Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby line of military settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After pleasure comes pain’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘Royal Military College of Sandhurst!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the drying ground. Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘York Place’ on ‘Osnaburg Hill.’ And is there never to be an end of these things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains children breeding up to be military commanders! Has this place cost so little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing, created by money raised by loan; will this thing be upheld by means of taxes while the interest of the Debt is reduced, on the ground that the nation is unable to pay the interest in full?’
It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture. If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new feature of the road, the lady cyclist.
BLACKWATER
There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more ‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name, so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire, that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between Hartley Row and Hook, called the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has gained on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton and Odiham. This tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically chalky scenery of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the Great Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.
Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the ‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever, a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.
To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on towards Basingstoke.
The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black, open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.
Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country, is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old times is the long, long street of
HARTLEY ROW