THE SUBURBAN THAMES
This run of thirty-seven or thirty-eight miles commences at Esher and Claremont Station, situated within a hundred yards or so of the old Portsmouth road that passes through Esher village. Leaving the station behind, you turn to the right at the high road, and so come up a gentle, mile-long incline to Esher, where, instead of wheeling up the long street, the first turning to the right is taken for Hersham. This leads to a fine gravel road passing between Esher new church and the village green, with the lodge gates of Esher Place showing prominently away to the right. In the grounds, in a low-lying meadow by the river Mole, stands the picturesque battlemented Gatehouse, all that is left of the once proud, but unhealthy, palace of Cardinal Wolsey, built long before Hampton Court. When the Cardinal lost favour with Henry the Eighth, that autocratic monarch commanded him to retire to this damp and objectionable retreat. Some of the fallen statesman’s letters are still in existence, written from this spot, complaining of the “moist and corrupt” air.
It is a delightful coast down for some distance towards Hersham, along a quite unspoiled road, crossing a bridge that spans the Mole. Hersham, a hamlet where four roads meet, is in summer a by no means unpleasing place, but the contemplative wayfarer, thinking of its fortunes all round the calendar, wonders how the inhabitants of this, and places similarly remote, can exist through the dull winter’s days without feeling buried alive.
Keeping to the right through Hersham, the way to Weybridge lies along a road bordering Burwood Park, and shaded by solemn pines, coming at length up a slight rise to a heathy expanse just outside Walton-on-Thames railway station. Keep straight on, with the railway on the right hand, for a mile, and then turn right along an excellent straight road for another mile, leading direct down into Weybridge.
That once pleasant village is rapidly being spoiled. Its healthy surrounding of heaths and pine-woods, and its position on the Wey and near the Thames, together with the fact of being situated on the South-Western main line, have caused the building of innumerable villas and the transformation of the quiet, old-fashioned village street into a suburban thoroughfare. The small green is still left, and on it a memorial column to the Duchess of York, who died more than eighty years ago at Oatlands Park, close by. It is surmounted by a pyramidal stone supporting a ducal coronet. If it were not for the very curious history that belongs to it, the column would not be worth much attention.
