THE “ROSE AND CROWN,” MILL END, RICKMANSWORTH.
Two rural inns, typical in their respective ways of rustic England, are illustrated here. They neighbour one another; the one on the Bath Road at the fifty-fifth mile-stone from London, before entering Newbury, and being, in fact, the half-way house between the General Post Office, London, and the Post Office in Bath; the other but two miles away, at Sandleford Water, where a footbridge and a watersplash on the river Enborne mark the boundaries of Hampshire and Berkshire. Sitting in the arbours of the “Swan,” that looks upon the Bath Road, you may see the traffic of a great highway go by, and at Sandleford Water you have the place wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the birds of the overarching trees. There was once an obscure little Priory here, whose every stone has utterly vanished.
THE “SWAN,” SANDLEFORD.
THE “SWAN,” NEAR NEWBURY.
THE “JOLLY FARMER,” FARNHAM.
The “Jolly Farmer” inn at Farnham, where William Cobbett was born in 1762, still stands and, overhung as it is with tall trees, and neatly kept, is in every way, we may well suspect, a prettier place than it was in his time. And it is, doubtless, in its way, now a higher-class house; a general levelling up, in the country, of ale-houses, taverns and rustic inns, being always to be borne in mind when we read or write of the rustic wayside inns of a hundred years or so since. You may in these days even play billiards, on a full-size table, at the “Jolly Farmer,” and order strange exotic drinks undreamt of by the rustics of Cobbett’s day.
