Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

Leaving Guildford’s picturesque High Street by one of the retiring thoroughfares branching from it on the north side, past that most sketchable of Guildhalls, we come, in something less than a mile, to a crossing of the Wey, and so to a hillside parting of the roads. Here we take the left-hand turning, to the secluded hamlet of Wood Street, whence roads and lanes in plenty—some straight, many devious—lead to that hamlet of “Normandy” where, in 1835, William Cobbett died. If it be true that William the First “loved the red deer like a father,” it may be said with at least equal appropriateness that Cobbett had as great a love for trees. Here, at oddly named Normandy, he oscillated between the equally congenial occupations of harrying a political opponent and of creating plantations, and many of the saplings he planted with his own hands are now grown up to form the woodlands that clothe this countryside.

It was well for Cobbett’s peace of mind that Aldershot Camp, the signs of whose neighbourhood now begin to be evident on our way to Ash and Farnham, had not come into being while he still lived; for, soldier though he had been, and a characteristically independent and sturdy one, he grew to hate the military, and never missed an opportunity of venting his apocalyptic wrath upon the Army. Did he live now, he would find plenty opportunities here, and around his birthplace at Farnham; for the presence of the redcoats—and the blue, the grey, the green, and the khaki coats too—is very much in evidence, alike on the road and on the surface of the road, cruelly cut up by ammunition waggons and guns.

And so through crooked-streeted Ash, with its public-houses dedicated to military commanders distinguished and heroic, or merely Royal, and the stores and the shops showing the unromantic and domestic side of the soldier’s life, which, and not glory, is nearly the whole of Tommy Atkins’s existence, varied with dusty and inglorious drills in gritty barrack-yards and field-days in the Sahara-like Long Valley.

The neighbourhood of Aldershot and its camp is highly interesting to those who take an interest in soldiering (and most feel an attraction that way), but it is utterly destructive of the picturesque.

A mile beyond Ash we cross insensibly from Surrey into Hampshire, and in another mile back again, owing, not to any vagary in the road, an eminently and respectably straight highway, but to the serpentine and elusive character of the county boundary. And thus—through unsponsored new hamlets, the sporadic but unacknowledged offshoots of Aldershot, sprawling yonder across the sandy wastes—to the tail of the Hog’s Back, whose bristles are the larches and firs of this heathy country.

The right-hand way, at the junction of the roads, leads into Farnham, “rather better,” as the country people say, than a mile off. It is conceivable that, at the end of a long day, this might appear to be “rather worse.” Farnham remains itself still, despite its near military neighbour, a quietly prosperous old town, with a long east to west street, and a short and broad one in the middle of the town, running north to the Castle, and beyond it to a very welter of firs and sands. Farnham Castle yet gives its tone to Farnham, for it is still—as it has been for nearly eight hundred years—the residence of the Bishops of Winchester; although, to be sure, the Bishops cut a very small figure nowadays beside that soldier-statesman-churchman, Henry of Blois, who originally built the fortress. Farnham is appropriately sedate and decorous. The ruined Keep is here, in its pretty garden shaded by ancient cedars, and there are a few vestiges of antiquity within the great range of buildings; but very few, for the restorations by Bishop Morley in the late seventeenth century, and those of recent years, have preserved the place as a residence at the expense of archæology. Even so, the picture made by the long and varied front looking down upon Farnham and seeming to block the street, is very grand.

Away on the other side of the main street is the church; the churchyard a place of pilgrimage for the sake of Cobbett, that ardent reformer who frothed at the mouth with political denunciations for forty years, and now lies beneath a closely railed-in altar-tomb on the north side. A more cheerful resort is his birthplace, a very old gabled house, now the “Jolly Farmer Inn,” facing a bridge across the Wey, in Abbey Street.

He was born in 1762; and almost alone, perhaps, among the places with which he was familiar, the house is unchanged.

It is past the railway station that one leaves Farnham for Waverley Abbey. Signs of the hop-growing industry of which this town is a centre are evident to sight and smell in early days of autumn, for then are rumbling carts laden with fat sacks (“pockets,” they call them) of fragrant hops met with at every turn, and the scent of them produces the most furious appetite.

After passing the level crossing take the left-hand road, which leads to Waverley in under two miles, with Moor Park on the left, once the seat of Sir William Temple, the patron of Swift, the “eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman” who was that retired statesman’s secretary. How little dignified was the post above that of a lackey may be judged from the flirtation Swift began in the servants’ hall with Lady Giffard’s waiting-maid, a flirtation “which,” says Macaulay, “was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard.” The waiting-maid was “Stella,” and the poor secretary became that terrible genius, Dean Swift.