Of first importance to the tourist who flits day by day to fresh woods and pastures new are the rural inns that afford so hospitable and unconventionally comfortable a welcome at the close of the day’s journey. Unwise is he who concludes the day at populous town or busy city, where modern hotels, pervaded by waiters and chambermaids, remind the Londoner of the metropolis he has just left. Your old and seasoned tourist, afoot or on a cycle, by himself or with one trusty, quarrel-proof companion, avoids altogether the Big Town. He has been there, more often than he could wish, and will be there again. His pleasure is in the village inn, or the tavern of some sequestered hamlet; and he knows, so only his needs be not sybarite, that he will be well served there.
Queer old places some of them are: bowered ofttimes in honeysuckle and jessamine; sometimes built by the side of some clear-running stream; at others fronting picturesquely upon the village green. How quaint their architecture, how tortuous their staircases and sloping their floors, and what memories they have gathered round them in their long career! Who, not being the slave of mere luxuries intended to make a man eat when he has no appetite, and to drink when he has no thirst upon him, does not delight in the rural inn?
THE “WHITE HORSE,” WOOLSTONE.
Many, like Canning’s “Needy Knife Grinder,” have—God bless you!—no story to tell, and leave you, it may be, pleasantly vacant-minded, after long spells elsewhere of close-packed mental effort. A welcome vacation indeed!
The “White Horse” at Woolstone, a queerly pretty little inn with a front distantly resembling a Chippendale bureau-bookcase, is an instance. No story belongs to the “White Horse,” which is tucked away under the mighty sides of White Horse Hill, Berkshire, and additionally overhung with trees and encircled with shrubberies and underwoods, and is finally situated on a narrow road that presently leads, as it would seem, to the end of the known world. The stranger stumbles by accident upon the “White Horse” inn while looking for a way uphill to that ancient Saxon effigy of a horse scored in the turf and chalk on the summit; and there, before he tackles that ascent, he does, if he be a wise man, fortify himself against the fatigue of much hard Excelsior business by that best of tourist’s fare—ale and bread and cheese—in the little stone-flagged parlour.
Among memories of old rural inns, those of the “White Horse” are not the least endearing; but the “Anchor” at Ripley has a warm corner in the hearts of many old-time frequenters of the “Ripley Road,” who, when the world was young and the bicycle high, made it their house of call every week in the summer season, and wavered little in their allegiance to the “Ripley Road” even in autumn and winter. Ripley, in the days of the high bicycle and in the first years of the “safety,” was well styled the “Cyclists’ Mecca,” for it was then the most popular place in the wheelman’s world. On Saturdays and Sundays it was no uncommon thing to see two or three hundred machines stacked in front of the “Anchor.”
THE “TALBOT,” RIPLEY.
Photo by R. W. Thomas.
There were several reasons for this popularity: the easy distance of twenty-three miles from London; the fine character of the road; and certainly not least, the welcome extended to cyclists at the “Anchor” by the Dibble sisters and brother in early days when all the world regarded the cyclist as a pariah, and when to knock him over with a brick, or by the simple expedient of inserting a stick between the spokes of his wheel, was a popular form of humour.