to leave it outside the inn for the bean-feaster to play monkey-tricks with it. For themselves alone the beeches are distinctly not worth seeing, being just a grove of not particularly old nor especially fine trees. The attraction is the view from them towards London; and, standing as the trees do on very high ground, the view is sufficiently remarkable. The Tower Bridge, it may be added as an inducement to visit the spot, can be distinctly seen from here—although the cynical might say that it can be seen better and with less trouble on Tower Hill—and that tiresome, eternally insistent Crystal Palace, from which it seems almost impossible to get away in cycle runs round the south of London, is seen scintillating in the sun as clearly as though it were quite close at hand, instead of being eleven miles distant. A feature of Knockholt Beeches is the Cockney abandonment of the merrymakers here, when ’Enery and ’Enrietta exchange hats and dance to the inspiring strains of the concertina. There are artists who paint the Beeches and the view thence, and to them these corybantic revels are sad stumbling-blocks; which only serves to prove (what we already know) that the days of classic landscape are dead, with Salvator Rosa, Claude, and Turner. Any one of that artistic trio would have seized the grand opportunity, and have composed a picture of Knockholt Beeches in which ’Enrietta would become a sylph and ’Enery a wood-faun.
KNOCKHOLT BEECHES.
We have now just the return journey to indicate. Taking the second turning to the right on leaving Knockholt, a road is reached which affords a safe coast to Cudham. Just at the little church of that place, however, a sign-post and a danger-board give us pause, and dismounting, we discover that our road to Downe lies along a sudden, short, and sharp drop, well meriting that warning. A little way on, we can safely mount again for another grand coast, carrying us half-way up the next hill, and then a walk up the remainder brings us through plantations to the hill-crest, whence we drop comfortably into Darwin’s picturesque village. This is the evolutionist’s place of pilgrimage, and Downe House, for forty years the residence of that great man of science, a much-observed retreat. Truth compels the admission that it is an extremely ugly house. Darwin died in 1882, a victim to scientific enthusiasm, having caught a cold on the damp grass of his lawn one night, on going out with a dark lantern to study the domestic arrangements of the earthworms.
From Downe pretty lanes lead to Keston, passing Holwood Park, a lovely estate now belonging to the Earl of Derby, but noted as having been the scene of William Wilberforce’s determination to devote his life to the abolition of slavery, so long ago as 1788. A stone seat, a few hundred yards within the park, marks the spot, and bears an explanatory inscription; and a hoary oak, its decrepit limbs chained and fastened elaborately together, overhangs the scene.
In the pretty churchyard of Keston, situated in a secluded hollow not far from this spot, and removed by a long way from that bean-feaster’s paradise, Keston Common, lies Mrs. Craik, who, when Dinah Muloch, wrote the once-popular John Halifax, Gentleman.
