But most distinctly I decline
To climb the Hill at Streatley!”
But to have done with all this, and to make our way to Basildon, which, although it is divided into Upper and Lower, is in the total of those parts but a small place. I do not know (nor apparently does any one else) from what Basil or Basileus—what leader of men—Basildon takes its name. That, like so much else, is lost among unrecorded things, but the world knows a something else more immediately to the point; and that is the fact that Charles Morrison of Basildon Park died in the early part of 1909, worth about six millions and three-quarters sterling. The estate was later sworn for probate at the remarkable figure of £6,666,666; an extraordinary array of numerals, almost exactly the Number of the Beast, “six hundred threescore and six,” mentioned in the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, multiplied by ten thousand.
The ornate gates of the noble demesne of Basildon Park look upon the road, and are very florid, with stone gate-piers surmounted by urns filled to overflowing with stony representations of most of the kindly fruits of the earth, and upheld by cupids. Basildon church, with a farm or two and the parsonage, lies down near the river in a tongue of meadow-land so cut off by the river on its north side and the railway on the south that it is, in effect, much more remote than many places hundreds of miles away. The high-road, like the railway, cuts across the base of this piece of land; and as only a narrow lane runs through it and simply ends at the church, there is no inducement for the ordinary wayfarer to venture this way. Strangers are rare down by that nook where Basildon church stands, almost hidden by trees, and I should not be surprised to learn that the few people who live there mark those days as special, and keep them in memory, when they chance to see a strange face. There are many remote corners along the shores of the winding Thames, but none more secluded than this of Basildon.
It is a small church that serves for the place, and the body of it appears to have been wholly rebuilt of late years. The tower, an eighteenth-century red-brick affair, is an almost exact counterpart, on a smaller scale, of the tower of Pangbourne church. Beside the massive polished granite tomb of the Morrisons stands a sculptured group of two boys represented as bathers standing on a rushy river-bank. This is the pathetic memorial of Ernest and Edward Deverell, aged sixteen and fifteen, who were drowned while bathing in the Thames, June 26, 1886.
WHITCHURCH.
The road on to Pangbourne gradually nears the river again, and touches it at what was until some twenty years since one of the loveliest reaches of the Thames, for here the stream is bordered by a long ridge of chalk hill, broken here and there into cliffs that used to shine whitely into the water. Keeley Halswelle painted an exquisite picture of this scene, and it was hung in the Royal Academy; and that is now the only thing left of it, for Shooter’s Hill—the name of this ridge—has been purchased by a highly-successful trader in what is satirically known as the “rag trade” (why is it that the drapery trade is so greatly affected by Welshmen?) who has not only set up for something in the way of a country gentleman here, with his ornate house and picture-gallery, and his gardens and hot-houses, but has, in addition, quite in the way of the businessman, made the purchase an investment by scooping out nine or ten sites from those wild riverside chalk-cliffs, and building on them a series of villas, described in the guide-books as “bijou residences.” So the quiet, ancient beauty of Pangbourne Reach is now a thing of the past, and instead of the white cliffs, the stream reflects red-brick.