Sight-seeing with ease and comfort is the ideal of the cycling tourist, and this run into a corner of Buckinghamshire and the Milton country comes as near the ideal as anything ever does in a world of punctures, leakages, hills, headwinds, and weather that is either sultry or soaking.
Starting from Southall Station, which will probably strike the tourist as in anything but a desirable locality, we gain that flattest of flat highways—the Oxford road—just here, and, leaving the canal and its cursing bargees, together with the margarine works, the huge gasometers, and other useful but unlovely outposts and necessaries of civilisation, speed along the excellent surface, past Hayes End and the hamlet Cockneys are pleased to call “’illingdon ’eath,” until within a mile and a half of Uxbridge, where a turning on the right hand will be noticed, properly furnished with a sign-post, pointing to Ickenham, Ruislip, and Pinner. Here we leave the dusty high road and its scurrying gangs of clubmen, whose faces, as they scorch along, are indicative of anything but pleasure. It is a pleasant by-road upon whose quiet course we have now entered, going in a mile-long descending gradient, past the grand old trees of Hillingdon Court overhanging the way, down towards Ickenham. It is a perfectly safe and thoroughly delightful coast down here, far away from the crowds, along a lane whose leafy beauty and luxuriant hedgerows might almost belong to Devonshire, instead of being merely in Middlesex. At Ickenham, one of those singularly tiny and curiously old-world villages that are, paradoxically enough, to be found only in this most populous of English counties, are a village green, a pond, and a pump. The pond is, perhaps, not so translucent as it might be, for the reason that the ducks are generally busily stirring up the mud; and the green, being mostly loose gravel, is not so verdant as could be wished; but the pump, occupying a very central position, is at once ornate and useful, and, in appearance, something between a Chinese joss-house, a County Council band-stand, and a newspaper kiosk. Also, it still retains on its weathercock the tattered and blackened flag of some loyal celebration or another, which may mean loyalty in excelsis or merely local laziness. The very interesting old church, with whitewashed walls and with odd dormers in the roof, has some excellent windows and a little timbered spirelet that shows up white against a dense background of trees, and is, altogether, just such a place as Gray describes in his “Elegy,” in whose churchyard sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet. Suburbia has not yet disturbed this “home of ancient peace,” and it is still worth the very earnest attention of the artist, as also is that grand old Jacobean mansion of Swakeleys, standing in its park, near by.
A mile onward is Ruislip, best reached by bearing to the right at the next turning, and then sharply to the left. Round about “Riselip,” as its inhabitants call it, they grow hay, cabbages, potatoes, and other useful, if humble, vegetables; and, by dint of great patience and industry, manage to get them up to the London market. It is only at rare intervals that the villagers ever see a railway engine, for Ruislip is far remote from railways, and so the place and people keep their local character. Two or three remarkably quaint inns face the central space round which the old and new cottages are grouped, and the very large church stands modestly behind, its battlemented tower peering over the tumbled roofs and gable-ends with a fine effect, an effect that would be still finer were it not that the miserably poor “restoration” work of the plastered angles, done by that dreadful person, Sir Gilbert Scott, is only too apparent.
RUISLIP.
Taking the Rickmansworth road, and presently crossing the road to Harefield, a desolate, half-ruined modern house of large size, apparently never yet occupied, is seen on the right. This is called St. Catherine’s End. Beyond it, on the same side, presently appears an unobtrusive road, with an air of leading to nowhere in particular, and, in fact, abruptly ending on the banks of Ruislip Reservoir. The sound of “reservoir” is not a pleasing one to those who are familiar with the ugly things of that name with which an unbusiness-like Legislature has allowed the water companies to destroy the beauty of the suburban Thames; but there are reservoirs of sorts, and this is one of the picturesque kind. The Regent’s Canal Company made it, many years ago, as a store for refilling that waterway, and it was doubtless more than sufficiently ugly then. But trees have since that time partly covered the hillsides sloping down to it, and that finest of all artists and best of landscape gardeners, Nature, has grown rushes and water-lilies here, and nibbled a bit out of the straight-edged bank there, until the place looks anything but artificial. Wild birds and wild flowers, too, render this a pleasant spot, and there are boats even, in which one may voyage down the mile, or less, of lake, at whose distant end the red-roofed villas of Northwood may just be seen, whimsically like some foreign port.
Returning to the road, the first hill of the journey presents its unwelcome front to be climbed or walked. Duck’s Hill, as it is called, leads to an elevated tableland where the bracken and the blackberry briars grow, and shortly leads down again, by means of an exceedingly steep, though short, fall through a mass of loose stones and thick dust. The gradient and the quality of the road-surface render this bit particularly dangerous. Succeeding this is a more gradual descent, leading to a right and left road. The right-hand, on a down-grade, and one the tourist would fain follow, is not the route, which lies, instead, to the left, and goes determinedly uphill for half a mile. Just when you begin to think this excursion is too much like taking a bicycle out for a walking tour, it becomes possible to mount and ride with comfort; and then, entering Batchworth Heath and Hertfordshire simultaneously, the lodge gates of Moor Park are seen across a wide-spreading green surrounded by scattered houses. It is of little use to describe Moor Park, for the house cannot be seen by the casual tourist, and the cyclist is not allowed in the grounds. The place has passed through many hands, and now belongs to Lord Ebury. It was once the property of a certain Benjamin Hoskins Styles, a forerunner of the modern type of financier, who had grown suddenly rich by speculating in South Sea shares. He caused the hills that faced the house in either direction to be cut through, in order to provide “vistas.” He secured his vistas at a cost of £130,000, which seems a high price to pay for them; but, according to Pope, he also let in the east wind upon his house, and the next owner, who happened to be Admiral Lord Anson, spent £80,000 in trying to keep it out again.
Gradual descents, and two or three sharper ones, lead for a mile in the direction of Rickmansworth, and then a C.T.C. danger-board shows its red warning face over a hedge-top, just as a beautiful distant view of the town unfolds itself below. There are those who, as a rule, disregard danger-boards: if such they be who wheel this way, let them be advised to make this an exception, for it is a long and winding drop down, and ends by making directly for a brick wall, some cottages, and a canal; sufficiently awkward things to encounter on a runaway machine. Those who will not be advised, and are accordingly run away with, are recommended to choose the canal.